Google News SEO- Tips to Get Your Site Crawled as a Google News Publisher
Since the world’s largest search engine ‘Google’ continues to rule in terms of search engine market share, publishers, website owners, and brands are continuously looking for new ways to drive more traffic to their sites. Currently, Google News is one of the most effective and affordable ways to boost web traffic.
According to a report, Google News sends almost 6 billion users every month to publishers across the globe. And if you successfully get 0.0001% of this huge number to your online store, brand, or blog, that’s massive and can boost your SEO efforts as well.
What is Google News?
Google News is a Google-powered news aggregator and provides a huge flow of news, articles, blog posts, and articles collected from countless magazines, publishers, blogs, and websites. It is a cross-platform news aggregator that can equally be used on Android, iOS, and the web.
In the past, publishers had to manually submit their articles or stories for approval via Google Publisher Center and it was hard to get stories submitted successfully. Hence, recently Google has updated guidelines for Google News that which sites or magazines are eligible to appear in Google News with their stories or updates.
According to Google, publishers and website owners need to create high-quality, informative, and useful content that complies with Google News content guidelines. They should also not produce content that is hateful, violent, or dangerous. And they will successfully be able to secure a visible place in Google News.
How Does the Google News Index Work?
Google News is not a news publisher itself. However, it aggregates articles and news from different websites and magazines using an algorithm to present relevant news to users based on their location, interests, usability, freshness, and authoritativeness. Website loading speed, responsive design, and cross-browser compatibility are some of the other key requirements to appear in Google News with your website or magazine. Then all the results are categorized into topics and subtopics.
Benefits of getting into Google News Search Results
Google’s new SEO is not just about getting more traffic to your website or business, there are a lot of benefits you can get by appearing in Google News.
When your content is properly optimized according to Google News content guidelines, it is more likely to appear in search results within moments. This is highly useful when you are breaking current affairs and news.
Since Google News feeds come with customization features, when you consistently create and publish content on your magazine or website, you may also see the users coming back often and engaging more with your content. When users opt to see ‘more stories like this, they will be served with more useful content in the future from your side.
Google News SEO Tips to Get Your Site Crawled as a GN Publisher
Smart publishers, bloggers, and content marketers are already reaping the benefits of Google News by getting more clicks and better search engine visibility.
Below are some of the Google News SEO best practices you can take to get your website crawled as a Google News publisher.
Follow Google’s technical content guidelines to ensure bots can crawl your site
An algorithm is used to crawl and aggregate sources for Google News from thousands of websites and magazines around the globe. To get your content listed in Google News, you need to create unique and permanent URLs to help the system determine which pages of your magazine are articles and news. You also need to use HTML formats for your content and links as Google’s crawler scans sources for HTML. Avoid using too much multimedia, JavaScript, and PDFs that are hard to scan.
Optimize properly to improve your chances of inclusion
When writing news articles, use structure data markup for your content to make it easy for crawlers and bots to scan and crawl your stories. Also, try not to interrupt the flow of news articles and stories with other forms of content like videos and other visuals.
Make sure your site is an authoritative source
Google wants its users to trust the news sources included in Google News. That’s why publishers and website owners need to be transparent and accountable for what they are publishing. Sources must include easy-to-access information about the article or story and the faces behind the publication. For instance, authors of your website or magazine must display their contact details like social media profiles and email ID, etc. to increase credibility. All news stories and articles must also have a clear publishing date and bylines.
Publish genuine and useful content regularly
A new website or magazine should be updated with fresh and useful articles regularly to appear in Google News. If you often syndicate content from major news sites, the majority of your content should be fresh and unique.
Stick to a niche
Google always looks up news from unique sources and magazines. So, you should stick to a specific niche to set your website apart from others and increase the chances of appearing in Google News. Writing about a particular topic helps you appear in more Google News feeds customized for particular topics and brings repeat visits.
Create a sitemap
Once your magazine or website is approved by Google News, be quick to create a Google News sitemap for quick indexing. Sitemap helps Google News crawlers crawl your site more efficiently and quickly. It also provides better control over which stories you submit to Google.
Conclusion:
Google News is essential for publishers, bloggers, and brands looking to boost online visibility. Google News drives roughly 6 billion monthly consumers to publishers worldwide, offering huge traffic and SEO possibilities. Following Google’s new rules is crucial for producing high-quality, non-violent content. The complexity of Google News Index requires great website performance, including loading speed and cross-browser compatibility. Consistent content creation boosts customization and user engagement beyond traffic. Following technical guidelines, optimizing content structure, establishing authority, maintaining a niche, and creating a sitemap positions websites for Google News inclusion, increasing visibility and credibility.
5 Benefits of Scheduling Your Social Media Posts
Building a strong presence on popular social media sites is an integral part of an effective digital marketing plan. Growing your audience on social media helps you quickly gain a better and higher brand recognition rate. Moreover, it also enables you to create greater awareness regarding your business, products, or services. But, keeping your social media profiles up-to-date with interesting and informative content is time-taking. This is where social media scheduling comes into play.
Fortunately, there are so many low-cost and free social media management tools to help you schedule social media posts from one dashboard.
What is Social Media Scheduling?
Social media scheduling is all about setting up social media posts to be posted at a specific time or date across different social profiles. Scheduling your social media posts takes the daily struggle away and allows you to have more time to create better content for your social profiles. It also keeps you away from irrelevant and unnecessary posts that can result in reduced engagement.
Benefits of Social Media Scheduling
In this blog post, we have outlined a few amazing benefits of scheduling your social media posts and how they can help you boost your online presence effectively.
1. Cuts out the Need to Juggle Between Platforms
Being a small business or brand, you are expected to manage more than a few social media profiles to reach and connect with the target audience. Handling your presence on social media can easily become difficult when you start to expand your social media marketing approach to more networks. You may need to remember many login credentials, interfaces to master, and most importantly, consistently publishing across all profiles.
This is where investing in social media scheduling posts can pay off. Scheduling your social media posts via a social media management tool allows you to integrate all your profiles into a single dashboard with a single login. You can better manage your social profiles including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest from a single dashboard interface.
2. Post According to You Followers’ Time even Outside Office Hours
Just because 10 AM is a convenient time for you to publish content on social media doesn’t mean it is a convenient time for your followers to consume the content you post. Scheduling social media posts helps you post content at the right time. Several social media tools suggest the right time based on your audience’s active time. In this way, you can get your content in front of more social media users. Social media scheduling also helps you post content even outside office hours.
3. Fewer Distractions Throughout the Day
Undoubtedly, social media is one of the biggest distractions that can waste a lot of precious hours a day. It can be easy to jump onto your social accounts and take a minute for a quick upload and get your several minutes wasted by going through the images, videos, pins, and tweets posted by others. But when you use a social media management tool to schedule your post, you are likely to stay right within the tool for scheduling and are not required to be on social media sites for scheduling. As a result, you can save a lot of minutes a day that can be spent on other productive things like creating amazing content and coming up with new content ideas.
4. You Got Back in Busy Situations
Uncertain things happen always. You may get sick or need to leave the office unattended for vacations. Social media scheduling can cover you in such situations. Scheduling your social media posts provides you with a safety net and keeps your brand visible even if you are not there to do so. Planning allows you to get interesting updates posted at the right time without any human interaction.
5. Maintain Consistency
Having a clear and consistent brand identity on social media is more important than ever before. You need to provide your existing and potential customers with a consistent experience to keep them updated and make them stick around. Using social media management tools you can publish posts on all your social media profiles with consistency. Furthermore, social media tools also help you see how your posts will appear on different social feeds so you can adjust the content accordingly before it is published.
Conclusion:
Social media scheduling is essential for digital marketing efficiency. Starting with a single dashboard for many platforms, the benefits are many. This simplifies managing several profiles and unifies Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Strategic scheduling ensures material reaches the audience when they are most active, even after office hours. Cut distractions to focus on more productive tasks, and use the practice as a safety net in case of emergencies.
5 Best Free Tools to Monitor Your Online Reputation
We are living in a digital landscape where online reputation is one of the most significant success measures of brands and businesses.
With the growing fame of digital channels like social media sites, reviews websites, blogs, and directories, maintaining a robust online reputation is necessary for any business, big or small. This means, monitoring and keeping up with the online presence of your business should be an integral aspect of your digital marketing strategy.
Monitoring your online reputation helps you find out and deal with issues before they become major glitches. Keeping an eye on what people are saying about your brand or business helps you maintain a good reputation of your business over the web.
Why is Online Reputation Management Important to Businesses?
Online reputation can make or break the success of your business. A few bad reviews (maybe false too) can have a direct impact on the number of leads your business generates each month. In this modern era of life, consumers usually check online reviews before making final buying decisions and buy from brands with 4 or more stars. That is the reason, you should actively be monitoring the online reputation of your business and manage accordingly to get the most out of your online presence.
Monitoring all the online reviews about your business or products is something very much important you cannot move forward without. This is where online reputation management comes into play and deal with bad reviews and customer feedback for their satisfaction.
Top Free Tools for Online Reputation Monitoring & Management
Fortunately, there are a lot of software and tools are out there that help brands and businesses keep an eye on online reviews and gossips. We have picked top free tools that you can use to proactively monitor your online reputation to build trust and credibility.
1 Google Alerts
It is a simple yet most effective and totally free tool that you can use to monitor the online reputation of your business or brand. You can easily set up alerts for your brand name or keywords you want to monitor. Right after creating a Google alerts profile, you will start getting alerts in your email inbox whenever something found in Google results. The tool extracts alter across the web including blog posts, news articles, social media posts, and so on. You can set alerts for your brand name, popular industry terms, trending phrases, or competitors’ brands to stay on top of things.
2 BuzzSumo
According to their tagline, ’BuzzSumo scans billions of articles and social posts so you can harvest meaningful insights.’
BuzzSumo is not free totally but comes with a free content analyzer tool to help you see how and what people are saying about your business or brand. By using BuzzSumo content analyzer, you can get notified instantly when new links are created so you can act accordingly and as fast as possible. Furthermore, you can also see the social engagements around each topic created around the keywords or phrases you are monitoring.
3 Hootsuite
Since Hootsuite is a social media management tool, it also allows you to monitor what people are talking about your brand or business across different social media sites. You can use their free version to get quick access to Facebook Insights, Google Analytics, and Twitter stats to monitor your online reputation effectively at a place.
4 Hubspot’s Website Grader
Your business website is the center of your overall online reputation. That’s why you should be giving it a health check more often. Hubspot provides its users with a free tool named ‘website grader’ that allows them to see how well their businesses or brands are performing across different areas like a top funnel, middle funnel, and analytics. Once done successfully, the tool assigns grades for your website based on the obtained results. Moreover, you also get free suggestions and recommendations to improve website scores for a better online presence.
5 SocialMention
Social media is one of the best digital marketing channels not only to promote your brand but to interact with customers in real-time. That’s why social media monitoring is one of the vital aspects of online reputation management. Social Mention is a free online reputation monitoring tool that offers real-time search across 100+ social media sites. As a result, you can track and monitor social mentions for your brand, competitors, or the entire industry.
You can also use their widget on your website to display real time buzz created about your brand across social media sites.