SEO For Publishers

Attract, engage, and retain audiences through sustainable publisher search engine optimization (SEO) solutions.

Develop a Roadmap

Understand where your site has been, where it’s going, and how to move the needle. Let us provide the blueprint for SEO success.

Target Readers, Listeners and Viewers

Discover strategies for producing and optimizing news content that hooks the target audience.

Increase Organic Performance Baseline Over Time

Publish content that continually grows your organic traffic, improves your search engine rankings, and expands monetization opportunities.

Some of the Digital Media and Publishing
Clients We’ve Helped

These are some of the many companies that benefited from our SEO for publishers expertise.

Publisher-Focused Search Engine Optimization Solutions

While many basic SEO principles are applicable across industries, SEO for the publishing industry is a completely different ball game. Publisher websites have unique needs that generic search engine optimization solutions can’t address.

We implement tactics and strategies tailored to the publishing industry, allowing us to achieve short-term wins and long-term growth.

Intervention:
SEO & Content Strategy Development

Website visitors analysis and content quality assessment

Relevant cluster research, topics mapping, optimization recommendations

Content cluster development, including content gap analysis and identification of content pillars and clusters, briefing templates

Site structure and taxonomy optimization for maximum online visibility

Overarching short- and long-term SEO strategy outline

Maintenance:
Ongoing SEO Suppor

Monthly analysis of traffic, search volume, and user engagement (Google Analytics, SEMRush and Google Search Console)

Content performance review: optimization of existing pages to ensure high-quality content, meta descriptions, title tags, internal links and content cannibalization, CTR (as necessary).

Technical SEO support and assistance with any unexpected issues that come up.

Ongoing rollout of template pages

Training:
Capabilities Building

We will set up a series of trainings to help you upskill your staff and strengthen internal capabilities for a killer SEO team.

Our Process
How We Deliver Outstanding Results for Publishing Websites

Audit

Our publisher SEO team conducts site audits to find relevant content, external and internal linking, and technical problems that cost traffic and revenue.

Engagement

Our publisher SEO solutions are designed to help publishing websites optimize website engagement. This translates into deeper insights, better content engagement, and greater content distribution. We take the initial phases of the campaign to capitalize and templatize top and rising content.

Strategy Development

We create a comprehensive SEO content strategy to boost brand awareness, improve internal linking, generate valuable backlinks, and encourage searchers to click, engage, and become repeat visitors. We see high-value content as the key to audience-building and monetization strategies for news websites.

Publishing Velocity

Iterate and improve editorial performance (across all content types) and topical authority to grow, engage and monetize your audiences.

Our Approach

Many online publications struggle to see the results of their SEO efforts. One of the main reasons is the lack of knowledge of which principles and strategies to prioritize. Thousands of guides offer SEO tips online, so it’s no wonder many publishers feel overwhelmed.

We strictly focus on the most high-impact areas first in our interventions. Once we help news publishers overcome crucial barriers to stronger online visibility in search engines, we implement strategies that tackle the rest of the issues.

Search engine optimization SEO Solutions for news publishers – Our Approach

The Topic Cluster Model

This model organizes content pages to create a more structured and targeted site architecture.

This organizational strategy focuses on clustering related articles around specific topics rather than spreading loosely related or unrelated content across multiple site pages.

We adopt the above flywheel approach (across all content types, including news) when developing your reader engagement and overall audience from organic search:

Build your informational content whilst re-optimizing existing content to increase your traffic baseline

Add news content to your cluster that will earn you high-quality backlinks and speed up your content flywheel

Direct users to tactical and conversion/monetized-focused content that drives better outcomes

This also forms your content pillar and clusters

Increase your content velocity over time to develop topical authority and generate faster results. This helps search engines understand your site’s core expertise.

Discover Your Biggest Opportunities

What Publisher Clients Say

Mohit Pathria

Founder, Gizmo Story

When we started working with the SODP team, we had only 60k monthly visitors and were struggling to grow our website. The SODP team quickly analyzed our website and provided us some valuable insights, which helped us achieve 300k monthly visitors in just 4 months, which is a remarkable achievement! We continued with the membership and grew our website to ~800k visitors with the help of the online training and educational materials available. I highly recommend SODP to anyone looking to grow their web property. I want to thank Vahe and the SODP team for helping us achieve our goal.

Justus Fokker

COO/CTO, De Zaak

SODP has been an absolute change from the other SEO companies we have worked with in the past by really focusing on how to best create, deliver and push our content as a publisher. They have helped us grow our website and are a trusted sparring partner.

Tim Ashelford

Publisher, We Are Explorers

You don’t know what you don’t know, but SODP do! Vahe and the team live and breathe SEO and from day one they’ve been passionate about helping our content reach the audience it deserved. They understand the realities of publishing and work to help you create high-performing content that doesn’t compromise on quality. Best third party we’ve ever engaged!

Our Strengths
Experienced Publisher SEO Professionals Here to Help

SEO for publishers could potentially mean different things to different people due to an individual’s position, website maturation, internal capabilities, and desired outcomes.

Our core areas of expertise are in Google News SEO, Editorial & Content Strategy development/execution, Information Architecture & Technical SEO, and Capabilities Building. This allows you to holistically benefit organization-wide or focus on a particular challenge.

All of our team members, whether senior team members who have come from and worked within a publisher prior to starting with SODP Media, or specialists who have built their skills with SODP Media from scratch, have gone through our extensive Publisher SEO course to make sure we continue being leaders in our niche.

We are also publishers ourselves and can connect and share the daily challenges and resolutions you need to be more efficient and effective in your audience development efforts.

Google New SEO

Editorial & Content Strategy

Information Architecture and Technical SEO

Capabilities building

Success Stories

Just a few examples of how we helped our clients take their audience development efforts to the next level.

Boss Hunting

Boss Hunting is one of Australia’s leading men’s publications. Targeting the male demographic in the 18-40 age bracket, the publication offers a mixture of news, careers advice and lifestyle content. Boss Hunting started life in 2021 as pages on Facebook and Tumblr, before launching its first website in 2015. The publication’s focus on quality content saw its readership expand to 5 million as of 2020.

Boss Hunting increased its organic traffic in 2022-2023 by 107%

We Are Explorers

We Are Explorers (WAE) is a leading publisher within Australia’s flourishing micro-adventures community. WAE appeals to a broad demographic consisting of those interested in outdoor experiences.

WAE was launched in 2014 by passionate adventure seekers based in Australia who aimed to make content that inspired people to live more adventurously. The site’s extensive network of similarly passionate writers, photographers and filmmakers produces authentic and award-winning content.

We Are Explorers increased its organic traffic by 4X

Keep Your Goals in Sight

It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day challenges of publishing. Develop a plan and process to take your media property to the next level and beyond, and let SODP Media help as your extended team to make this happen.

If you have any doubts, here are answers to some common questions that underscore why you should request your complimentary review sooner rather than later.

What Is Publisher SEO?

Publisher SEO is a branch of search engine optimization (SEO) that focuses on improving digital publishers’ Google rankings and organic traffic.

It focuses on technical SEO, on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and content optimization strategies to improve search engine rankings.

This includes optimizing page speed, structured data, keyword research, and link building, to name a few. It also adopts strategies unique to the digital publishing landscape, such as content velocity, original reporting, advertising best practices, paywall optimization, and more.

Improving a publisher’s ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs) requires producing high-quality, optimized content at scale. This takes more than creating high-quality content that includes relevant keywords and internal links; it also takes a deep understanding of the search engine landscape and how algorithm changes can affect editorial workflows.

Despite its importance, SEO for publishers can often end up on the sidelines owing to heavy editorial workloads. This is understandable, given the resource pressures many publishers face.

But don’t worry. Each publisher’s SEO strategy differs and depends on their capacity and needs. SEO is an organizational effort. Even after a story is published, its SEO performance can be improved, maintained or redirected to engage and attract new and existing visitors.

How Do I Do SEO for News (Newspaper and Magazine) Sites?

SEO for news websites starts with a technical and content audit, with publishers then incorporating the findings into their editorial and organizational processes.

While all news publishers share the same goal—increasing traffic from search engines and audience engagement—each path will differ. Every organization will have varying resource levels, distribution channels and experience.

The first step is identifying news sites’ organizational characteristics to develop a unique strategy for each. Once your strategy is in place, it is vital to ensure editorial buy-in before assigning roles and responsibilities.

When each team member knows what they’re responsible for and what they’re working towards, your company can begin rolling out its strategy while carefully measuring results to see what’s working and what isn’t.

How Do I Optimize Articles for Google News in 2024?

Optimizing articles for Google News requires a greater focus on authority, content freshness, relevance, and velocity than traditional SEO.

While algorithms determine Google News and Google Search results, they place different values on different signals. For example, coverage speed, accuracy, and E-E-A-T impact news results pages more than organic search results.

This means sites must consistently break stories quickly while building their topical authority. The second part of that equation doesn’t necessarily need more breaking news content. News providers can benefit from more generalist SEO strategies that appeal to audiences interested in evergreen topics.

We’ve created a comprehensive guide to Google News SEO that explores many facets of optimizing for Google News and beyond.

What Is Content Velocity and Why Does It Impact Search Engine Rankings?

Content velocity is the rate at which you publish new content. A website that publishes a large amount of original content covering a topic sends a signal to search engines of its topical authority. As a result, content velocity is an additional SEO criterion to consider in your SEO strategy.

In our experience, there are four main issues publishers face when it comes to content velocity:
• They don’t have a content pillar strategy and, as a result, no linked supporting content
• They don’t personalize the content to users’ interests – either due to the lack of skills or the lack of resources
• They are unable to produce high-quality content at scale
• They struggle to find the right resources to create high-quality, relevant content at scale

How Do I Identify Relevant Keywords for My News Website?

You start by conducting keyword research – identifying the search terms used by your target audience to help shape your content.

Keyword research will provide you with insights such as:
• What users are searching for on search engines
• What the search volume is for a particular topic
• What the search intent of users is
• What content formats work best for other websites
• What knowledge gaps present an opportunity
• Which keywords produce strong results for other websites – your competitors.

Our Site Uses a Paywall. Does that Hurt Our Search Engines Visibility?

There are four types of paywalls: freemium, metered, dynamic, and hard paywalls. There are two main methods of blocking: front or user-side and back or server-side. The former is the easiest to bypass, presenting the lowest risk to visibility in search results. The latter is significantly harder for search engine crawlers to bypass, which means it presents stronger risks to SEO.

If you fail to adjust your strategy accordingly, a paywall will damage your publication’s visibility in search results.

How Much Do Publisher SEO Services Cost?

Publisher SEO services can vary depending on the level of service a media company requires. Some larger publishers will pay tens of thousands of dollars monthly to help evolve and execute an effective SEO strategy. Smaller media outfits with more modest needs will pay much less for more targeted strategies.

Some might need help identifying duplicate content across multiple pages, thus cannibalizing their traffic, while others might need help developing an internal linking strategy.

SODP Media provides various Publisher SEO services depending on a digital publisher’s needs, internal capabilities and resources, and allocated budget.

Take advantage of our free strategy audit; together, we can identify the right strategy to help grow your audience.

Creating high-quality content that’s easy to find on search engines and gets shared on social media platforms will not only help drive traffic to your site but will also influence the success of your subscription or ad revenue models. More traffic will translate into more revenue.

How Do I Execute an SEO Publishing Strategy?

You have two choices when developing an SEO publishing strategy: keep it in-house or outsource the task.

Publishers that opt for an in-house solution will need to upskill an existing team using training resources — such as SODP’s Publisher SEO course — or hire new team members dedicated to staying abreast of search engine updates and responding accordingly.

The other option is to work with an external SEO consultant. When choosing this option, it’s essential to ensure that your SEO partners have experience in the publishing space. While Publisher SEO is a branch of SEO, its objectives and approaches differ significantly from SEO for other industries.

Whichever route you choose, the goal will always be creating a relevant, high-quality content strategy that pleases your target audience, Google and other search engines. Interesting and dynamic content that people love but can’t find has very little value in its own right.

Request Your Free SEO Strategy Audit

Contact us to schedule your consultation and to receive your FREE SEO strategy audit. There are no obligations, just a detailed SEO publisher strategy.

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