🎯 Actionable insights

💡 1. SEO growth strategy for news and media sites

If you’re operating in news or media sites, you’ll know the struggle of managing a high amount of content under different categories.

However, you can have great benefits after unlocking the category and tag pages of your news site.

An example,, where a news site is driving around 528k organic visits per month by optimizing its collection or tag pages.

Here’s how you can use content volume to drive additional traffic:

1. Categorize your articles

First, start categorizing your article topics into primary categories and secondary categories.

Example:

Lifestyle (Primary category)
- Fashion (Secondary category)
- Relationships (Secondary category)
- Health (Secondary category)
- Culture (Secondary category), etc.

Repeat the process with other major categories

2. Create new tag pages

Oftentimes media sites make the mistake of not creating tag pages for targeting actors, festivals, athletes, popular celebrities, places, etc.

Here’s an example of a tag page targeting cricket (Sachin Tendulkar):

This way, you can find hundreds of opportunities to create tag or collection pages.

3. Optimize the category/ tag pages for SEO and clicks

Now, creating lots of new category and tag pages isn't enough. You also need to optimize these pages so that it ranks for related keywords and Google can use these pages to crawl older articles.

Here’s how to optimize these blog collection pages:

1/ Title and meta description

For news sites, you need to optimize the title for targeting news related keywords such as:

Latest Kolkata news
Cricket news today

To target these types of keywords, consider optimizing your title and meta description with keywords like latest, today, real-time news, headlines, and more.

2/ Unique content

Most successful news sites optimize their tag pages with title and meta description. However, you can take this step further by adding unique content (say 100+ words) to the page.

Adding unique content to the tag/collection pages helps you in:

Helping Google to understand about the page context
Increases your relevance for relevant search queries

3/ Use pagination

Another important step is optimizing for improving the crawlability of older news articles.

Normally, a tag page displays dozens of latest news articles. However, there could be thousands of pages under a tag page.

This is where Google faces challenges in crawling older pages as it will take many clicks for crawlers to reach the oldest articles.

To deal with this, make sure you’re using pagination (specifically mid point pagination links) to reduce crawl depth.

I recommend reading Mathew Henry's guide on how site pagination and click depth affect SEO.

TL;DR

Categorize existing articles
Find collection and tag pages opportunities
Optimize your collection page with meta title and description (use words like latest news, headlines, today news, etc.)
Add a small description about the page topic
Use pagination links to improve crawl depth

👉 Insights from Sk Rafiqul Islam (Let’s connect on LinkedIn)

⭐ Unlock SEO breakdowns of high-performing sites in search

When you join the Content Marketing VIP club, you'll unlock 30+ resources on:

SEO case studies
In-depth guides (EAT, Blog UX, Content briefs, etc.)
SEO audit
Frameworks and SOPs

You’ll also get access to new content going forward.

This should be expensive, right?

The content marketing VIP club has a yearly membership option which costs you only $27 per year. That means you’ll spend around only ₹6 per day to reach the top category of SEOs 🏆. Now, the choice is yours 👇

👉 Join Content Marketing VIP club membership

💬 Bite-sized insights

💡 1. Validate your blog topics before publishing on the blog

The difference between social content (e.g. LinkedIn posts) and blog content is that on the blog you can publish total crap and will see no evidence it's total crap.

On social you get immediate feedback on whether your content resonates or not.

Publish on social first. Repurpose the good stuff for the blog.

👉 Insights from Peep Laja

💡 2. Check link position of internal outlinks using ScreamingFrog

One of the cool features of Screamingfrog is internal outlinks.

This feature helps you see the number of internal outlinks from a page along with its link position (in content, footer, header, aside, & navigation).

So, if you're aware of PageRank, you'll know the benefits of prioritizing link position to maximize the PageRank passed from one link to another.

Here's an example of analyzing the internal outlinks from a central hub page:

👉 Insights from Sk Rafiqul Islam (Let’s connect on LinkedIn)

💡 3. Relying solely on sidebars, navigation, or footer links for internal linking? Fix this.

Links in the sidebar or footer or navigation passes less PageRank than links placed in the main content.

Still, you'll see many large sites with thousands of pages relying on links from the footer, sidebar or related category sections on the page.

So, make sure that you're putting the effort into linking to relevant pages from your main content, not only from supplementary content.

Below I have shared a webpage displaying different types of content:

Main content
Supplementary content
Advertisements

(Image source: Google quality raters guideline)

To make this one step further, always use descriptive anchor text and avoid generic link text like:

click more, read more, visit here, etc.

👉 Insights from Sk Rafiqul Islam (Let’s connect on LinkedIn)

🗓️ Free resources and tools

💡 1. Create content briefs optimized for SEO and conversion (free PDF guide)

Topics is a keyword research tool by SEOmonitor that helps you:

Find keyword opportunities
Group your keyword list (up to 1000 keywords) by search intent

Here’s a screenshot:

Here’s how I am using the tool for SEO:

Once I create a keyword list (either by competitor analysis or keyword research process) with hundreds of topic ideas, it is important to group keywords by similar intent.

For example, you don’t want to treat the following two keywords separately

Coconut water benefits
Benefits of drinking coconut water

This is where this tool helps you by understanding keyword intent and categorizing them accordingly.

👉 Find related topics and keywords with Topics by SEOmonitor

💡 2. Write articles that perform with an editor that thinks (Free to try)

Recently, I found a content editor powered by an AI assistant, called Reword. And, honestly, this is more than just a content editor.

Image source: reword.co

It helps you in many areas of a content marketing workflow such as:

Content research – ask questions about your blog content or audience and it will suggest ideas/answers.
Use AI to write new content, polish existing paragraph, or shorten a content section in seconds
Collaborate with your content team
Fix grammatical errors
Get content update suggestions based on the performance of your existing articles

👉 Try Reword for free and optimize new and existing articles with AI editor

Content Marketing VIP

#091 Content Marketing VIP Newsletter