How to increase your online traffic? Florida Press Association VIP Roundtable

If you have these or similar questions, we invite you to watch the webinar, which took place on May 10 at the special invitation of the Florida Press Association.

Thanks to Karen and the entire Florida Press Association team for making this webinar available!

Transcription:

Karen Tower: Here we go. We start that!

We're very lucky to have 4media join us today and they're going to share. Peter is going to share some tips and some strategies on how to increase your online strategy.

Small reminder, as you guys have just heard, this session is being recorded. So if you feel like you didn't get it all today, we will have it recorded and we can send that out to you.

But now without wasting any more time, I'm going to pass the baton to Peter.

Piotr Marek: Thank you, Karen.

So good to see you guys. I'm really missing you after the Jacksonville and I'm looking forward to see you in Sarasota in July. And I'm bringing one more company with me that is doing great programmatic stuff. So there will be a huge invasion of European tech over here.

So let me share the screen. As today I would like to share with you three external possibilities of attracting the traffic to your websites. Hope that would work.

Can you see the screen right now? Is it working?

Karen: Yes.

Piotr: Great. This is me. I am in media sector since I was twelve. I'm the second generation publisher. We are having five online newspapers and the television station in northern Poland. The first TV audition, TV broadcast I had when I was 12yo, I was doing the reviews of PlayStation One, video games. So there was no YouTube back then. Probably I would be a famous YouTuber, but well, this career is wasted.

But I still am in the business. I took over the newsroom 4 years ago from my father. So it's still a part of my business. In 7 years we built company that operates in 6 countries. With our advertising panel we work with about 2400 publishers right now.

So the number is nice and growing and I have all the experience in a big organization. I used to work for European Parliament as a political journalist interviewing head of states, prime ministers and the television producer.

And I love travels. So I also wrote a few articles to National Geographic Traveler, Polish edition and even got a reward for my Cairo to Cape Town trip. 

Just a few information about the companies we built. It's about 50+ people on our team right now helping publishers to thrive, because we strongly believe that publishers can compete with big media groups and tech and they just need great tools and knowledge how to do so.

That's it when it comes to advertising and promoting myself.

Let's get deep into the details.

What you are seeing here, guys, is the print screen from Google Search Console it is my online newspaper for the last three months. And only because of those three external sources like Search, Google Discover and Google News I get 400,000 clicks to my websites if you count it only for the programmatic income.

So that means that only thanks to those external sources I got about 12 grands in this quarter so this is something that we are really paying attention to and everybody, starting from technical up to editorial team knows the numbers and knows how to deal with it.

So we are focusing on three external  sources of the traffic this is the Google News, Google Discover and SEO  - Search Engine Optimization. The topic is huge.

I promised Karen that I will talk no longer than half an hour so that we'll have also some space for questions from you, guys.

So these are like two things I would like to tell you about. I always say everything what is perfect goes in threes, like Holy Ghost, God&Jesus and so on, so also external sources goes in three, like Google News, Google Discover and SEO.

What are the differences between those services? 

Google News is a content aggregator. So it scrubs the websites, all informational websites over the world and delivers them to the audience. 

Google Discover is the personalized feed and Google News is available on desktops and mobiles, while Google Discover is something that you get only on this device, so you get it only on a mobile.

And SEO - search engine optimization, this is the traffic you get from the search results and it is very important for the publishers, as they say, the content is the king, but the distribution is the king kong. 

That's how I say, so we can write great articles, we can do great stories, but if we don't get attention of the people and the technology and so on, this work will be wasted.

So it is really important to make use of those services, especially that if well designed, it almost do not require extra time from your staff, from your technical team. Which means that this 400k clicks is free traffic. Something that you don't have to pay extra. You don't have to pay Google, Facebook or another source, this is something that you do once and it works.

So, yeah, Google Discover, as I mentioned, this is it.

This is your screen and what is really important, it shows the results of... It is personalized. So if you are interested in, I don't know, we are preparing the wedding. You are planning your trip. If you are buying a car, if you are taking a loan, probably you will see the… Articles connected to the topics that you are searching over here. Very important on the local level, but also very important for the magazines, if they are focusing on some particular target group. Great source of the traffic.

So for us, very important, more than 200,000 clicks to our website. But what is also very important is the number of the impressions. Because when you look at your phone, they're going to see your logo. So it means that rising the brand awareness of your media outlet, your magazine is key, for both, for audience but also for the advertisers. 

And these are the numbers that we are also sharing in our marketing materials. They help us to sell.

Google News is the service that was created by Google in 2001, 9/11. I always ask the question to the audience 'do you remember what you were doing at 9/11 when this happened?'. And everybody says: 'yes, I remember what I was doing, where I was, what was the exact time', because it was, I think the first such terrorist attack on a mass scale.

So why Google decided we need an additional service?

People were starting to search in Google about the information about the attacks and what they get in the back, in the results was not the CNN or New York Times websites. They were like very well positioned general information about Word Trade Center. 

So the relevance of the search was very terrible. The project took literally a few hours for Google developers to put live the service that we know right now as Google News. And what they did and it is still in their code, they are attracting news only for the last 48 hours.

So while Google Discover and SEO these are like services that live longer, the news in Google News lives only for the 48 hours. And not everybody can get into that service, because this is the service that is verified by Google and verified not only by Google bots or robots, but also verified by humans.

You can see the link over here. The name is PublisherCenter.Google.com. If you are not in that Google service, please just go there and you can apply for being registered. 

What they are checking?

They are checking a few things. One of the things is the domain ranking. I mean they are checking if you have a new website, new URL, how long are you on the market?

But most of all, they are checking the quality of the content that you provide. It used to be called EAT, then they added another 'E' to the front. So this is the abbreviation of the Experience, Expertise,  Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. 

So, for us, local publishers or magazine publishers, it is quite easy to pass these requirements.

But sometimes it takes time. It takes time. It is not something that is done automatically. I know the cases that it took publishers six to twelve months to get into the Google News service.

But that was the new outlet, the new media, so they need to gain more credibility about their services and then they get this. 

How it is displayed?

This is something I screened at the end of April when Joe Biden announces that he's going to run for another term. So you can see the huge names like BBC News, Fox News, but also the smaller like  - 538.

This is the example of the global or national news, I would say. But that works also on the local level. And especially if you are having more than one site and at least three sites and you are writing about the same topic, you may create something what is called trend in Google News and in the search results you will be visible in those boxes.

So again great source of the traffic. What we have to pay attention is how to write, how to write the content. Or it should be max six hunder pixels about 200 characters when it comes to title editorial, editorial 110 letters, very important thing.

When it comes to lead and article size, you should put always keywords in the title. So if you have an accident on some road or you have elections, put the keywords into the title.

Article should be minimum 80 words. Standard size is like 150-200 words. And if you update the article you should add two or three new sections. The article one is not enough.

What is also important for you to know is that algorithms in Google Discover, Google News and SEO search these are three different algorithms. This is not the same algorithm and of course most sophisticated one is in the search result. 

We had this discussion about AI before current AI. Google also is putting AI technology into their search. So we have to a little bit help to this algorithm to know what we do.

A few rules about the content.

I told you about this EEAT rule. But you have to pay attention to the whole content on your site. I mean, you are not only responsible for the articles, for the pictures, videos that are there, but also for example for comments. 

I had a case of the publisher that was rejected in Google News because there were some racial comments on his website. And it is something that you have to really pay attention, especially when you're applying to this service.

Then it is I wouldn't say less important because you have to monitor everything. But, please, take into your mind that you are responsible for the content of the whole site. This is something that publisher forgets.

If you are not a niche magazine, avoid the medical articles or cannabis articles and of course porn or sex articles. This is something that Google doesn't like. Unless you specify in such niche then it is okay for Google.

So these are main rules when it comes to content. When it comes to user experience UX, it means how your site is perceived by the readers.

Avoid too many ads. It is really important. Avoid such mechanism. Like you have one section and then the button read more, like you are closing the content behind it and it will not get through the Google News if you are doing the paywall option, it might get into the Discover.

So these are like few things. The site should be nice and clean and that also influences your income. If there are too many ads, the rates for each CPM is way lower. For example, when we are monetizing the video on the sites, we sell only about 30-40% of the videos that are available to keep their rates higher. And in total we earn more if we would just put everything into the open market.

So think about it, when you are designing the site or if you are working with some external CMS like ours, they should help you in designing the right ad net so it will not interfere with the user experience.

Comments, external content, this is something what I mentioned to you, what is also important and this … The things before were connected to your editorial team. So they have to know the roles, they have to know how to write.

The things that I'm going to tell you about right now is more about the technology. It doesn't matter if you're using WordPress, if you're using our CMS or blogs, whatever system you are on, the rules are the same. There is a clear documentation of the Google services and when you design the website, your developers just should read it.

And one of the key things is use of Google Indexing API. This is the tool where we connect to the Google and we tell Google hey Google, we have a new article. 

Why don't you have a look at it? It helps you to get indexed into the search results in Google search console. So with high probability you will get more traffic. There is no guarantee that Google will index or look at this article. But it is like raising the probabilities that it will happen.

Very important to really add a huge influence of number of views in Google Discover service once we implemented it to our CMS. Good picture, good pictures. It concerns two things. One is the size of the pictures. It should be at least 1200 pixels wide. It shouldn't be smaller. If it's smaller, it will not be indexed in Google Discover and in Google News.

So think about it and also right format of the images. Most of the editorial teams are still using JPGs as the main format, so what we did in our CMS? We are using WebP format. This is the format that Google likes when it comes to indexing. It's very light but keeps the resolution of the picture. So in our CMS once you upload the JPG, then it is automatically converted to almost 40 different WebP formats when it comes to size. 

So when the people are reading the articles, it doesn't matter which device they are using, immediately they receive the picture on screen. So the loading speed is huge.

Internal links. This is the Newcomers Guide, one of our clients in Florida, from the Florida Weeklies, you should have at least one, tree would be perfect. 

What I mean by the internal links? It should either refer to the home page, the article or the category link. Very important, very important thing.

Separate sitemap. So you should have two sitemaps. One for SEO and the other one for Google News. That is telling Google what's on your site.

Dates. There should be at least two: publication and actualization of the article. They don't have to be visible both, but they should be included into the code. Very important thing that we tell Google: hey, we updated the article. Check it once more, because it's going to be again relevant for the people. Remember this 48 hours rule. So this is why it is very important.

You should allow the robots to index your site also when using ALT. This is the alternative description of the picture. Very important thing that we are using. Sometimes people are forgetting to allow Google bots to get in the site.

And what is also very important is the quality of the site. And this is why the Google created the tool that is called Page Speed and that checks the core web vitals. And these are the factors of your website. It means how fast it uploads, what is the user experience.

It is very important that you are passing this core web vitals. If you are not, you are lowering search results and with high probability you will not get traffic from Google Discover.

Very important stuff here you can see a few screens from our CMS Florida Weekly Destinations. Another site from Florida. Express Elblag - my site. 

And this is something I did for thethis competition - this is Blox/ Town News. Guys, catch up with your technology, you should get good results.

And the other thing in code is Schema.org. 

This is the number of the indicators in codes that tells Google what is what, what is picture, what is headline, where is the title, what is the type of the article.

Again, guys, remember, this is not something that you as editors should take care of. This is the work that should be done by your technical team. It should be automated, it should be fast. This is something that you as CEOs or journalists, you shouldn't take care of at all two services behind us.

Last one. And this topic is huge, probably two, three days talking about it. So let me summarize it in five minutes, Guys.

Just a few key information about the search engine optimization and Google search console as a main tool, where you can get information, if you are doing a good job about it.

The first question is how long your news is alive. This is one of the top stories we used to have in our weekly newspaper. Our online site. You can see that this print screen was made today, when I was preparing the presentation.

So you can see that the life of the news is five, six days and then it goes somewhere deep into the internet. But if you have some news that lives longer, the line can look like this. 

And this is one of the general news about the tourist attraction in my hometown. The daily traffic is not huge, it's between, let's say 100 till 800 hits, clicks. But if you look for the whole cycle, how long the news lives, then it gives you constant page views, constant income.

And if people ask me why do we need SEO? Why do we have to think about SEO? This is it. This chart tells you why it is so important.

From the search results we got 123,000 clicks in three months. So very important source of traffic. You can of course check into your Google Analytics. Direct hits are the most important one.

Organic search referrals. These are the google services. One of the tool I'll always encourage publisher to have and it's a must if you don't have Google search console, Google Analytics is the one, G4 right now, you should migrate from the universal and Google search console is the other tool that gives you the feedback how your site is doing, how your team is doing and what's the user experience of your site. If you don't have access, ask your team to provide it with one - very important stuff.

And over there we find the queries. It means like the top questions people ask in Google. Of course, you have the name of the brand but also the name of the town over there. You can check inquiries, how are you doing on them. And for example, this is the name of the hometown.

Average position was 11 and it is not good. But we are competing here with the town hall, city hall, all those town institutions. So we get results from 6 to 10 in the search results when it comes to the hometown. You can monitor it and it is very important because this is, again, external source of traffic.

Site maps. Something I told you about when I was talking about the Google News and Google Discover. You can see that we have two site maps. One is general for SEO, the other one is the news site map. And why there's the difference in the discovered pages? It is because of this 48 hours rule.

So it means in the news, in two days we published 22 stories on our website, while the 12,000 is the total number of the stories published since we applied this system.

And what is also very important is that your website will have an internal plugin that will show you how your article will be visible in the SEO. If you are using the WordPress, there's a plugin that is called Yoast SEO, very good tool. We designed special tool for publishers.

Once you write the article in our system, you can on the right hand side see  if the length of the title is good. If the SEO description is good, you can see the Google preview. We use it not only for articles but also for business directory, for classified ads, for events. So very important thing because this is the thing that people are searching for. So check on your website if you have this feature. If not ask your developers to implement it.

And again Core Web Vitals. If you are failing, you will get lower results in the search. Google is really paying attention into it. It was implemented in November 2021 for desktops. In march 2022 for mobiles, this core web vital rule. Very important thing when it comes to SEO of the site.

You can also check the quality of the site user experiencing Google search results. So you have all information and they are free for you. If you have the Google search console, just use it. Check if you are there.

What is also important is the headings. Is there a good hierarchy of heading? The most common mistake we are seeing when we are auditing the sites is that main heading is missing or there is no description in it. Main heading is the thing that tells Google what is your site about. If you are not having this description then it is really like basic mistake when it comes to SEO. Check on that.

So in order to prepare SEO audit you check two things onsite. If you have good URL, content and so on, you check the search, Google search console and offsite link building.

But to be honest, preparing great audit is complex stuff. What I ask my SEO team is: 'hi guys, just prepare me a checklist what you do when you are checking the site, the quality of the code and so on'. This is something we do for the publishers, we do for our own CMS. 

It must be all green, our results, so I will not read it, Guys, you will have access to this presentation. I can send it over to Karen. Feel free, Karen, to share it with the Guys tonight. 

Just a checklist what you should check when it comes to quality of your website. But this is more about developers and SEO specialists, if you have someone on your team. 

There are lots of things you can check yourself using the Google Search Console guys, this is it. 

Good luck in getting more traffic from those three sources. I think that 400K clicks for the work that you`ve already done. This is the number that should make almost everybody happy if you need some help, you can contact me directly or through Karen.  I'll stop sharing the screen and I'm open to any questions. I don't know what time is it if I'm right on time or not.

Karen: No, you're perfect. This is perfect. Thank you very much.

So now let's make that few minutes to open up for questions. Questions that we can get Peter to address while we've got him.

I have a quick question. So when you're working with a new client, what is the first thing that you look at?

Piotr: We check the core web vitals, page speed ranking. If I would have to tell you 'change one thing' in the quality of your site, you have to pass the core web vitals. If you are not, then you are losing lots of traffic and so on. So if you ask about one thing, I would say that thing really matters.

Also the quality of the pictures, the format of the pictures and the quality of the hosting. Sometimes there are lags on the servers. For example, right now we are migrating one of the magazine from Honolulu, from Hawaii, and the response from their server is 1.2 second. So it means it's a lot. It might seem not… It should be really like milliseconds.

This is one of the reasons we are using Amazon cloud to ensure the efficiency of the solution and scalability of the solution. 

Karen: And the 48 hours rule. Can you expand on that a little bit? The 48 hours rule.

Piotr: This rule was implemented by Google because it wanted to show the newest results on the search. So, as I told you about how the service was created, when the 9/11 happened. And the search results, there were, like, very old entries. So the 48 hours rule ensures that there is a relevance of the content for the search.

Karen: Okay, got you. Makes sense.

Piotr: But what's great is that if you update the article at one or two chapters, then this rule again applies. It doesn't have to be the new article. There are, like, stories, Christmas, 4th of July and so on. There are many topics that you can really play with the old content. Just update it a little bit and again, you can get traffic on them.

Karen: Okay. All right, well, that makes sense. Any other questions? Any other thoughts?

Well, I'd like to remind...  Well, first I'd like to thank Peter. Thank you very much. This was very helpful. I learned something. And a small reminder: registration is open for the Florida Media Conference, which will take place July the 20th and the 21st.

And when you visit, you'll be treated to a lot of sessions where we're going to be touching on topics that are important to all of us. But you'll also be able to spend time with our great partners like Peter at 4Media. They will be setting up appointments where you can go and really sit down with them one on one and get more information. 

So, if you have any questions about the conference or any of our partners, feel free to reach out to me. Again, this has been recorded and we will send that out as well.

And thank you very much, Peter. We really appreciate you joining us, and we look forward to seeing you.

Piotr: Thank you for having me, and see you soon in Florida in July.

Karen: See you in July.  All right, thanks, everyone. Bye.