9 tips to boost your news site’s engagement
A handful of simple best practices can ensure your content survives search engines and offers readers the most effective experience.
Today’s content management systems make it easy for small publishers to whip out content with minimal tech savvy. That’s good for busy journalists and editors, but simple technical errors can seriously damage a site’s traffic potential.
There are a handful of simple ways to ensure your content survives search engines and your audience has the most effective experience.
The Medill School of Journalism’s media innovation and entrepreneurship (MIE) program partnered with the Institute for Nonprofit News to analyze nonprofit local news sites’ user data and provide recommendations. This year, participating news sites were The Texas Observer, The Connecticut Mirror, The Colorado Independent and The Chicago Reporter.
Based on what we learned, here are nine ways to understand your user analytics and improve your site’s engagement:
Don’t trust your user numbers.
They’re probably inflated: On Google Analytics, a user is based on a cookie, which exists for each device and browser. The same reader might be accessing your content on two browsers on the same computer as well as on their phone, and they would all count as separate users.
Target engagement, not pageviews.
The number of pageviews is not the best gauge of traffic. Outlets like Gawker depended on the clickbait model, and many websites tried to increase pageviews by spreading articles (or photo slideshows) across separate pages. Increasingly, publishers now value long-term engagement, which is best measured by pages per session.
You can increase engagement by designing your website to give readers multiple avenues to stay engaged. Some tips are described below.
Design for all screen sizes.
Mobile readership is gaining a larger share of news traffic. Because websites are viewed on many different screen sizes — some horizontal, some vertical — it’s essential to build websites using responsive web design.
Tips to keep in mind:
- Ensure the top story is in the top of the scroll, which conceptually likens to a newspaper’s top-of-fold.
- Fully display the headline for all screen sizes.
Know your audience.
Google Analytics offers information about who your users are — age, gender, location, interests — if your site enables Google’s “Advertising Reporting Features.” You can look at user insights with any number of variables, such as device type, city, age or browser. This information can help you identify your strengths and growth opportunities.
Know where your audience is coming from.
Every audience is unique, but one thing is consistent for many news outlets: the homepage is not readers’ main access point. Search results, social media and newsletters play larger roles in luring users to individual articles.
To increase search-driven traffic, make sure headlines include the search keywords people are likely to use if they’re interested in a particular topic, and make sure HTML meta descriptions — which show up under headlines in search engine results — sum up the article. For newsletters, write catchy subject headlines to clue in busy but loyal readers on the topic du jour. For social media, focus on feelings — users share content that they care about.
Link in, link out.
Hyperlinking within stories helps with user experience as well as Google search authority. One way Google gauges a site’s legitimacy or domain authority is how often it links to other verified sites, and vice versa. Plus, curious readers will value the additional references, whether they are on your website or external content. It’s all the better for you to hyperlink to related stories on your own website to increase opportunities to extend reader engagement.
Highlighting story recommendations in the sidebar and at the end of the text gives readers other options for additional engagement. Embedding related links in the body of an article is an effective way to break up the text and surface related links where readers are likely to see them, especially for mobile readers who don’t always reach the end of the article. Critics may argue that these links dissuade readers from finishing the story, but they also are the best way to alert them to other articles they might be interested in.
Boost headlines with search keywords.
Search engine intelligence is still artificial: Google does not typically understand the puns or editorial nuance commonly found in print headlines. Ensure web headlines are straightforward and include terms that readers would likely search for. Keywords should be near the beginning of the headline as the first few words are more important to search engines, according to search engine optimization experts. Refer to Moz’s Keyword Explorer or Google Trends for clues.
Give your pages a searchability boost by inserting descriptive alternative text for images and including keywords in article URLs.
Use one <h1> tag per page.
In HTML parlance, <h1> denotes the most important headline. Search engines use the first <h1> tag as one of the clues to understanding a page’s content. Using more than one tag may confuse the search engine crawler. For subheadlines throughout the story, consider <h2> and <h3> tags.
Keep load time speedy.
Google penalizes sites with low loading speeds in its search results. Plus, a slower loading speed leads to a worse user experience, which in turn affects user engagement.
You can shorten loading time with certain image formats. JPEG2000 provides better compression than JPEG or PNG, allowing for faster downloads and lower data consumption. Lazy-loading offscreen or hidden images after all critical resources have been downloaded will shorten the load time and feel more interactive. Refer to the Google Page Speed tool for more details.
Danny Hwang contributed to these insights.
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