How to Retroactively Optimize Your Site’s Top Stories

This is a sample step-by-step guide for how newsrooms can retroactively optimize top stories with a few SEO best practices, including technical fixes and keyword incorporation. This guide is based on our project’s SEO work with our nonprofit, single-subject cohort of newsrooms.

These recommendations are based on Moz, the tool we use to track changes in SEO optimization across all sites over time. In addition to Moz, this guide is based largely on WordPress sites with the Yoast plug-in.

We see SEO work within a newsroom as falling into two buckets: the retroactive piece that involves combing through preexisting content and stories, and the forward-looking piece that involves implementing these steps into staff workflows. This guide focuses on the retroactive process.

DUE DILIGENCE

Identify your top 50 Organizational Keywords. Your outlet should have a list of 50 to 100 keywords or key phrases that you would like your site to rank for. If not, we recommend sitting down with your editor, technical team, and other key leaders at your group to select your primary keywords. These words should be a mix of the practical and aspirational. For example, you should include keywords you know you rank well for already (so you can retain your rank), along with keywords you’d like to rank well for over time.

• Disclaimer: in the case of single-subject newsrooms, many keyword choices will revolve around your outlet’s core focus and might not include as many opportunistic keywords based on trending news, etc. This will require your outlet to pick several keywords that capture the core coverage or focus area and to work on optimizing these words, consistently, over time.
• Throughout the keyword identification process, we recommend using a few tools to determine the competition and difficulty to rank for certain keywords: Google Trends, WordTracker, and Moz’s keyword planner that includes 20 searches a month (or upgrade to Moz Pro for unlimited searches).

SET UP A RETROACTIVE TRACKER

Identify the 50 to 100 Top Pages on your site. These are the pages you will focus on throughout this exercise. Sites that are your Top Pages could be:

• Evergreen content
• Highly trafficked
• Representative of your publication’s mission or purpose

Create your tracker: In an Excel worksheet, set up a tracker with four columns. Row 1 should read, from column A through D, “TOP PAGE URL,” “Discover,” “Keyword Opportunity,” and “Org. Keyword.” Then, paste the URLs of your identified Top Pages in column A. Leave the rest of the Excel sheet blank for now. Your spreadsheet should now look something like this:

Add in the Discover words or phrases to your tracker.

• Look at the Discover section of your Moz report.
• Identify all pages ranked #2–5.
• For pages in Discover already listed in your SEO tracker Excel sheet, copy the keyword or key phrase listed next to it and paste it into the Discover column next to the appropriate page in your tracker.
• For pages in Discover NOT already listed in your SEO tracker Excel sheet, you might consider adding those pages to your Top Page tracker.

Add in Keyword Opportunities to your tracker.

• Look at the Keyword Opportunity section of your Moz report.
• Identify all keywords with a monthly volume of 11–50 or higher (the higher, the better).
• Open up each of your pages listed in the Excel sheet and control F for each keyword you identified in the previous step.
• If the page does include a Keyword Opportunity, paste that Keyword Opportunity into Column C in the Excel sheet next to the appropriate page.
• For the pages without any Keyword Opportunities, consider creating content around this keyword. You might consider flagging the keyword list to your editorial team.

Add your Organizational Keywords into the tracker.

• Open up that top keyword list from before, and input Org. Keywords into stories that contain or could contain this keyword. Your tracker should now look something like this:

Choose which keyword or key phrase to optimize for each story. You might have up to three keyword choices (Discover, Keyword Opportunity, Org. Keyword) for each Top Page URL. We recommend optimizing one or possibly two of these keywords in the story.

• We recommend highlighting or indicating to yourself in the tracker which word or phrase you have chosen to optimize for each story. This decision should be based on the difficulty and rank for the different options, as well as strategic considerations around your immediate or long-term goals for keyword rank.
• Consider: We strongly advise against incorporating three or more keywords into a story, or incorporating one or two keywords excessively throughout the story (in more places than the below steps). Sometimes, if the story contains multiple, different keywords in the URL, page title, first paragraph, etc, it could fail to establish the intent of the page with Google. Additionally, if you use one keyword excessively (and it becomes more than three percent of the entire words used in the page), then the story will be considered a spam attempt by Google.

Commence Optimizing!

• Open a page.
• Optimize the SEO title (or Title Tag). Add the keyword to the SEO title as close to the front of the title as possible. If needed, shorten the SEO title to 75 characters or less. Consider the readability and emotional impact of the SEO title.
• Optimize the metadata description. Add the keyword to the metadata description.
• Optimize the URL. Add the keyword to the URL (utilize redirects if needed). Shorter URLs are better. Make sure that a reader could easily predict the page content by looking at the URL.
• Optimize the first paragraph of the story. Add the keyword to the first paragraph of text within the story itself, if you can.
• Optimize the anchor text. Make sure that the anchor text throughout the story is succinct, relevant to the linked-to page, and not generic (double-check that you don’t have any generic anchor text phrases such as: “here,” “this,” etc.)
• Mark and repeat. Once you are finished optimizing a page, mark it as complete in your tracker and continue onto the next page.

Establish Partnerships

Look at the Top Inbound Links section of your Moz report.

• Reach out to the site and say hello, and thanks.
• Start the work of establishing relationships with sites producing inbound links. This ties into the forward-thinking, workflow part of SEO.
• Double-check: preferably the partner is linking to you with keyword-rich anchor text in the first paragraph of the story.

Look at the Mentions without Links section.

• Contact those sites and ask for links, preferably with rich anchor text in the first paragraph. (If possible, provide them with the exact anchor text you would like, keeping keyword opportunities in mind).

Thanks for reading! How does this guide compare to the retroactive SEO optimization processes at your site?

Next up, we’ll be posting a blog on a few different SEO workflow strategies within our cohort. In the meantime, please feel free to send me a note at Emily_Roseman@hks.harvard.edu with any suggestions on how to improve this guide — we’d love to hear from you.