Whether you want to brush up on your keyword research or dig into more advanced search concepts, these are the SEO tips you’ll want to know as a magazine publisher.
Search traffic is something online magazine publishers can’t afford to ignore. While word-of-mouth marketing and social media will always have their place in the world of digital publishing, the importance of search traffic can’t be overstated. Publishers that haven’t optimized their websites for search are missing out on valuable traffic.
Many magazine publishers are intimidated by SEO and hesitant to make changes to their websites out of fear that they won’t be “doing it right.” At its core, though, SEO is very simple. It involves making a series of small, but important, changes to a website’s content and structure, with the goal of helping the website rank higher in search. Small updates to content and website structure can add up to big results in the form of increased traffic and higher click-through rates.
How high a website ranks on Google depends on thousands of factors, the most important of which is relevance to the query. It’s easy to reach the first page of search results when someone is searching for the title of your magazine, but it might be harder to rank for popular keywords in your niche. Ranking on the first page of Google results for a popular keyword like “fashion” or “sports” isn’t going to happen overnight. However, with diligent work, publishers will usually see gradual improvements over time.
The higher your website ranks in search, the higher your click-through rate will likely be. More clicks equal more traffic, and that adds up to an increase in readership and subscribers. Given that 93% of online experiences begin with search, publishers can’t afford to not rank highly in Google results.
Many of the so-called “golden rules” that publishers have heard about SEO are either outdated or don’t apply directly to the magazine industry. Magazine publishers aren’t just looking for traffic. They want to attract targeted visitors who are actually interested in the topics they cover. High-quality traffic is a key priority for online magazine publishers. In a survey by Ezoic Research, SEO and audience growth were ranked as the top two priorities for publishers. If you want to make your website visible to the greatest number of readers in your coveted demographics, then you’ll need to have a solid SEO strategy in place.
To help you optimize your website for search, we’ve created these SEO tips with magazine publishers in mind.
Top Search Strategies for Online Magazines
Search engines help online magazines promote their content and reach new audiences. To decide which webpages to show on search engine results pages (SERPs), search engines like Google and Bing rely on “signals,” like relevant content, relevant keywords, social profile pages, and quality backlinks.
Broadly speaking, the activities or optimization strategies that lead to real improvements in search can be broken down into two main categories:
- Optimizations that impact the website’s ranking in SERPs
- Changes that impact the behaviors of visitors as they browse search results
Magazine publishers can make changes to the back-ends of their websites to help rank higher in search results. Those are the SEO strategies you’ll see covered most frequently — things like adding title tags and optimizing content for relevant keywords. The other main SEO category involves modifying how websites appear in search results, so people are more likely to click on the link when they see it. This might be something like customizing the title tags on each page so they better reflect the content of that page, or using special characters to break up the monotony and make links more eye-catching in SERPs.
Both of these categories are important, but for the remainder of this article we will focus primarily on that first group.
10 SEO Tips for Magazine Publishers
- Create high-quality, relevant content.
- Improve your internal linking structure.
- Make sure your website is mobile-friendly.
- Optimize all URLs, title tags, headers, and meta descriptions.
- Make sure your online directories are optimized with relevant keywords.
- Title tags should include specific information about what visitors will find on the webpage when they click.
- To attract clicks from targeted visitors, focus on long-tail keywords.
- Create profiles on all relevant social media websites, including Facebook.
- If relevant, such as for city or regional magazines, consider adding location pages to your website.
- Engage with readers on top social media platforms.
For a complete SEO evaluation of your website, reach out to Web Publisher PRO today.
