7 Ways SEO
Employees at local magazines and alternative weeklies are not familiar with downtime. The teams and budgets are small, the responsibilities big. So, how does a team manage? Besides developing new models to increase revenue and resources, teams can also work smarter by having clear goals and utilizing automation. Here are seven ideas to consider:
1. Articulate a clear mission.
In quantitative and qualitative terms, what does success look like for your organization? For your site? Are there any employee responsibilities or company initiatives that don’t contribute effectively towards those goals? Use analytics, reader and employee feedback, and a dash of gut instinct to cut out the things that aren’t contributing towards your larger mission.
2. Rotate your layout automatically.
Set up your site so that pages are automatically populated with the most recent or relevant content; this will reduce the amount of time you spend manually shifting things around. Metro Publisher makes this easy with content modules, or sprockets. You can set up a sprocket to automatically pull in the latest stories published in the dining section, for example, or you can have a sprocket pull in the latest stories tagged with “New Year’s Eve 2021.”
Metro Publisher also allows you to use one sprocket multiple times throughout your site, which will save you from repeatedly uploading the same thing. For instance, you could have one sprocket on your site that links to your latest issue’s cover and content. Instead of adding that cover image to multiple places around your site when a new issue is published, just upload it to a latest issue sprocket once.
Also, when setting up your homepage, create one layout for normal news days and then another layout designed for breaking news days. This will save you time on days when you need to make one story or set of stories especially prominent.
3. Update, don’t rewrite, top-performing older articles.
Local magazines and alternative weeklies produce a lot of evergreen content—”best hikes under 5 miles,” “top ice cream spots,” and so on. Instead of creating new articles every couple years when the content needs an update, go back to the original article, update the content, and re-publish. This minor switch will not only save your staff time, it will also preserve the article’s SEO reputation, which is especially important if the original article received a lot of search traffic. When you re-publish the article, changing the headline is fine, but do not change the URL. Switching the URL will void the SEO advantage that using the original article gives you.
4. Populate your calendar automatically.
Online events calendars are one of the biggest sources of user traffic for local magazines and alternative weeklies. But they can also be time-consuming to maintain. One way to quickly source content to fill your calendar is to allow website visitors to submit their own events. Metro Publisher allows visitors to add events by filling out a simple online form. To avoid spam, you can require that all event submissions require an employee’s approval before they are published.
When adding events internally, you can also save a little time by importing .ics files instead of copying and pasting in each piece of information for an event. Larger organizations such as colleges or professional sports teams may also have event calendar links that are publicly available. Within Metro Publisher, you can enter these links to automatically import all these organizations’ future events into your calendar.
5. Automate the creation of large online directories.
Large directories such as lists of top health professionals or local restaurants can draw a lot of search traffic. Metro Publisher has a handy tool where you can set up as many directories as you would like on your site. But inputting each entry manually, especially for large directories, takes hours. Instead, organize your entries into a spreadsheet and import them into your website all at once. If you are using Metro Publisher, you can follow the instructions detailed here or ask Metro Publisher’s custom support staff to import the locations for you—the job typically costs around three billable hours.
6. Automate the creation of analytics reports.
Automating your analytics reports allows you to spend more time analyzing data rather than pulling it together. Costly services like Parse.ly and Chartbeat make it easy for users to create automated reports, but you can also create them with tried-and-true (and free!) Google Analytics. First, create a dashboard in Google Analytics that contains the key statistics you would like to measure: total pageviews, time on site, user demographics, etc. Then, set up a scheduled dashboard report email in Google Analytics. Recipients you designate will receive an email with a PDF attachment that contains the analytics information. You can create several dashboards—one for your editorial team and one for your sales team, for instance. You can also set up several different scheduled emails. Maybe a writer would like to receive a daily report whereas your marketing manager would prefer a monthly report.
7. Create automated email newsletters and workflows.
Email is one of the best ways to promote editorial content, subscription sales, and stay connected with the community you serve. To save some time, it’s ok to automate some of your emails; most email providers will allow you to do this. Metro Publisher provides RSS feeds by section, subsection, and tag, so it’s easy to create curated emails filled with the latest stories relevant to specific interests—news, dining, art, etc. In addition to editorial emails, make sure you set up smart circulation email workflows to let subscribers know when, for example, their credit card is set to expire or when they need to renew. Taking the time to set up logical workflows now will save you time and potential lost revenue later on.
