If there's a thing that can drive you more traffic for conversion without leveraging SEO and paid ads - Google news is that thing.
As you can see that is my Google news publication tab on the screenshot below.
And like you know I don't run a news website either I'm a journalist and you don't have to be one either.
If you're smart enough you can get your Blogspot blog added and drive loads of traffic.
But the question is, how do Google news approve websites for inclusion?
There're cases that aren't yet resolved because Google news team typically didn't tell us everything on how websites are being judged in terms of approval and rejection.
As an SEO, content writer, and online publisher that's really a lot of assignment.
In fact, I can't deny I got rejected twice, the next move was the third and I got approved and everything goes live.
Google News is a content syndicated platform that Google uses to organize both local and world news in a most personalized way that delights its users.
In other words, Google news is reserved for publishers that stay timely, updated, and in many ways perform the word journalisms.
More importantly, Google news send roughly over 5 billion clicks to publisher around the world especially to those who perform good journalisms as a news source.
Even if you get a little percentage out of the figure above(5 billion clicks), that's huge as traffic when you do the statistics.
Everything said but there's a challenge to face in many ways having your Blogspot sites as a news source in the Google news publication center and your articles get indexed and rank on the news carousels, top stories, and app.
Yet, let's practicalized and see the best approach for getting your Blogspot blog added as a news source and drive loads of traffic.
Get the word journalism right
Google news content game really has changed as it was ever before now, the beauty about everything on Google news is that it's hard to see evergreen content that isn't newsworthy ranks.
Most articles you see that rank and got featured in Google News app, top stories, and carousels are topical optimized content.
They're based on timely and most current events. You can tell just from looking at the screenshot below, the best practices that evolved there really shows in many ways that determine news-related content ranks over evergreen content.
And that can be so difficult for non-news sites that focus more on regular SEO to see substantial traffic from Google news.
Here's the picture of everything said above and polemicdigital cleared all in the air.
As per polemicdigital, When you get everything right in news SEO you tend to know very quickly. The same applies when something goes wrong.
This is the reflection in traffic graphs, news websites tend to see much stronger peaks and troughs than regular sites.
For a regular site:
And for a news site:
Regular websites tend to go even more sloppy and grow over time as most regular SEO focus more on long term traffic to build expertise and authority whereas that isn't the case for news vertical SEO as it's focused on topical and real-time news.
A piece of news that exceeds the time frame 48 hours isn't news anymore in Google news index as it falls short of the grace to rank.
This means any article that exceeds 2 days will not be shown in Google news carousels and top stories.
Read here: How To Do SEO On Google Blogger 2020(+ Tutorial Pictures)
In fact, research backs it up that an average lifespan of an article in Google news is 40-41 hours.
So, how do you want to get the deal done for approval?
let's look at the best practices of getting your Blogspot blog approved in Google news.
How to get Google News approval:
- Focus more on building authority to rank, not just publishing thin content anymore
- Write to authenticate, don't copy someone else work
- Avoid too many grammatical errors still, nobody is perfect
- Write rich snippet headline but avoid clickbait
- Install SEO friendly theme
- Use your normal sitemap
1. Focus more on building authority to rank, not just publishing thin content anymore
If you are a front runner in your industry if you can adapt to good journalism, and adhere to the webmaster guidelines you'll have less struggle not getting added as Google news source.
Building authority as said really is difficult but Google news requires just that for eligibility.
You can tell from just looking at the screenshot below, sites like Business Insider, Goal, TechCrunch, and more rank for the SERP top stories for their timely journalism as they have build authority over time in the eyes of Google news algorithm.
That said, doing regular SEO isn't that similar to Google News vertical SEO as the much difference is that regular SEO focus more on long term goal.
Trying to adhere to Google crawl budget and indexing as it means the longer you stay, the more traffic you drive to your blogger blog over time.
As for news vertical SEO, it adheres more often to real-time SEO as it cares about timely topical articles dedicated to its users.
So, what does this building authority means to you?
Having that rich keyword intent to rank isn't just enough to build authority over time.
That means you need to do more.
Nearly 12% of search queries now have top stories they rank for as you can see from the screenshot below.
And roughly 2% of news dedicated content ranks for featured snippets.
This means having that authority whereas begins from the search engine, how often you rank for several keywords and the intensity of your search presence, social signals, and mentions correlate to the building of your authority.
You can tell more often that Google is concern about those websites that rank in its index.
Google really is concern about E.A.T in the search results and how often people link to them.
Your expertise and authority in your respective field matters in the eye of Google.
With the May Google core algorithm update, there was a lot that happened in their index.
The core update shows the volatility of the SERP fluctuations and why thin content won't anymore rank for search terms.
And if you're still doing just that, publishing thin content you'll have a big problem getting approved in Google news.
Try as much to build on strong topical relevance and strong peak to stand out.
The intention you should have is about standing out, not blending in, in the industry you are.
Read here: How To Rank Blogger On Google In 2020(+ Tutorial Pictures)2. Write to authenticate, don't copy someone else work
Google algorithm is very smart detecting plagiarism work and if you're cut you can be penalized.
In other words, that might not help you much as you might be entirely de-index from its search index.
If you are going to make a piece of work you wrote stand out, you will have to do it in your own unique way.
And structure it in a way both humans and search engines will understand.
Google News is a reputable news feed trusted by millions of people all over the world.
To what Neil Patel completely says, to be included in news XML's your reporting must be original, honest, and well-structured with quality anchor texts, meta tags, and an authoritative voice.
Standard journalism is all about investigation and not just about search engine optimization. So, you should be able and ready to investigate a story and authenticate it, before reporting it.
3. Avoid too many grammatical errors still, nobody is perfect
I can tell with my first sign up in Google news publisher center I received an email notification that says there were too many grammatical errors with bad sentence structure.
I then couldn't help myself by not deleting some articles, with that, I lost some inbound links that depreciate my search rankings.
It helps because I doubt if I ever regretted doing that it makes me even more productive.
After all, I used a tool called Grammarly all I need was to install it through the chrome web store and that's all.
Even as the tool isn't 100% perfect and as nobody can yet it solves some unexpected mistakes which can make the whole content look scrappy.
4. Write rich snippet headlines but avoid clickbait
You don't have to perform journalism on the aspect of generating more clicks.
But good journalism should be done with a comprehensive analysis and research.
A rich snippet headline should always authenticate and reflect the logic of the body content.
Not for the selfish way you think you can bypass Google news algorithm for more clicks without being caught.
If you want to be included in Google news the punctuality about your headline matters.
For example, take a look at the screenshot below you'll notice that nearly 95% of publishers in Google news are cautious about which word to capitalize.
In this case, some publishers used small letter cases throughout the H1 tag, some mixed both, and a few percentages use a capital letter without any mixture.
The most gifted ones used to adhere to good standard journalism practices that authenticate in many ways that they report.
They come with real and original stories reporting with a rich headline that's honest in the eye of Google.
5. Install SEO friendly theme
The theme you used strictly determined if the Google news team can manually accept you as a news source.
Google team manually check sites and go ahead about reading some articles before approving any newsworthy sites.
If your blogspot blog architect looks poor for user experience Google won't bother much adding you to their news publication center.
Read here: Blogspot And SEO 2020 – The Definitive Guide
To avoid such a painful scene, you can hack on this ready-made blogger SEO template tool here.
Pick on anyone of your choice, install it and the earth improves for everyone.
6. Use normal sitemap
It's hard having news sitemap XML install in blogger but normal sitemap can still do better.
If you have to periodically tell Google news crawler the budget of your articles.
That's, how often Google news should crawl your articles.
So to do just that, create a sitemap, add it up to Google webmaster.
After all, create an RSS or Atom feed you'll need just that for your publication
That said, go back to your publication center, choose feed over web location for fast crawling and indexing.
Add up the created RSS or Atom feed URL as a new section if install correctly you'll see something similar to the one below.
After you have reviewed it.
Conclusion
Having your blogspot blog in Google news can drive you real-time traffic without leveraging paid ads or SEO.
With Google News vertical SEO you can as well as drive tons of traffic over time.
But the tricky thing is you have to ensure you perform good standard journalism practices and stay honest with reporting before added as a news source.
So, over to you, how do you want to get Google news SEO right and drive tons of traffic?