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All the way from 
?? today is the turn of https://ministryofsport.com.au/ posted by Matt Vogt.
Bit of a different site today; a news-based, content-lead website.
Google News for SEO
“Hey Matt Vogt
So I’m going to recommend something you might already be trying, but if not then it’s something you definitely should look at. It’s getting your website into Google News.
Google News can be an incredible way for news sites like yours to drive exposure, new and returning traffic.
You need to be accepted as a website into Google News, and I’ve tested a few of your articles and it looks like you’re not in there at the minute.
I spotted a competitor who is – bandt.com.au – and not only do they drive a lot of traffic per month (approx 250k visits), but 50% of their traffic comes from organic SEO traffic (inc. Google News).
Submitting to Google News
So how do you get into Google News? The good news is that it’s possible, but the bad news is that it’s complicated. And if you get rejected you have to wait a couple of months before submitting your site for inclusion again! Not great… (I’ve been in this situation before)
Here’s a quick checklist of actions you need to take:
– First off, you need to make sure you’re content is completely newsworthy and unique. Google call this aligning to the ‘principles of journalism’ (I’m sure you guys are fine with this, but good to be aware of)
– You need to create a specific Google News sitemap that updates as frequently as possible, and omits articles over 2 days old
– Create AMP versions for each of your articles (AMP = accelerated mobile pages – these are stripped down, fast loading version of your webpages that Google love to serve to its mobile users)
– The site has to be fast loading (which yours is)
Fortunately you guys are on WordPress, and implementing the above is much easier on WP than most other platforms. There’s a great WP plugin called Yoast that will take care of the news sitemap for you, and then there are multiple AMP plugins that will auto create AMP versions of all your webpages.
I’d recommend creating AMP pages even if you don’t decide to submit your site to Google News for whatever reason as it will help your rankings still.
Here’s a great post from Yoast on what you need to do, this should really help you – https://yoast.com/optimize-news-site/
Hope this all helps!” (Andrew Allen)
