How to maximize Google traffic? The ultimate guide for football news websites

Intro

Most football news websites rely heavily on traffic from Facebook and do not put enough work into optimizing their SEO to maximize the number of visitors they get from Google and other search engines. 

Competition for all this free organic traffic is fierce, but how can you make sure you come out as the winner and attract loads of Google traffic?

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In this article, we will share five actionable tips on maximizing your Google traffic as a football news website.

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 You will learn among other things:

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1. Why live blogs are a great way to get Google traffic 

2. Why a good internal link structure is vital to dominate the SEO game.

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Before we go on to exploring these tips, it is essential to understand that mastering the art of SEO  heavily relies on being proficient in 2 key aspects, namely: 

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Content and Technique.

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In this blog post we will focus on the content part, but without a technically optimized website, it will be tough to attract a lot of traffic from Google. So make sure you optimize the technical part of your website first.

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This article explains well how to optimize your website for SEO. We have technically optimized all websites that run on Newsifier and continuously improve our system to keep up with the latest technical SEO developments.

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Start a live blog to attract Google traffic

Starting a live blog at the right moment can bring in a lot of Google traffic. People typically search a lot on Google when there is a hyped up event, tournament or a match they are waiting for. This search trend shoots off when a highly anticipated match is approaching. So using live blogs for any such event reels in the anticipating audience to these websites. Moreover, Google tends to rank live blogs higher than normal news articles. 

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When using live blogs to boost SEO it is very important for the live blog to natively be a part of the article. The live blog should not be a third-party software that is embedded into the article. The major consequence of doing so would be that the content of the live blog will not be properly indexed by Google.

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Newsifier live blogs are natively integrated in articles and therefore automatically attract a lot of Google traffic.

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Also, make sure to publish your live blog article on time. The earlier you will publish the live blog, the earlier it can be indexed by Google and rank in the search results. When there are more websites who publish live blogs about the same event, the website that publishes the live blog first has a better chance to be preferred by Google, thus  ranking better.

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Now that we’ve established that live blogs are an incredible resource for attracting Google Traffic, an important questions comes up: What are the best events to start a live blog for? 

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To answer that, basically any event for which there is a lot of search volume on Google. Events that work typically well are important football matches, draws for important tournaments like the World Cup or Champions league. Other examples of important events are big news events,  for instance the last day of the transfer window. 

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So, if there's a football match or any other event  that you know people are hyped up about, then you can be confident that it'll generate a lot of traffic on a live blog.

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Make sure the Meta Title and Meta description of your main pages are optimized

The Meta Title and Meta Descriptions are what you see in the Google Search results (see image below). A lot of football news websites are not putting in enough work to optimize the these which ends up tanking their search traffic which could be otherwise boosted.

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Based on the Meta Title and Meta Description, people decide if they click on your page in the search results. So make sure this Meta Title is as attractive as possible, because the more clicks your page has (relative to the other pages on the same search results page), the higher it will be ranked by Google. The reason behind this is incredibly straight-forward, this metric heavily influences Google’s search engine algorithm. As such, the better this metric is, the more relevent your page will be in the eyes of the algorithm.

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A good way to check the current Meta Title and Meta Descriptions of the pages of your website is www.metatags.io. Here you can enter the URL of your page to see what the current Meta Title and Meta Description looks like.

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As your website is a football news website, make sure that in the Meta Title of your home page, you make it clear that your website is the best place to find the latest football news or club-specific news (if your website covers news from a certain football club).

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A good Meta Title and Meta Description could be for example:

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Meta Title --> Latest news and transfer rumours about Arsenal

Meta Description --> Here you find all latest news, transfer rumours and match reports about Arsenal

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This way, the reader knows exactly what the website is about. Our research shows that adding ‘transfer rumours’ in the Meta Tite and Meta Description also increases the number of clicks on the search result. Our biggest advice is to experiment with different Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions to see its effect on the page's ranking.

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One of the most common mistakes that many websites make is over using their own name in their Meta Title (see image below). People decide in a split second on which search result they will click. So make sure to put the main topic on the page at the beginning of the Meta Title. 

Make rich tag pages for clubs and players 

Making rich tag pages for players and clubs can bring you a consistent flow of search traffic. You can use tags to group your news articles on a tag page.

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Note that in this article, we use the word ‘tag pages’. Still, we notice that different online publishers use other names for tag pages, like topic pages, archive pages, category pages, etc. Whatever you call them, their basic concept is the same: a page that lists all articles relating to a specific topic.

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In other words, by using tag pages, you can group similar content into one central place. Creating tags for the most important keywords related to your website is efficient and effective for SEO. 

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For clubs and players, there is always a lot of search volume. So if you make good tag pages where all articles about this club or player are listed and have relevant information about this player, you can attract a lot of search traffic.

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But how can you set up good tag pages for clubs and players?

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1. First, make sure it has a good Meta Title and Meta Description. Whenever you look up something using Google or any other search engine, each result shown is the title of a web page (Meta Title), followed by its URL and a short summary (Meta Description) of the content of the web page (usually 160 characters or less). So, these are the three 3 things that someone will see and they’ll make a quick decision on whether they want to click on your web page’s link or not based on this. A good Meta Description is short, simple, concise and includes a call-to-action.  

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The main goal of the Meta Title and Meta Description is to make people choose your website when the search engine gives them an entire ocean of web pages to choose from.

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2. Then make sure to put the right content on top of the tag page by adding relevant information your visitors want to know about the player or club. Like the age of a football player, their career statistics etc. Or the match schedule of a club. 

This extra content also helps Google better understand what your page is all about. It is important to include the most important keywords in this text. You can find more information on the best practices for tag pages here.

At FootballCMS we provide fully optimized tag pages for all clubs and player with relevant data about the club or player.

3. When you have created tag pages for all clubs and players it is important to create as many internal links to this page as possible as internal links are an important ranking factor for Google.

A good way to create enough internal links to the tag page is to do this from within the articles. So when you mention the club or player in your news article you need to make a link from this word to the tag page.

At FootballCMS we have made a system that automatically creates an internal link to the tag page when a player or club is mentioned.

Another way to create valuable backlinks to your most important tag pages is by putting links to these pages in the website's footer. As these links are then listed on the home page itself, it is an excellent way to create valuable links to the tag pages.

Make a transfer news page

One of the most searched topics in football is news about transfers and transfer rumors.Especially during the transferwindows in January and the summer months. 

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So make sure to create a tag and tag page that says ‘transfer news’ that you use for every news article about transfers. This way you can group all transfer-related news articles on the same page. 

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Next, make sure to add some relevant text on this page so Google understands what the page is about. Don’t forget to use the right Meta Title and Meta Description (see also tips above). Like:

Meta Title --> Transfer news and rumours | <name website>

Meta Description --> Read all latest transfer rumours first on <name website>

Trending topics - Ride the news wave

News, in general, is dominated by news hypes all the time, and football is no exception to this. Every week, a few topics dominate the news ánd also dominate the search volume. We see that with trending topics it is a really good tactic to publish several stories around this topic. As with trending topics, almost every article that covers this topic in some way will attract a lot of search traffic. 

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Your editors might already know most of the trending topics at the moment. However,  tools like Google Trends are a saving grace since they are jam-packed with features that can help with researching and analyzing trends as well as saving you a lot of precious time as a bonus.   

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Since Google Trends is a valuable asset for improving your page’s SEO, here’s a brief guide on how to use this tool.

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Select Trending Searches in the menu and then pick the category ‘Sport’. Here you can see what the most searched topics around Sports are, which normally contain a lot of football-related topics.

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When you have defined the trending topics of the moment, you can also use Google Trends to come up with ideas and interesting angles for news articles. You can do this by searching for the topic in Google Trends itself. You can then see related topics and related search queries that are also trending in search volume. 

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You can use this information then to write articles about the main trending topics taking the other trending subtopics into account.

Bonus tip

Here’s a tip for getting the most out of trending topics that will help you in the long-run. Whenever there’s a transfer rumor attached to certain player circulating, check how much coverage this rumor has gotten from other websites. If this is a relatively new rumor, then there’s still time before other websites catch up to it and you can be confident that this will be news to your visitors as well. This presents a golden oppurtunity for you to quickly publish a background article about this player and reel in user traffic on your website. In that case, many people will look for information about this player on Google. So if you are the first news website to publish a background article (like a player profile) about this player, you can get a lot of search traffic.

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An extra benefit of this strategy is that you can link to this article every time there is an update about the transfer rumour of this player, which will lead to many internal links (good for SEO) to the article. Many extra clicks improve your website's authority as a source for relevant news on trending topics. 

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Apart from these tips, there is much more to know about SEO for Football News websites. Reach out to us if you want more tips and tricks specifically for football news websites or if you are interested in an SEO audit of your football news website. 

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I hope the above explains well how you can maximize search traffic for your football news website. Do you want more valuable tips? Then subscribe to our monthly newsletter especially made for football news publishers (see subscribe form in footer).

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You can also reach out to our team for a special SEO audit of your website. We have years of experience in SEO optimizing football news websites and have attracted millions of extra visits from Google for our clients.

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