SEO Best Practices for News Publishers

The webinar, hosted by Similarweb and presented by SEO consultant Barry Adams, walks news publishers through the strategic role of SEO in modern journalism. Jackie Lee opens with a contextual overview of how the publishing landscape has shifted from print and broadcast to a multi‑device, multimedia environment, emphasizing that Google is the primary traffic source and that SEO is essential for competing not only with traditional news outlets but also with social platforms and streaming services. The session then delves into practical tools and tactics: 1. Technical site analysis – fast crawling, clean HTML, XML sitemaps, Core Web Vitals, and recommended crawlers (DeepCrawl, Botify, OnCrawl, JetOctopus, Screaming Frog, Sitebulb) plus Google Search Console. 2. Competitive research – using visibility indexes (Sistrix, Semrush, Ahrefs) and Similarweb’s traffic‑source comparison to identify share‑of‑voice and niche opportunities. 3. Keyword and real‑time trend research – leveraging Google Trends, Google Autocomplete, AnswerThePublic, and Similarweb’s real‑time data to capture fast‑moving news keywords, with guidance on avoiding overly niche jargon. 4. Real‑time performance monitoring – tools such as NewsDash, News Dashboard, Marfeel Compass, Chartbeat, Parsely, and GA Real‑Time Content Insights to track article rankings and traffic minute‑by‑minute. 5. On‑page news optimization – headline best practices (include full names, clear keywords), lead paragraph length (≥80 words, ideally 200 words), image specs for Discover (1,200 px wide, 16:9), URL structure with keywords, and internal linking/tagging strategies. 6. Long‑term authority building – top navigation, tag pages, internal linking, and E‑A‑T signals (expertise, authoritativeness, trust) to establish topical expertise. 7. Prioritization and quick wins – start with editorial SEO (better headlines, internal linking, tagging) before tackling deeper technical issues; quick wins yield immediate traffic while long‑term tactics sustain growth. 8. KPIs and benchmarking – use Similarweb for competitive benchmarks; align metrics with business model (page views for ad‑supported sites, conversion/subscription rates for paywalls). The Q&A covers article length (400‑500 words optimal), indexing of tag pages (should be indexed, with sensible volume), and recommended KPI sources. The webinar concludes with next steps and contact information.
Questions this video answers
Around 400 to 500 words is optimal; 200 words is the minimum for Google News traction, but 400‑500 words tends to perform best.
Yes, tag pages should be indexed so Google can recognize them as part of the site’s topical expertise. Use a sensible number of tags and avoid excessive URLs that could strain crawl budget.
Use Similarweb to compare your traffic and channel performance against competitors. Align KPIs with your business model: page views for ad‑supported sites, conversion rate and subscriber numbers for pay‑wall publishers.
Chapters
Hi, folks. Welcome to the webinar. Let's go ahead and get started. As a reminder, this webinar will be recorded, and we'll be sending out a recording at the end of the discussion. So let's kick things off. Welcome to today's webinar on SEO best practices for content publishers, hosted by Barry Adams, who we're very lucky to have, and Similarweb. A little bit about ourselves. Barry Adams is an SEO consultant with Polemic Digital. And my name is Jackie Lee. I'm the head of publishers and media at Similarweb. So just a couple of housekeeping items. We're going to start with a brief introduction from me. I will give a little bit of background on the influence that SEO has on news and editorial goals for newsrooms, as well as contextualizing the search environment using Similarweb. I'll then pass the presentation off to Barry, who's gonna do a deep dive into the tools that actually do SEO well. And then he's gonna do a deeper dive into publishing-specific SEO tactics. This should be a great session today. So really hope you find this insightful. So as a quick introduction, I think one thing that we wanna do is level set that in the last 20 years, the publishing and media industry as we know it has shifted tremendously. If you think, you know, In the '90s, it was a physical product that was printed or a literal TV that you had to be in front of the TV to watch a show. And since then, we've shifted towards a world that's multimedia and multi-device. As a result, that traditional competitive set for these traditional brands has really expanded. Now brands are not competing just for readers or viewers. They're competing for audience time and attention, which means that the competitive set has broadened substantially. Google is the number one source of traffic to most publishers. So the brands that leverage the best SEO innovations and best practices are giving themselves the best opportunity to break through, not just with their traditional competitors, but when you're competing with social or streaming. SEO is really, I think, one of the key tools to do that. So taking another step back just to contextualize the search environment for the content creation side of any publishing business, There's 2 things that SEO really helps— sorry, there's 2 things that publishers really do where SEO helps. The first is newsrooms, content creators are really focused on making the content that resonates with their target audiences and can drive habituation. But making great content is just part of the puzzle. Once that content is created, how do you make that discoverable with the folks that could find it interesting, that it could resonate with? And that's where SEO really comes in. Optimizing the great stuff that's already being created so you can break through. It's really a way to capture that traffic. And when we think about breaking through, we can't ignore Google. It is, it has a massive outsized impact. When you think about the different touchpoints with Google Search alone, you have Google News, you have Google Top Stories, you've got the News tab, and in mobile, you've got Google Discover. And when you think about how brands bubble up to the surface when people type in a particular search term, there's actually optimizing the article itself, the content, the links within it. At a more macro level, what does that brand specialize in, in terms of their overarching editorial prowess? And also one other thing that Google takes into account is having a site with a strong technical foundation. These are all things that Barry is going to take us through later in the presentation. So contextualizing the search environment for these brands, I think, is an important first step. 3 key questions that I think we need to think about are, who is getting the greatest share of voice today amongst a competitive set? What are the terms that are currently trending in the publishing and media space? And more importantly, what are the up-and-coming keywords for this industry that SEO teams can take back and start to optimize their content, change their keywords, change their links to really capture that that next upswing. One of the things that you can see in SimilarWeb is taking a look at who's getting the greatest share of voice today. So what this screen is showing is looking at the news and media industry, which is a predefined category in SimilarWeb. We've narrowed this to the United States, looking at desktop winners over the month of February. Yahoo, New York Times, and CNN are the leaders. And if you look at this, New York Times actually jumped 50% month over month. I think this is really, really interesting as a space for people to start looking into what these brands are doing that's really causing them to lead this industry. The next thing to look at is what are the words that are currently trending? And I think you can see here, Wordle is the top trending term, which I think explains a bunch of that jump to New York Times. I think one thing to bear in mind is that when you're looking at this industry, it's It's not necessarily just hard news, politics, terms that are really driving traffic. I think this speaks back to how the competitive set has broadened substantially, where now Wordle, which is a game— New York Times acquired them— that's really, I think, driving some of this traffic. And in terms of how to capture the upcoming trend, this is a view of what the up-and-coming keywords are. These are some of the terms that are just starting to trend in the And we're starting to see terms like Leah Thomas, like daylight savings, like Deshaun Watson. As brands are starting to create content around these particular topics, I think it's really important to keep this in mind so that as you're making new things, what's the next thing that's coming? With that said, I'm going to go ahead and hand this off to Barry at this point, who's going to dive into the specifics of how we can take some of these insights and really use this to propel your brand forward. Barry.
Thank you very much, Jackie. Thanks for setting me up nicely there. So first, I want to talk about different SEO tools that you can use to analyze your website, analyze your competitive space, analyze keywords and performance. Every single SEO tool or toolset that I will be discussing here is specialized in a specific task. You have some SEO suites that cover multiple areas. But generally speaking, I personally, I prefer to use specialized tools for specialized tasks that do one thing really, really well. And it's important to separate these out by category as well, because they have different purposes and provide a different platform for you to base your optimizations on. So if you start with the technical site analysis tools, next slide, please. We'll be talking about optimizing the website for specific aspects that really help your performance in Google. Initially, you want to make make sure that your content can be crawled and indexed very, very fast, and that there's no hiccups there, that Google can very quickly find any newly published articles that are listed on your website. This starts with having a fast website initially that responds very quickly to requests from both Googlebots and users, so Google can crawl the website at a very high rate. It means having a very good site structure as well that is logical, that makes sense to both end users and to search engines. And you can also provide XML sitemaps, both general XML sitemaps and Google News-specific XML sitemaps that allow Google to very quickly find newly published articles and add those to their crawl queue. Then the indexing, of course, very important as well. This is one of the areas where publishing websites are a bit different from general websites. General sites, non-news websites, don't really have to worry too much about having clean HTML code because Google tends to render web pages in a headless browser and will parse the code no matter how mucked up it is. But for news publishers, that rendering phase tends not to happen because it's very resource intensive for Google to do. So they tend to base the indexing of news articles primarily on the HTML source code, which means you need fairly decent, fairly clean HTML source code that is very easy for Google to digest. Your news article structured data really helps with this as well, so that Google has that metadata in the form of a structured data snippet in the HTML source to index the article and understand the article so it can extract the headline, some of the content, any featured images, etc., etc. And increasingly we see Google put a lot more emphasis on the user experience that a website and news articles provide, and they've managed to assign metrics to those in the form of Core Web Vitals, which you will have seen in your Google Search Console reports. Having good Core Web Vitals scores is a small ranking factor at the moment, but I do see fairly decent correlations with websites that improve their Core Web Vitals and also seeing uplifts in search traffic. So I do think it's a fairly important aspect of optimizing your website so that you make sure that you provide a good user experience, fast loading, not too interruptive, no intrusive overlays, etc., etc. And like I said before, the imagery as well, very important that you have the right images in the right size and aspect ratio. The tools that I love to use for the technical site analysis, I like to use various different crawlers. You have the cloud crawlers, the software as a service crawlers like DeepCrawl, which is one of my favorites. You also have Botify, Oncrawl, and JetOctopus is a fairly recent addition to the market, which is a very fast crawler as well. These are basically set and forget crawlers where you configure a crawl and then unleash it on your website, and a couple of hours, a couple of days later, it'll come back and say, here's your finished report. It will have crawled your website and will give you fairly introductory reports to what potential problems on your website might be. It's always important to realize that these are just, you know, fairly basic analyses on your website. They're not necessarily a to-do list for you. You still need to interpret these reports yourself and see what the actual problem is that is the root cause of those issues. These tools don't understand the ins and outs of your specific website. They just have a fairly generic rule set about what a perfect website is supposed to be like. So don't see these reports generated by these tools as gospel. They are just a starting point for you to do some deeper digging and analysis and see, right, is this actually a problem that we need to fix, or is this just a feature of the website that we can live with? And the more experience you have with SEO, the more you are able to interpret these, these issues and see whether or not they're worth fixing and what the potential impact of positive uplift of fixing those issues might be. I also use a few desktop crawlers, which are basically pieces of software you install on your own computer to then run a crawl. They're a little bit more flexible, generally speaking, than the cloud-based crawlers. Screaming Frog is probably the most popular one. It's very flexible. You can use that to crawl pretty much anything that can be crawled on the web, and it's one of my favorite tools as well. And I've increasingly started using Sitebulb recently, which is sort of a nice middle point between a desktop crawler and a cloud crawler in that it's very configurable, has really good built-in reports as well, but still runs on your own computer. Though I hear they're also working on a server-based version of that. So that's really exciting news for the technical geeks like me. And of course, Google Search Console provides a wealth of information about how Google sees your website, any issues that it finds. So it's definitely something you want to start your week with by digging into your Search Console reports and seeing what has happened, what has changed since the last time you looked at it. Then competitive research is quite important as well. You may have set yourself specific goals as a publisher to want to dominate a specific news cycle or news area, and it's always important to do some competitive analysis to see who you're actually going up against. Basically, in the context of Google, Any website that ranks above you in Google search is a competitor. And sometimes you'd be surprised who you're actually competing against. The intent of a search is very important to understand in terms of how Google interprets what the best answers to that search actually are. And it's not always a news search. You think something might be newsworthy, you type it into Google, and you get a very different set of search results where news publishers aren't really getting much traction, which means the intent of the search probably doesn't align with what news publishers are putting out there. Or vice versa, it might be that something that you don't think has a high degree of news intent, but Google shows the top stories box and results in regular search results from publishers, which means, hey, this might actually be an opportunity for us to also achieve some rankings. So it's very important to actually do some searches on Google and see what actually turns up. And also to understand who your actual competitors are. And it can be quite challenging to go up against big name competitors who have massive SEO teams and a lot of investment in optimizing the presence on search. The best way to compete with the big outlets is to become a niche publisher yourself. Google likes ranking publishers that are focused on specific topics and provide in-depth content on a relatively small set of topics. So providing that sort of an experience towards Google and establishing yourself as an expert publisher on a niche set of topics is usually a very effective way to be able to compete with big publishers when it comes to big news stories or topics that are specifically relevant to your output as a company. It's very hard to compete with the big media outlets on every single topic. So you sort of have to pick your battles and see, right, what do we as a publisher want to be known for? What kind of topics do we want to rank for? And then make sure that you really focus on those and provide the best quality journalism, the best quality content on those specific topics. Now, looking at the tools that you can use to perform that competitive research, there are some tools out there that are specifically focused on the search market. These have different indexes where they look at the visibility of websites based on a certain amount of keywords and where websites rank for those keywords. One of my favorites is Sistrix. I use Sistrix a lot. I see that the search visibility indexes correlate pretty well with visibility in actual Google search results. Other alternatives are Semrush. They have a pretty decent visibility index. So do Ahrefs. And of course, this is where Similarweb probably has a bit of an advantage over the search indexes because Similarweb looks at all traffic, not just search traffic. With Similarweb, you tend to get a better idea of all the different traffic sources that lead to a website. And you can compare your own traffic to that of some of your close competitors to see, right, we may be stronger in search, but they are stronger in social media. And that can lead you to all kinds of interesting lessons to learn to optimize your own output, not just in search, which we'll be talking about today, but also in other channels to see what you can learn from your rivals and see if you can compete more effectively in those areas. Next slide, please. Then, of course, it's very important to optimize your content for the right keywords. Now, increasingly, Google has moved away from ranking web pages based purely on keywords. They're more talking about topics, but keyword research Keyword research is basically still important because it's also topic research. It's understanding what your audience is actually trying to find on the web, what they're typing into Google, and the kind of content that they're looking for. Some of the easiest pitfalls you can do, especially if you're a niche publisher, is to focus too much on insider lingo, on terminology that is unique to your industry that the general audience might not necessarily have an awareness of. So that's why keyword research can be very valuable because it tells you what your audience is actually typing into Google, what they're actually looking for, so that you can make sure your content aligns with that. Of course, in the context of news and publishing, classic keyword research is probably not the best approach because that's historic keyword data, whereas news is very fast-moving and something that's popular today might not even have existed yesterday. News stories in general have an optimal ranking window of about 48 hours, especially in the, in the top stories box on Google search results. Although you do tend to see some older content in there, but especially for moving news stories, you tend to have a fairly small window of opportunity to rank your content in there, which means you have to get your optimization right the moment you publish your article. You need to make sure that your content is optimized for the right keywords the moment you publish it, because you don't necessarily get an opportunity to tweak that later down the line and fix your mistake. You get one chance at it. So it's right to get that in place the moment you click on publish. And the output, it's not just the quality of your output, also the volume of output tends to be rewarded well by Google. Google tends to prefer publishers that have a fairly decent amount of articles published every single day, especially on a fairly narrow set of topics, which again tends to favor the big media outlets. So you need to make sure you have the resources in place as a publisher to produce enough content to satisfy Google's demands. Whereas with evergreen content, which is content outside of the news cycle, more like guides, how-to articles, the top 10 lists, that sort of thing, you have a lot more flexibility in changing things later down the line. In fact, it's encouraged to update those articles regularly every couple of months to make sure that they're still up to date and they're not necessarily dependent on the news cycle. You can aim for long-term rankings in regular search results outside of the news ecosystem. And again, you need to make sure that it aligns with people's search behavior, what they're actually looking for. And like I said, you have a bit more flexibility in tweaking the headline and tweaking the on-page optimization there because you're not limited to that short ranking window that you have in news-specific rankings. The tools that we tend to use for keyword research, there's some suite tools that have multiple opportunities. Again, Similarweb here, very, very useful because they have that real-time data on what people are actually doing on the web. The other suites like Sistrix, Semrush, Ahrefs also have very good Keyword research modules associated with them. Google Trends is a free tool that you can use. It's incredibly powerful, although it has its most potential in English-speaking countries. Outside of that, some of the real-time trends aren't necessarily as useful or not even present sometimes. But Google Trends, for example, you have the real-time search trends that you can subscribe to and get email updates from in a lot of different countries. So you get automatic emails from Google about the new trending searches that are happening. Right now. Also, just, you know, especially for evergreen, Google suggests, Google autocomplete, what Google automatically suggests as searches and automatically completes your searches to, is also useful because that is based on actual user data and actual queries that people type into Google. So that's a very quick way to double-check what people are actually typing into Google, what they're actually searching for. And you will see on most Google search results, you also have that people also ask ask box, but there's questions relating to the topic you just typed in. And those again are aligned with what people actually search for. So that's a very useful source of information as well that can trigger you to create content specifically for those questions. AnswerThePublic is a really good tool that you can use that automates the scraping of those Google Complete and Google related searches as well. So you don't have to manually do that for every single search. You can have a tool like AnswerThePublic do that for you. And same with also ask.com. Also a tool that scrapes Google's People Also Ask suggestions from search results and can do that at scale for you. So it's a very good way to get that data out of Google fairly, fairly quickly. And then we're talking about real-time insights, which is useful, especially for news desks. Again, this is one of the areas where news is different from regular SEO because real-time analytics is not useful in most contexts except for news publishers. News publishers need to know how how their articles are performing every minute of every single day. That top stories visibility is incredibly valuable for news publishers, but it can change from one minute to the next, which means you need to be aware when your story drops out of top stories, or if there is a top stories box somewhere on a popular topic that you could write content for where you're not showing up. There are some specialized tools that can help you with that. And it's also a good way to see, right, what's happening on any given article. Are we very heavily reliant on search for these traffic to these stories? Do we have good presence on social media? And it allows you also to prepare your content workflows in preparation for specific events like the Olympics that are happening or product launches that Apple is doing or whatever it is. So that you can see, right, we have a certain content output that we're going to prepare for whatever is happening. And with real-time insights, you see, right, is this actually working, or do we need to adjust it on the flow and see, do we need to adapt it and generate different content? Next slide, please. The tools that you can use for real-time insights— there are a few tools that are specialized Google News monitoring tools. NewsDash and News Dashboard are the 2 main ones for monitoring rankings in top stories and Google News. Both of them offer similar functionality and features based on that. And there's some good real-time analytics performance packages out there as well. Marfeel Compass is a really good one that was launched fairly recently. The classics, Chartbeat and Parsley, always very popular to monitor your real-time performance of your articles. And if you use Google Analytics on your website, there's a free tool called the Real-Time Content Insights that you can use and plug in your Google Analytics account to, and it creates a dashboard for you. To show you exactly which articles on your website are performing and how users are progressing through your website and where they are coming from. So let's talk about how you actually optimize news articles. And you will see that there's a slightly different emphasis here compared to classic SEO, where it's all about title tags and on-page content. With news articles, the emphasis is a little bit different. So first, we are talking about the headline. The article headline is not the same as the title. It's the visible headline on the page. That is probably the single most important ranking factor for a news story in Google's news ecosystem. And it's important that that article headline mentions the keyword, mentions the topic that you want to rank for. You can't be too cryptic about that. You need to be fairly explicit, fairly clear, and use the right phrasing of that keyword completely in the headline. And when you talk about a politician, for example, it's recommended to use the full name like Joe Biden rather than just Biden, so that Google understands exactly who you're talking about. And there's no ambiguity about who it is that the article is about. Second, then we're talking about the actual article content. Of course, the opening paragraph is very important. So you want to sort of summarize the article a little bit and set the tone and the context for the rest of the story. And there's a minimum content requirement that Google has set of 80 words. Personally, I think 80 is probably a little bit on the thin side as well. I'd say if you can do 200 words as a minimum, you're probably better off so that Google recognizes it as a valid news article. Third, we're then talking about the images, especially in Google Discover. You want to make sure that you have a good headline image, a banner image that Google can show in the Discover feed, which means it has to be 1,200 pixels wide and have a 16:9 aspect ratio. And fourth, the article URL is also very important. You want to include the topic of the article again, the keyword of the article in the URL. The URL doesn't have to mirror the headline. You can have a slightly different URL. You see this with some publishers who really stretch the headline— sorry, stretch the URL and put a lot more keywords in the URL than they have in the headline, because they're not really tied to having a coherent sentence in the URL. You can just have a string of keywords as your URL, and it will help the relevancy of the article a little bit. And then, of course, we're talking about building long-term value in Google's ecosystem. This is a part of SEO for publishers that mirrors classic SEO, where it's all about long-term tactics and long-term value. You will not see very quick wins there. It's more about building those authority and trust signals that Google wants to see, so it can rely on you as a publisher and rank you in search results. First, it all starts with your top navigation. Your top navigation links are basically the signposts that tell the world, including Google, this is what we write about. These are the topics that we cover as a publisher. So you want to make sure that your top nav links are well crafted and clearly indicate your specialties as a news outlet. And it's not just a generic box like, here is news, because that's meaningless. You have to sort of use your top navigation as a banner that tells the world, this is what we're publishing about. And second, we're talking about the tags that you use, article tags, very important tagging and categorization in general of articles. Again, it's a very good way to tell Google that these are our editorial specialties. This is the content that we specialize in and the topics that we cover regularly as a publisher. Third, then we're talking about internal linking. This aligns a bit with tagging because you can link from entire site and article to specific tag and section pages to empower those pages and tell Google that yes, we are strong on these topics. But also you're gonna use links to other related articles, of course, as well, because those tend to increase engagement. And Google sees engagement signals as a positive sign that you're a publisher that people want to engage with and want to read content from. And fourth, we see an increasing emphasis on the quality of your output, both in terms of the content itself and of the publication as a whole. And Google has found ways to algorithmically determine these quality signals. We call them EAT: expertise, authoritativeness, and trust. And this is about content quality and about transparency, transparency of authorship and transparency of ownership, so that Google understands that this is a real website with real content published by real people who are experts in their field and owned by an organization that is committed to proper journalistic output. And there's no ill motive behind the scenes there to try and game Google's algorithms and produce disinformation. And like with all things in life, it's all about doing the little things right over a long period of time. The concept of the aggregation of marginal gains is that every single thing that you do slightly better means it adds a cumulative effect to your overall performance over a long period of time. Doing nothing is the same as creating declines, really. So doing nothing is a downward line, whereas you want to make sure you're on a constant steady upward line of making small tweaks and improvements. It's very rare to find like a There's no magic bullet that is suddenly going to explode your traffic in the short term. You're going to have to do the small things better over a long period of time to get on that upward trajectory and have that flywheel of improvement where you can see the payoffs in the long term. And that's really all that I have, and I think we're open to questions now.
Thank you, Barry.
Thank you.
I just wanted to jump in really quickly. I noticed that there were a couple of hands being raised during the presentation. Wouldn't mind putting your questions into Q&A. I'm going to invite Stephanie and Rafael, who are our moderators on this panel, to jump in with, I think, some of the questions that we've been receiving. I'm actually going to start with one while we, while we do that compilation. with all these different tools, tasks that a publisher could be doing, I mean, everyone's got limited resources. What do you do first? Which one is gonna be the most impactful?
I think because of the fast-moving nature of news, for most publishers, providing, you know, your content is already being indexed by Google, that's of course the first hurdle you have to clear. You want to focus on improving your headlines and improving your on-page SEO. That's usually the quickest win that you can do. Just, you know, making your headlines more descriptive and focusing a bit on keywords and your headlines. Some other quick tactics usually involve good internal linking to tag pages and to other articles. And after that, you know, maybe you want to dig into some of the performance on your website. That's not necessarily a quick win, especially when it comes to potential technical issues the website might have, but the payoffs could be quite significant if you manage to improve your user user experience on your website. But yeah, start with editorial SEO, start by writing better headlines, having, you know, good internal linking and good tagging on your articles. That tends to be the quickest win and also the one that tends to build the most value over time.
That's great.
I'm actually gonna stop sharing my screen so we can actually see your face, Barry, as we're chatting. Stephanie and Rafael, do you guys have any questions that have through on the chat that you wanted to raise?
Yeah, Jackie, we are receiving several questions. We have one here from Luigi that says, hi Barry, based on your analysis, what would you say is an ideal length for an article that you see working well in the news?
How long is a piece of string? In my experience, 400 to 500 words tends to be really good for a news story. Although I have seen longer articles than that perform really well as well. Shorter articles, They can work. Like I said, 200 words is sort of a minimum for an article to get any sort of traction in Google's news ecosystem. But if you aim for 400 or 500 words, 400 words, 500 words, you tend to be on the good side of Google's ranking systems.
We have here another question from Oded. For article tagging, should the tag page URLs be indexed by Google?
Yes, they absolutely should. If Google can't index tag pages, it doesn't know they exist. So I see some publishers that deliberately prevent Google from crawling and indexing tag pages. And that's a mistake because then Google doesn't recognize those tags as being part of your website. And so it doesn't have any value that it can get from those tag pages. The reason why a lot of publishers don't index their tag pages is because they have too many tag pages. And it's huge crawl overhead and index overhead for Google. But that's a different problem. That means you need to be smart about using tags. That means fewer tag pages and smarter tags. Smart pagination of tag pages rather than just blocking Google from crawling all your tag pages, because that will harm your topical expertise in Google's eyes. So it's about finding that golden medium and controlling the process of creating and managing your tags properly so that there's a good number, not too few, not too many. But also don't underestimate Google's ability to crawl your website effectively. Google says that if your website is under 1 million URLs, you generally don't have to worry too much about crawl optimization. In my experience, the moment you hit 100,000 URLs plus, you want to put a little bit of emphasis on crawl optimization. But I do tend to agree with Google that once you get to 1 million plus URLs, then crawl budget becomes more of an issue you need to manage. And even then, you know, Google is fairly smart about where it crawls and where it focuses its crawl effort. So don't be afraid to have hundreds of thousands of tag pages if your website site can cater to them and you have a broad enough scope as a publisher to have those pages.
Perfect. Guys, we have a lot of questions. So I think we will ask one last question and we will make sure to answer all of them in private. Okay. The last question that I have for now is where can I find some base metrics to know if my numbers are Should I improve some things like benchmarks, and which should be the main KPIs?
Very good question. I think a tool like Similarweb is a great place to start because you can see where you're doing compared to your competitors. Who do you see as your main rivals, and how are they performing? You know, a tool like Similarweb will tell you that where you are versus your competitors on all the different channels, on search, on social, on email, etc. So that's a very good benchmark right there in terms of the clicks that you get and whether or not you are performing to, you know, the standard that your competitors are setting, because you're sort of working in a competitive landscape there. The main metrics, it, you know, we're still running businesses here. Even the best journalistic outlet, with maybe the exception of the BBC, who's publicly funded, page views are the metric that you win by because those relate to ad impressions. And ad impressions tend to pay the bill unless you have a paywall, in which case it's more about subscriptions and the amount of page impressions isn't necessarily important. So whatever KPI you choose, make sure it aligns with your business goals. If you're advertising funded, it's about ad impressions, i.e., page views. If you are a paywall publisher, you need to make sure that you have a high conversion rate from page views to subscribers. So the conversion rate and the subscriptions that you get off the back of that is much more important. Don't know if you want to add anything to that, Jackie.
No, I mean, I think that was a great note to end this webinar on, short and sweet. Really, again, Barry, thank you so much for your time. This is super, super insightful, super helpful. For anyone whose questions we weren't able to answer live on the webinar, we'll make sure to get those over to Barry and we'll circulate those responses offline. As always, anytime you would like to connect with Similarweb, please check out our site. We'll also be sending around a recording of this particular webinar. Thank you so much to everyone, and hopefully we will have a chance to get together again soon.
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