I’m truly a news buff and enjoy learning about what’s going on in the world. My iPhone has 20+ bookmarks for reputable news websites that I frequent, and I find myself waking up to a steady flow of information. While getting my fix the other day, I realized that most news sites have very poor SEO, which is a major downfall and tremendously hurts traffic.

The way I look at it, if a news organization spends millions of dollars on journalists, editors, office space, marketing and other costs associated with doing business, why not squeeze the most out of content? Why wordsmith top notch articles if they’ll simply be lost on the Internet due to lousy SEO? Time to step it up.
After doing some digging and taking notes, I was surprised to see that 8 out of the top 10 news websites simply ignore SEO. Articles aren’t titled properly and most important of all, meta titles are ignored. Attaching an SEO-friendly meta title to an article can be done in the blink of an eye, so why not do it?
I believe the problem stems from a gap in the flow of content. News websites must have in-house SEO consultants to review content before being pushed live, but that doesn’t appear to be happening. It’s quite unfortunately and will hopefully be rectified in the future.
In conclusion, by ignoring SEO best practices, news organizations are losing ground and allowing potential website visitors to find competitor websites first. Losing traffic, when you really think about it, means losing money since advertisers pay top dollar for placement on the most popular, high traffic websites. If traffic tanks, income from advertisers will follow suit.
Aaron Schoenberger
The Brainchild Group