Meet Some Rebels

You Can Be One Too, Click Below To Get Started
Start a Free Trial
Request a Demo
Introducing Social UX for Media Learn More >
Rebel Insights

RebelMouse's Active Core Web Vitals Monitoring System

In the competitive digital landscape, providing a top-notch user experience on your website is critical to standing out and attracting your target audience. This is where Core Web Vitals (CWV) come into play. CWV are the essential metrics defined by Google that focus on the speed, responsiveness, and visual stability of a web page. At RebelMouse, we specialize in CWV verification and optimization services to ensure that your website not only meets these vital performance thresholds, but also exceeds them.

Performance Specialist Team and Constant Training for Our Platform Engineers

Our dedication to exceptional website performance is led by a team of performance specialists. They focus on continuous research and development to implement the best coding practices and create smart solutions aimed at improving CWV metrics. With deep expertise in web development, optimization techniques, and performance testing, our specialists ensure that our clients benefit from the latest advancements in web performance.

This team establishes guidelines and provides ongoing mandatory training for our entire Platform Engineering team, ensuring that every developer working on our clients' sites is well equipped to help them maintain optimal performance.

Internal Monitoring Process

RebelMouse's daily Core Web Vitals monitoring tool

A dashboard overview used daily by the our team to keep CWV metrics across our vast site network front and center.

With a focus on simplicity and accessibility, we've implemented an easy-to-use system to monitor our clients' performance metrics. By collecting data daily from Google CrUX reports in conjunction with our proprietary Core Web Vitals monitoring system, RebelMouse Performance Monitoring (RPM), we track the key metrics efficiently.

Our process is streamlined, using a straightforward dashboard overview that aggregates results from both sources, identifies potential issues, and triggers predefined actions:

  • For clients where we fully manage their Layout & Design Tool experience, we automatically check our project management system to ensure that any issues that've popped up are already ticketed for review and resolution.
  • For clients who use their own developers to manage their Layout & Design Tool experience, we maintain a proactive approach, promptly communicating any new issues to the respective client directly for review and resolution.

What Triggers the Monitoring Process?

Core Web Vitals results in a spreadsheet

Our performance monitoring system continuously analyzes Core Web Vitals across all of clients' websites. When a score drops below our predefined performance thresholds, an alert triggers an automated process.

  1. The system checks our project management system to see if a ticket already exists for the issue.
  2. If not, a new ticket is created and assigned to the appropriate project manager.
  3. The ticket will detail the performance issue, and serves as a task list for our development team to work through to implement the necessary fixes.
  4. We don’t just assume it’s fixed though! Our team follows up, checking the scores to ensure that we’ve actually seen an improvement in performance.

That whole process, from spotting the problem to getting it fixed and evaluating the results, is how we keep our clients’ websites running smooth and fast. It’s a team effort, and we’re all in it together!

Interested in learning more about how we evaluate and solve Core Web Vitals issues to drive better business outcomes? Contact us today and we'll be happy to discuss your current digital setup and how we can help.

Behind the Scenes: The internal Core Web Vitals monitoring system that keeps our clients ahead

RebelMouse Security Update: October 2024

At RebelMouse, security is our top priority. We’ve made substantial investments to ensure that our platform stands out as one of the most secure CMS solutions on the market. And in that vein, a year ago we committed to being SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, and we're happy to say that we are now fully SOC 2 Type 2 compliant.

SOC 2 Type 2 compliance covers an organization’s controls and operating effectiveness with regard to data security, processing, integrity, privacy, and availability, and committing to this process has been a wonderful match for our security-and-process-minded culture.

We stay ahead of emerging threats by continuously refining our processes across both our business and our software platform, enhancing our codebase, and integrating cutting-edge security technologies at every turn. By regularly updating our software libraries and leveraging advanced tools, we ensure that our clients and their data are always protected.

Our security measures include using GitHub and Amazon Web Services’ tools to proactively detect and address vulnerabilities. In addition, Drata’s security and compliance automation platform helps us maintain the highest standards of protection and regulatory compliance.

Since the start of 2024, we have dedicated over 2,000 hours toward security improvements, 270 hours for SecOps enhancements, resolved 500 tickets, and involved 14 developers and DevOps engineers in the process. Those updates affected 18 microservices. We’ve also updated and adopted 23 internal policies to align with industry standards, further strengthening our commitment to security.

By using our platform, clients can eliminate the need for an in-house IT department to handle security concerns, enjoying the peace of mind that comes with knowing that their CMS is always secure and up to date.

How Journalists Can Use AI: Add Context Based on Archives

A custom-built chatbot based on Raw Story's archives is an essential tool for their newsroom

In an era when misinformation can be rampant around the web, it’s so important to have trusted sources you can turn to for accurate news. One of the most credible sources, that you know you can trust, is quite simply your own team.

John Byrne, founder and CEO of Raw Story, approached us with an interesting idea. He wanted to build an AI editorial tool from the ground up that was based on their content archives. The independent news website, which recently turned 20 years old, is based on delivering news and insights at the breakneck speed of today’s political news cycle. It’s endless. Time is of the essence, as new content is pushed out constantly, so becoming more efficient is really important to their team.

Enter the AI chatbot that our team built in partnership with them. Trained on more than 300,000 posts in their archives, it has encyclopedic knowledge of political events, important people, key organizations, and mainstay topics over the past two decades. It has the ability to write up high-quality background on issues that Raw Story has previously covered, all in a fraction of the time it would take someone to do the research.

AI chatbot provides Raw Story stories about Kamala Harris with links The chatbot in action, linking to the most relevant stories about a specific person.

“It’s best at generating more background copy, and historical information, that we can put into breaking news to make it longer, more cohesive, and more understandable for our readers,” said Raw Story Executive Editor Adam Nichols.

It’s not only based on the text of Raw Story’s articles, it’s much more intelligent than that. It has authors completely indexed, so you can search for content written by a specific journalist. It has publish dates for every article, so you can set timeline filters to find the exact context you need. It provides links to stories in Raw Story’s archive, so it’s a copy and a paste away for better linking of all of their content together in a smart way. And, of course, this is Raw Story — it builds upon itself nearly in real time. You can search for relevant content from today, or this week.

It is conversation-based and extremely intuitive, so it knows the ways it can best help an editor or writer on the fly.

  • Need to add background to a breaking news story? Easy.
  • Looking for context on that court ruling today? Simple.
  • Trying to build a timeline of events for a complex issue or topic? Done.
  • Seeking links to improve the reader experience? Sure.
  • Want to proofread an article and make suggestions for improvements? All set.

Has it been useful in accomplishing the goals they set out for it? “Unquestionably,” said Nichols. “It is accurate and it is very easy to edit down.”

AI chatbot surfaces key news about climate change in the last week on Raw Story along with links The chatbot has a sense of time so that the most relevant links and background information are surfaced.

Between its assistance with copyediting and adding context, Nichols estimates that the tool cuts out a solid five-to-six minutes for Raw Story’s editorial process, which in the minute-by-minute political world in which they race to beat competitors, is extremely significant. “Quite substantial,” he said.

Byrne said that one use case he’s seen is utilizing the bot instead of Google Search to quickly find content Raw Story has previously written. It identifies the right links and context for newer stories.

“It does a better job of taking all the articles together, condensing it to a short thing, and giving you the background,” he said.

It’s a great editor, too.

“It helps speed up the editing process by correcting grammar in a more sophisticated way than tools have before,” Byrne added.

All in all, it makes the team at Raw Story much more efficient.

If you’re interested in building an AI-powered chatbot like it for your own editorial team, get in touch with us! We can help you with exactly this kind of solution to turbocharge your team and improve efficiency.

Rebel Insights

Threads’ Unremarkable Problem

Meta launched Threads in response to the spiraling catastrophe of Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. It quickly grew to 175 million active users and has become a significant new social platform for Meta. But where does Threads go next? And will it last in the long run?

We keep all of our clients modern through our cloud-based CMS solution, and so integrating with the Threads API as soon as it became available was a no-brainer. We encouraged all of our clients to immediately create and promote their Threads channels. Some of our clients, including George Takei, became very popular very quickly on Threads. It’s an important social platform and it increasingly can drive real traffic and audiences.

So we shared with our product team all of the API details for the Threads integration. We already have beautiful support integrated into our platform for creators and editors to publish to all of the usual distribution channels and win at organic SEO. Our next product update will add a “Publish to Threads” option to live alongside the Facebook, Instagram, and other social-sharing options that users have become accustomed to.

During the course of that planning, our engineering team immediately asked why we didn’t have work planned to support optimized embeds of Threads content the way we do with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and others. That turned out to be a really interesting moment of extra analysis that our strategy team performed. Nobody, it turns out, is embedding Threads content anywhere. None of us are finding Threads in media stories, and none of the Threads content being created is sparking new stories at all. While Mark Cuban and Elon Musk play out the good guy vs. bad guy superhero roles on Twitter, Threads marches along as an entirely unremarkable ecosystem.

Meta Threads trending topics Trending topics in the Threads app yields largely benign, uncontroversial content.

Meta explicitly stated that by launching Threads, the company wanted to own a text-based social network, but they also wanted to avoid the fighting, trolling, and warring that had become an intrinsic part of Twitter’s DNA. And so the Threads algorithm has spent a year rewarding soft content instead. It’s surprisingly easy to quit Threads because there is so little that’s addictive about the content itself. The algorithm has made the experience explicitly unremarkable.

This leaves space for a company that’s ready to take on the real town square of the world’s conversations. One that is moderated, intelligent, and is built to amplify the most sophisticated and evolved viewpoints of any debate.

The State of Core Web Vitals, INP, and Organic SEO in 2024

RebelMouse has been dedicated to being the highest-performing CMS across Core Web Vitals metrics since 2021, when Google signaled the importance it would have on ranking impact and organic traffic. By the fall of 2023, the introduction of INP as a new Core Web Vitals measurement was clear. Unfortunately, being able to test against it was very difficult. Understanding its full impact was even harder.

In March 2024, when INP was officially released, we knew within hours of the update that it was going to be an extremely hard moment for the web. By the time the data came in from Google CrUX reports 45 days later, the confirmation was in. INP had hurt everyone’s performance scores significantly. RebelMouse’s massive advantage across Core Web Vitals was turned into a slight advantage. So, just as we did in 2021, we settled in to start doing some very hard and focused engineering.

Entirely new tools to analyze the problem were built from scratch. We developed something the engineering team here called INP-Zilla — a library that would deeply understand JavaScript callback behaviors and optimize performance.

HTTP Archive Core Web Vitals chart showing the performance of Adobe Experience Manager, Arc XP, Contentful, Drupal, RebelMouse, and WordPress RebelMouse leads the enterprise CMS space when it comes to meeting and exceeding Google's expectations for its Core Web Vitals benchmarks.

We are very proud that the work we performed this year has given us the same type of separation from the pack that we had established back in 2021, and that all of our clients who chose us years ago were able to stay focused on their content and the customization of their product instead of spending multiple quarters’ worth of engineering work to address technical debt created by the fast evolution of the web.

INP Is going to be very hard for other technology providers to fix. Their scores have simply not improved like ours have. Solving INP means being able to understand complex JavaScript behaviors elegantly, and most engineering teams will find themselves overwhelmed to find the time to address this while delivering the rest of their goals.

In the meantime, the latest core updates from Google have clearly prioritized technical SEO one level further. In the competition between two articles that are both very well written, the article with better technical performance and user experience is winning now.

So, come win with us.

How The Fulcrum Grew SEO Traffic With a Blueprint Redesign

Focus on user experience and fast performance leads to impressive results

The Fulcrum continues to grow, thanks to a redesign of their website that improves technical SEO and an editorial focus on establishing itself as an authority on a key trending topic in U.S. politics.

Just a few months after we shared how this publisher is following a digital media playbook for growth, we collaborated with their team to launch a redesign on July 1, 2024 and made a concerted effort on a “Project 2025” content series. In the four weeks since, they’ve seen remarkable growth, including a 46% increase in Google Search clicks, and 120% increase in Google News clicks.

chart showing growth in traffic for The Fulcrum after a Blueprint redesign with RebelMouse

The redesign emphasized speed and performance, and no doubt helped with SEO so that their Project 2025 work could reach a larger audience. It is based on our new Publisher Blueprints, born out of thousands of hours of research, development, and best practices, and fully optimized for fast performance and the best user experience possible. They also incorporate design recommendations from the Google News Initiative.

David Nevins quote on The Fulcrum redesign

The Fulcrum has also seen more Google Discover traffic since the redesign than the previous four months combined! It’s an incredibly encouraging trajectory, especially with the 2024 U.S. Election on the horizon, which The Fulcrum will be covering closely.

While the redesign helped position The Fulcrum for SEO wins, the publisher has done an excellent job articulating a major issue of the election season: Project 2025. They’re approaching the coverage in an all-hands-on-deck, non-partisan way. We worked together with the publisher, identifying this as a huge opportunity after the SEO success of their initial piece, “Project 2025 is a threat to democracy.” The Fulcrum's co-publishers David L. Nevins and Kristina Becvar turned that feedback into an informative series, and they’re constantly adding fresh content.

As the publisher states on individual articles, they are exploring the issue with a lens that “relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.” It's a unique approach with comprehensive analysis.

All of the Project 2025 content comes together with a can’t-miss “Project 2025” banner at the top of the site that lands users on the latest stories. This appears across their site.

Project 2025 highlighted in navigation of The Fulcrum website

Revamped Taxonomy

BEFORE:

AFTER:

elections menu item highlighted in navigation of The Fulcrum website

Let’s dive into some nuances of the redesign. Previously, nearly everything was lumped together under a “News & Opinion” menu. Now, as a part of the redesign, there is a clear and logical taxonomy broken into five buckets that vastly improves the user experience and the crawling process for SEO. It emphasizes the topics that The Fulcrum most frequently covers and organizes it all in a dynamic way that can be updated based on current events.

For example, it is a presidential election year in the United States and that is at the forefront of a lot of what The Fulcrum is writing about, so “Elections” are given prime importance in their navigation bar with breakouts into Election 2024, Electoral Reforms, and Money & Politics. Other content is rolled into the categories of Governance, Pluralism, Principles, and Trending. The “Trending” category in particular is a fun one as it includes Artificial Intelligence and Pop Culture.

Perfect Core Web Vitals

The user experience was vastly improved with The Fulcrum’s redesign, the site is super fast and responsive, as we used the following tactics to optimize for Core Web Vitals:

  • Ultra-light JavaScript application; cleaned and optimized CSS and HTML
  • Smart caching rules
  • GZIP compression, which reduces file sizes by up to 85%
  • A progressive web app (PWA) and a smart page load strategy
    • Blueprints preload fonts and load images ahead of time for certain screen sizes depending on network speeds
    • Ads and other key resources load right after the critical elements

More Appealing Section Pages

Sections like Pop Culture have a wonderful new look. Instead of putting so much prominence on a single article and nothing else, like the old design, a lead story is in the spotlight, while other recently written articles have quick headlines and images along the side. Popular stories in the section are just a slight scroll down — look, there’s Taylor Swift. This is much more appealing for user experience, as it’s easier to browse more content and make a choice on what you’d like to learn more about.

Enhanced Author Pages

The beautiful new author pages are much more pleasing to the eye, going beyond the bio with new-look icons unified in design and calling attention to more stories with headlines and images. It’s also easier to get to other sections of the site with the improved navigation bar, and the newsletter call-out at the top right helps to increase subscriptions.

Plus, on article pages, you can now hover over an author name for more details about them:

Home Page Based on Categories

Before the redesign, the home page was an endless scroll of articles. The redesign introduced strips of content based on categories, allowing users to quickly consume many more headlines and images across content categories and make an informed choice on what they would like to learn more about.

Mobile-First Design

mobile view of The Fulcrum blueprint redesign

The new design puts a focus on mobile with more content available on the page, clear calls to action (such as a “Sign Me Up” red button promoting the newsletter), and beautiful images.

Would you like to see how our new Blueprints could supercharge your own website? Reach out today to get started!

From Launch to SEO Growth: Best Local Things Case Study

How 50 websites turned into one with a safe migration and boost in SEO

Let’s be clear at the outset: This was a complex migration. The task was to merge 50 existing websites into a single new website called Best Local Things for AmericanTowns Media. Whether it was perfecting the taxonomy, properly importing the data, setting up redirects for a seamless transition, or finding ways to tie everything together, this was an extremely unique project and it required all hands on deck to get the job done.

Constant communication, a well-defined plan, and making sure no stone was left unturned were all a part of the recipe for success. It wouldn’t have been possible without the leadership, dedication to excellence, and partnership mentality from Jim Maglione, Ed Panian, and Bekim Sejdic at AmericanTowns Media.

Ed Panian quote on successful website migration

“It was a continuous journey of improvements from start to finish. The constant feedback from the client was incredibly valuable and really helped the team to stay on track,” said RebelMouse Account Manager Carolina Ramirez. “We truly collaborated as partners, and the results we're seeing are a testament to that teamwork.”

The efforts were worth it. The results speak for themselves.

Best Local Things new home page with map

We have a beautiful new website that we can all be proud of, with top-notch Core Web Vitals, exceptional technical SEO, fast performance, and a seamless user experience — plus we’re growing traffic and revenue, and this is just the beginning.

“Their team's deep involvement provided valuable insights and feedback, which was crucial to our success,” added RebelMouse Solutions Architect Vitória Caetano. “Migrating their extensive database of local information required meticulous planning and execution, and it took over a month to finalize a plan. We developed new tools and workflows to ensure a smooth transition, which was a significant achievement for our team.”

It all happened just in time for America’s Independence Day. The site was up and running on June 18, fully redirecting from the old 50 states sites at that point. The growth was spectacular, with localized helpful content available to Americans nationwide as they planned for and subsequently celebrated the Fourth of July.

Even without the Fourth of July, all of the metrics and milestones were very exciting. We normalized the data, and we still saw great results.

Hugely Improved Technical SEO

A Semrush analysis of AmericanTowns Media’s top 15 sites using the old 50-state format revealed an average Site Health Score of 69.5 — ranging from 65 (bestthingsma.com) to 74 (bestthingsmd.com). The new Best Local Things website has a Site Health Score of 86, a dramatic increase. Just like that, there’s now a single site that is set up so much better from a technical SEO perspective that scores well above industry average (which is 77 for both the People & Society and Travel categories, according to Semrush).

Growth in Revenue

As of August 5, here is the list of ad networks and ad partners we have onboarded so far:

  • Google AdX and Google Open Bidding
  • Prebid banner ad networks
    • AppNexus
    • OpenX
    • Magnite
    • AMX
    • Criteo
    • Next Millennium
    • ADYOULIKE
    • Media.net
    • Amazon
    • Undertone
    • Infolinks
  • Recommended content
    • Outbrain
  • Video outstream
    • Aniview

We are highly focused on improving ad performance, since the website is growing so fast. Here is how our optimizations are affecting user RPM (revenue per 1,000 users).

Best Local Things revenue growth

Looking at the time frame of July 5–August 3 vs. the 30 days prior to the website launch on June 18, 2024 (May 19–June 17), Best Local Things has had an impressive 79% increase in total revenue.

Best Local Things revenue growth

Surge in Traffic

Comparing prelaunch (50 individual sites in aggregate) to post launch (one site), traffic increased by more than 150% over the course of the first month. That includes a 151% increase in page views, 173% increase in total users, and 183% increase in sessions. This is a tremendous accomplishment. This also excludes the viral peaks of July 3 and 4, so it’s truly impressive.

Best Local Things SEO growth

“Seeing our efforts translate into tangible benefits for their users was incredibly gratifying,” said Caetano.

Safe Migration

If you go to https://bestthingsct.com, one of the old state sites, you redirect to the proper destination on the new site: https://bestlocalthings.com/ct. Each state receives its own subfolder within the new domain. Similarly, if you try to visit an article on one of the old sites, such as “The Best Places for Crab in Connecticut” (https://bestthingsct.com/crab-restaurants), you’re simply and safely redirected to the correct page URL on the new site: https://bestlocalthings.com/ct/crab-restaurants. This made sure that existing link juice was properly passed from the old site to the new one, and there are no 404s or poor experiences when users are trying to access a page on one of the old sites.

Jim Maglione from AmericanTowns Media on working with RebelMouse

Total Team Effort

Many people were involved from both the RebelMouse and AmericanTowns Media teams to make this migration and launch a success. Just have a look:

AmericanTowns Media and RebelMouse teams part of website migration and SEO growth for Best Local Things
Bekim Sejdic from AmericanTowns Media on migration success

Want to see how RebelMouse can give your site a boost? Reach out today to get started!

Rebel Insights

Planning to Live Blog the Next Major Event? Here’s What to Expect for Engaged Time, Recirculation, and Traffic Sources

This article was originally posted on the Chartbeat blog. Chartbeat’s real-time content analytics, historical dashboards, and optimization tools help the world’s leading media organizations understand, measure, and build business value from their content.

Whether it’s unexpected breaking news like severe weather or one of the many elections planned across the world this year, readers will be looking for real-time coverage, and the best format for quick and efficient updates is the live blog.

In just the past year, live blogs kept readers up to date on top stories such as the Titan submersible and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. When breaking news events unfold over the course of hours or days, live blogs keep readers informed and engaged at the speed of news.

Because their style and substance differ from traditional articles, we wanted to see if there was a marked difference in core metrics as well. To do so, we analyzed live blogs published in 2023 across 35 large news and media sites primarily in the United States. Here’s what we found.

Average Engaged Time for Live Blogs

Made with Flourish

In 2023, Average Engaged Time for all content in our network was 28 seconds. When we isolate live blogs during the same period, median Average Engaged Time jumps to 48 seconds.

While some live blogs engaged readers for an average of 85 seconds, 50% of the sites we analyzed for this study fell between 34 and 63 seconds.

Decoding the Visual

To show the distribution of these values, we’re using box-and-whisker plots. The top and bottom edges of the box represent the 75th and 25th percentile values, and the horizontal line within the box represents the median.

Distribution of Traffic Sources for Live Blogs

Made with Flourish

When we compare the distribution of traffic for live blogs to that of all content, we see a similar pattern with the exception of social.

In traffic, engagement, and loyalty research from 2023, we found that pageviews from social had declined to 12% of total pageviews. With live blogs, however, 75% of sites in our study averaged at least 14% of traffic from social and the median was 22%.

Recirculation for Live Blogs

Made with Flourish

In a previous study on recirculation, we found that news and media sites had a recirculation rate of 11%, less than sites with narrower focuses like finance or sports. With live blogs on news and media sites, we measured a median recirculation rate of 7%. Since readers following live blogs have come to a site for updates on a specific event, it makes sense that they are less likely to move around to other sections and categories. That doesn’t mean that recirculation as well as user experience can’t be improved through tactics like strategic placement of helpful related links.

Takeaways From the Research

While deeply reported articles still garner plenty of traffic and engagement, live blogs are important tools for providing quick updates during breaking news events. Here are three insights to take with you:

  • Readers engage with live blogs longer than other pieces of content. The median Average Engaged Time for large news and media sites was 48 seconds.
  • Social traffic is an important referrer for live blogs. Timely updates mirror the pace of social media and can help connect the conversation off site with coverage on site.
  • Recirculation is lower for live blogs, but audiences spend more time with them, meaning there are more opportunities to link readers to related articles.

Ready to make the most of modern publishing? Request a proposal to take your website to the next level with RebelMouse.

4 Powerful Ways Content Creators Can Leverage Google Trends

In 2024, publishers are feeling the pressure more than ever. The rise of AI and the continuing dominance of Google have made it hard to earn organic traffic and nurture loyal readership. One great way to stay ahead and resonate with your audience is to stay on top of trends.

Google Trends is an invaluable tool for this. It’s a free feature that provides insights into what people are searching for using Google. This includes both historical and real-time data, as well as interests by region. It can help you understand what’s currently popular, identify rising hot topics, and optimize your content strategy.

Here are four easy ways to start incorporating Google Trends into your workflow.

1. Identify Trending Topics to Stay Relevant

One of the best features of Google Trends is that it shows you topics that are trending in real time. By analyzing what topics are creating a buzz, you can create content that is relevant and timely for your audience — hopefully capturing their interest before your competition does.

Here’s how you do it:

  • Explore Trending Searches: Visit the Google Trends home page and explore the “Trending Now” section. This will give you a good idea of what people are searching for.
  • Filter by Category: You can use the category filters to narrow down search results that make sense for your content.
  • Set Alerts: Set up Google Alerts for specific keywords related to your site’s content. You will receive an email when those topics start trending, which will allow you to seize a content opportunity.

Example: If you create content around health and wellness, you can check Google Trends for the latest health topics that are gaining popularity. Then, you can create content around those topics to attract readers who you already know are interested in reading more.

Real-time search trends related to health topics in Google Trends.

2. Optimize Content for Seasonal Trends

Google Trends can also help you identify seasonal trends that you can capitalize on to plan out your content calendar ahead of time. That way you will never miss an opportunity to grab your audience’s attention during seasonal events or trends that will resonate with them all year long.

Here’s how you do it:

  • Analyze Yearly Trends: Use the “Year in Search” feature to see what topics were the most popular in previous years. This will give you a better idea of recurring trends to look out for.
  • Seasonal Keywords: Enter keywords related to your content and analyze their popularity over time. Look for patterns that pique your audience’s interest at different points in the year.
  • Plan Ahead: When you identify trends in your audience’s behavior, you can plan your content accordingly so that you can publish content when interest is at its highest.

Example: If you create content around fitness, you may see a spike in “weight loss workouts” at the beginning of the year when people make New Year’s resolutions. You can plan for this spike in interest and make sure your content is ready to fire when the time is right.

The New Year’s resolution spike for the term “weight loss workouts” is easy to spot using Google Trends.

3. Understand Regional Interests for Targeted Content

Google Trends allows you to see how search interest varies by region. This can be useful if you want to create content that targets readers in specific geographic locations, or if your audience is spread out across different specific areas.

Here’s how you do it:

  • Regional Insights: Enter your desired keywords into Google Trends and look at the regional interest breakdown. This will show you where the topic is the most popular.
  • Localized Content: Create content that is tailored to the interests of your audience in specific regions. This will help you connect more deeply with those targeted audiences and nurture loyalty.
  • Compare Regions: Compare the interest levels between different regions when applicable, and use those insights to identify where you should focus your efforts.

Example: If you create content about food, you may realize that searches for “vegan cooking” is particularly high in certain states or countries, so you can create content about vegan cooking that caters to those specific areas. For instance, if “vegan cooking” searches are high in Oregon, you could create a post about “The Best Vegan Cooking Classes in Oregon.”

The regional breakdown of the search term “vegan cooking” in Google Trends.

4. Brainstorm Other Keywords for SEO

Google Trends is also very useful for brainstorming new keywords to improve your SEO strategy. By exploring related keywords and comparing different search terms, you can identify search phrases that might not be immediately obvious.

Here’s how you do it:

  • Related Queries: Enter a primary keyword into Google Trends and scroll down to the “Related queries” section. This is where you’ll find ideas for additional keywords that people are searching for related to your primary topic.
  • Compare Keywords: Use the “Compare” feature to see how different keywords perform against each other. This can help you identify which keywords have higher search volumes and trends over time.
  • Explore Rising Queries: Pay attention to “Rising” queries, which indicate keywords that are gaining popularity.

Example: If you’re writing about Christmas decorations, entering “Christmas decorations” into Google Trends might show related queries like “at home Christmas decorations,” “Christmas in July decorations,” and “DIY Christmas decorations.” These would all be great ideas for new pieces of content.

Related topics and queries for “Christmas decorations” using the “Rising” filter in Google Trends.

Never Miss an Opportunity for New Content

Google Trends is a powerful tool that can help you stay ahead of the curve, optimize your content calendar, and target your audience more effectively. Creating content in this current, hyper-competitive landscape is harder than ever, and Google Trends is a tool that can make a part of your workflow easier.

However, you need a lot of tools in your toolbox to have a successful content strategy. RebelMouse is a cloud-based, AI-enabled CMS that is built for the modern content era. Our proprietary technology has a robust editorial suite that helps content creators increase visibility across search, site, social, and beyond.

If you want to learn more about Google Trends and give your site a boost in readership, request a demo today and let’s start working together.

New Study: More Than Half of Searches Don’t Leave Google

Publishers are feeling the squeeze across organic search lately, and now there’s data to prove just how much Google’s dominance is growing. A new joint study by SparkToro and Datos analyzed Google Search behavior in 2024 so far, with a focus on what happens after users search.

The study leveraged a multimillion clickstream panel, which means it was able to track the sequence of clicks from millions of users after they started a search query. This data set is more comprehensive because it doesn’t just focus on specific subsets or keywords. Clickstream panels track the entire search journey, which is usually varied and often contains multiple searches that all differ in click behavior.

Click here to read the full insights from SparkToro and Datos’ study.

The data is from users located in the United States and the European Union. Let’s take a look at some of the key insights.

What Happens After Americans Search?

Datos and SparkToro

  • As you can see from the data above, zero-click searches make up 58.5% of mobile and desktop searches in the U.S. This means users aren’t clicking on any results after performing a search.
  • Nearly 30% of clicks direct to Google-owned properties, including YouTube, Google Images, and Google News.
  • For every 1,000 Google searches in the U.S., 360 clicks will go to the open web.

Let’s take a look at how those results compare to searches performed by users in the European Union.

What Happens After Europeans Search?

Datos and SparkToro

  • The data above shows us that zero-click searches are just slightly higher in the EU, with 59.7% of searches not ending in a click.
  • Clicks to the open web are a bit higher in the EU, with 374 clicks out of 1,000 searches leading to properties outside of Google.
  • Clicks to Google-owned properties are lower in the EU, with 24% of clicks ending up on Google’s other platforms.
  • The smaller number of Google-centric clicks could be attributed to the EU’s Digital Markets Act, which reduces traffic to Google-owned properties.

A Snapshot of Google’s Dominance

Datos and SparkToro

The chart above shows organic search clicks to the open web in the U.S. and the EU from 2022 to 2024. Aside from a brief increase in clicks through to the open web in the summer of 2023, the overall trend is downward for publishers outside of Google.

The data shows us that Google continues to direct less traffic to the open web, even as total search numbers increase. One positive note is that the overall volume of traffic Google sends to the open web remains relatively stable, thanks to the increasing number of searches.

These insights can be a cause of alarm for publishers who are already feeling the pressure to produce authoritative, helpful content that not only ranks high across search, but grabs the attention of users enough to get them to click outside of the Google sphere.

How to Stay Competitive Across Search

While the study does reiterate the competitive nature of search in 2024, there are still plenty of strategies publishers can use to maintain their search visibility.

Here are two great ways to stay ahead:

  1. Focus on Zero-Click Content: As you can see from the SparkToro and Datos study, zero-click searches are high. However, you can focus on zero-click content that optimizes for that type of user behavior. Zero-click content includes featured snippets, rich answers, and formatting content for Google’s “People also ask” module.

Examples of zero-click content in Google Search results.

  1. Don’t Skip Out on Technical SEO: Ensuring your content is optimized for search is of course the most important way to gain visibility across search. However, the next critical step is to make sure your content follows Google’s guidelines for user experience to ensure it makes it to the top of search results. This includes optimizing for structured data, meta descriptions, headlines, proper taxonomy, and more. Click here for more information.

Get the Right Search Support

RebelMouse is an AI-enabled, cloud-based CMS that is specifically designed to optimize content for search in the new digital climate. Our proprietary technology not only sets up your site for success across search, but our platform offers full technical support right out of the box. Upon launch, your site will already be optimized for zero-click content and all of the crucial technical SEO aspects you need to stay ahead.

If you need help staying competitive on search, request a demo today and let’s start working together.

Mastering Internal Linking for SEO Success

We always say that there are a lot of pieces that make up the SEO puzzle, and these pieces all play an important role in helping you to succeed across search. While quality content is also helpful — it’s the number one golden ticket to a winning SEO strategy — there’s a lot more that creators need to do to make sure that their quality content is set up for success.

One very important item on your SEO checklist should be the use of internal links.

What Are Internal Links?

Internal links are hyperlinks that connect one page of a website to another within the same domain. Quite literally, it’s just linking to other pages on your site in every post.

Why Are Internal Links Important for SEO?

While it seems simple, internal linking is actually quite important for SEO for a handful of reasons.

Creates Better Indexing: Google’s crawler, often called Googlebot, uses internal links to navigate each website to find and index new content. When Googlebot lands on a page, it will follow the internal links to other pages, which ensures that all of your important content is indexed properly.

Enhances the User Experience: Internal links improve the user experience because they direct users to other related content that could be of interest to them. This helps reduce bounce rates and extends the user journey on your site. Often, a site with a lot of internal links will have higher engagement rates.

Generates Link Equity: A healthy amount of internal links will create what’s called “link equity” for a website. That means if a page has a high page authority, or receives a lot of backlinks (meaning other pages on the web are linking to it), internal links on that page will also receive some of that authority.

Solidifies Site Structure: Internal linking helps reinforce your site’s structure. By organizing your content into categories and linking to related pages, you’re creating an intuitive hierarchy for your site’s content. This will help search engine crawlers understand the relationships between the pages on your site.

What Are The Different Types of Internal Links?

There are a few different types of internal links that you should be aware of. Make sure these links are visible and working properly on your site.

Navigational Links: These links are usually found in a website’s header, and will often be links to pages like “Home,” “About Us,” Contact Us,” or “Services.”

Navigational links on RebelMouse.

Contextual Links: These are links within the content of a page that direct readers to related content. This can be another blog article, product page, or section on your site. These links are often rich with keywords and hyper relevant to the source content.

Contextual links on RebelMouse.

Footer Links: These are links that are placed at the bottom of a web page that often link to pages like privacy policies, terms of services, and other important but not highly visited pages.

Footer Links on RebelMouse.

What Are the Best Practices for Internal Linking?

While it may seem intuitive to include internal links every time you create content, there are some important best practices that you should keep in mind.

Use Descriptive Text: Make sure the text you’re linking to is descriptive and relevant. This will help search engines understand the content that you’re linking to. For example, if your sentence is “Check out this link for our guide to fall fashion,” the words “fall fashion” should be clickable instead of “this link” or any other words in the sentence.

Only Link to Relevant Content: Make sure each of your internal links is relevant to the original content. Irrelevant or frivolous links could harm your search rankings.

Maintain a Logical Site Structure: Organize your site’s content in a way that’s decluttered and makes sense. It’s a good idea to use categories and subcategories, and make sure they are linked correctly.

Don’t Overlink: Too many links can be distracting and can dilute the value of more important links. Make sure your linking is logical and only helps enhance the user experience.

How Do I Manage My Site’s Internal Linking?

Search tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Google Search Console can help you manage your internal linking through data insights, and can help you identify areas for improvement.

RebelMouse is an AI-enabled, cloud-based CMS that has built-in integrations with tools like Semrush and Google Search Console to ensure your content is ready for success across search before it's even published.

Since we are a search-centric CMS, we make adding internal links an easy part of the content creation workflow, which is why we created our SmartLinks Dashboard. This intuitive feature allows users to add links on the fly to all of their key search phrases. For example, imagine you often use the phrase “unicorn colors” in your content. On RebelMouse, you can set a SmartLinks rule that will add an internal link of your choice any time the phrase “unicorn colors” is used across your content.

Here it is in action:

Using features like our SmartLinks Dashboard will make it easy for your content to earn more visibility across search engines.

If you’re interested in learning more about internal linking, or how our CMS can help you make it to the top of Google Search, request a demo today and let’s start working together.

How to Conduct a Digital Marketing Audit: The Essential Checklists You Need

Digital marketing is at a crossroads. The explosion of AI has begun to make publishers nervous about not only automated content creation, but the powerful nature of AI-driven search that could reduce search traffic to their sites. While these concerns are valid, there’s still plenty of room across the open web for successful websites and effective digital marketing.

The unpredictable climate means it's the perfect time to make sure your marketing efforts are as sharp as can be. A digital marketing audit can help you get a better assessment of your current strategies, so that you can identify strengths and weaknesses in your current business model. Whether you’re a small business, big brand, agency, or something in between, conducting a digital marketing audit is essential for maximizing ROI.

Here’s a step-by-step guide that takes you through performing a comprehensive digital marketing audit.

Step 1: Define Your Goals

Before diving into the audit, it’s important to define what it is you hope to achieve after the audit is completed. For example, are you looking to increase brand awareness, boost conversion rates, increase lead generation, or increase customer engagement? Maybe it’s all of the above and more. Once you’ve clearly defined what your goals are, make sure that each step of the auditing process addresses those objectives.

Step 2: Assess Your Current Digital Presence

Next, you should take inventory of your digital assets that could need refreshing. These can include:

✅ Website: Evaluate your website’s design, user experience, mobile-friendliness, and page performance.

✅ Social Media: Review your social pages’ activity, including engagement rate and follower growth across platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

✅ Email Marketing: Take a look at your newsletter’s audience size, as well as average open rate, click-through rate, and engagement metrics.

✅ Content: Examine the quality, relevance, and performance of your blog articles, videos, and any additional content you publish.

✅ SEO: Check your website’s search engine rankings, keyword profiles, and organic search volume.

Google Search Console can help you evaluate your search performance.

Step 3: Analyze Your Website’s Performance

Usually your website is your first point of contact with new customers. Tools like Google Analytics can help you analyze:

✅ Traffic Sources: Have a good understanding of where your traffic is coming from. This includes organic, direct, referral, and paid traffic.

✅ User Behavior: Take a look at metrics like bounce rate, average session duration, and pages per session to get a sense of your users’ engagement.

✅ Conversions: Track conversion rates, goal completions, and e-commerce metrics (if applicable) to see how successful your website content is.

✅ Technical Issues: Identify and fix any technical issues that result in user experience errors or broken links.

See reports on your website’s key performance indicators with Google Analytics. Screenshot from Google.

Step 4: Evaluate Your SEO Strategy

Traffic from search is essential for driving organic traffic. You can conduct a thorough SEO audit by analyzing the following:

✅ Keyword Analysis: Identify high-performing keywords for your content and potential new ones. Make sure your relevant content is optimized for those keywords.

✅ On-Page SEO: Make sure that title tags, meta descriptions, headlines, and images are optimized according to Google’s best practices.

✅ Off-Page SEO: Take a look at your backlink profile to identify quality backlinks and new opportunities for acquiring more.

✅ Content Audit: Review your existing content for relevance, quality, and overall performance. Identify any gaps in content and opportunities for new content that would entice new visitors.

RebelMouse offers comprehensive SEO audits. Click here to learn more.

Step 5: Review Your Social Media Presence

When optimized correctly, social media can still be a powerful tool to build brand awareness and increase engagement. You can audit your current social media strategy by looking at:

✅ Platform Performance: Take a look at all of the social media platforms you use and identify performance in terms of reach, engagement, and performance.

✅ Content Strategy: Evaluate the types of content you’re sharing and how effective they are. Make sure your posts are consistent with your brand’s tone and overall goals.

✅ Audience Analysis: Make sure you understand your audience’s demographics, including preferences and behavior on each social platform.

✅ Engagement Rates: Take stock of likes, comments, shares, and overall engagement rates across each platform. Identify your highest-performing posts and make a plan to create similar content.

Step 6: Analyze Your Email Marketing Campaigns

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach your target audience directly. You can audit your newsletter campaigns by evaluating:

✅ List Quality: Take a look at your subscribers and check for any inactive emails or new segmentation opportunities.

✅ Campaign Performance: Analyze open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and all of the engagement metrics of your previous campaigns.

✅ Content and Design: Try to look at your email content as a new reader. Then, judge its content, design, and CTAs.

✅ Automation: Evaluate your email automation workflows to see if there are missed opportunities for personalization.

Step 7: Deep Dive Into Your Paid Advertising Efforts

If you’re investing in paid advertising, it’s crucial to make sure you’re getting the biggest return on your investment possible. You can audit your campaigns by looking at:

✅ Campaign Performance: Get a holistic view of your performance across search ads, social media ads, and any other paid campaigns you have running. Get a sense of metrics like CTR, CPC, and conversion rates.

✅ Targeting and Segmentation: Review your targeting parameters and make sure that you’re reaching the right audience. This may mean you have to make your desired audiences smaller to achieve a wider impact.

✅ Ad Creatives: Evaluate the quality of your ad design and copy. Ask yourself, are your messages clear and compelling?

✅ Budget Allocation: Take a look at your budget across campaigns and platforms. Optimize your spend based on performance.

Step 8: Compile Your Findings and Create an Action Plan

After you’ve gathered all of the necessary data, compile your findings into a report that’s easy for you and your team to understand. You can do this by highlighting key insights, areas for improvement, and immediate action items. Develop and prioritize the tasks that need addressing and capitalize on newly identified opportunities as soon as you can.

Step 9: Monitor and Adjust

A digital marketing audit is not a one-and-done type of task. It’s important to regularly monitor your performance metrics and let them tell you a story about how you need to adjust your strategy. In today’s publishing landscape, it isn’t as important to have big, viral wins — you want continuous, sustainable growth through constant improvement instead.

Start Crushing KPIs With RebelMouse

Systematically evaluating your digital presence is a daunting task, but it’s an invaluable chore that will help you consistently meet your business goals.

One thing that can help your audit process is being supported by the right technology and expertise. RebelMouse is an AI-enabled platform that makes it easy for the sites in our network to win big on every platform, including site, social, and search. We’ve got both the built-in integrations to set up your content for success and the team you need to make sure your digital checklist is always taken care of and improving.

If you want to reevaluate your current digital presence and make sure that your content is optimized from start to finish, request a demo today and let’s talk about how we can work together.

Content Creators: Here's a Look at The Publishing Experience That's Changing the Game

If you're a content creator or social curator, you know all about the challenges tied to algorithm changes, industry shifts, and the ongoing fight to sustain reach in an oversaturated market.

At RebelMouse, we create lean tech that's built to iterate alongside these fluctuations. Chances are the CMS you're using was created before social. If that's true, you may still view content on your website and in social feeds as two different entities you have to control and manage. We're here to blur those lines for you and take publishing where it needs to be in 2024.

Take a Guided Tour Through Our Powerful Entry Editor With RebelMouse Founder and CEO Andrea Breanna

Google redesigned how they measure page speed, an update which put site performance at the top of its ranking factors. So high, in fact, that over the months it's become clear that page speed can deeply impact your overall SEO ranking and even make your ad buys more expensive. RebelMouse proudly powers the fastest sites on the web. Check out our case studies to see how site performance can fuel growth.

Content Optimization: Decentralized models — such as WordPress VIP — lack the social integrations necessary to mimic the feeds, and that's why they continue to fall behind. We've created a toolset that not only distributes your content to the platforms (where all of the eyeballs are), but also lets your content travel across platforms easily.

Social Integrations: We have a saying at RebelMouse: "If you create quality content without distribution, does it even exist?" That's why we created Discovery, an integral part of our suite of sophisticated enterprise-level tools. Using proprietary technology, Discovery is designed to help you figure out the social ecosystem that's already having conversations related to your content. But before you can reach out to potential influencers, your content has to be set up for distributive success.

SEO Tools: The resurgence of search is becoming more relevant every day. We use our own SEO tools and methods to win phrases organically. Our proven strategies coupled with our quality content has helped us reach the top of Google's result pages on a number of occasions. This is your opportunity to use the same tech and strategies to make it to page one on Google, too.

Dynamic Content: We live in a universe of content creators, and this means you don't have to do all of the work yourself. We have incredible integrations that help you share content from influencers through an intuitive search panel. By immersing yourself in a workflow built around reciprocal sharing, your own content won't just be enhanced, but also validated within your target community.

Insights: Our CMS operates on a data-driven product cycle. Everything we release at RebelMouse is subjected to a small percentage of traffic and A/B tested for performance impact. Our testing includes how each version affects page speed and user experience. We then take these results and check to see how they correlate with bounce rate, time on site, pages per session, and conversion to goals — such as shares, subscriptions, and purchases. We also take big data and distill it into easy-to-consume insights that you can quickly act upon. You can view how each post is performing on search and social, right from within Entry Editor.

We've never made a complete overview of our Entry Editor public before now. This is your chance to see the same intuitive and robust platform that built Axios and The Dodo from the the ground up. It's also the same CMS that powers United Airlines and PAPER Magazine. See how the main features work below, and follow the links in each section for detailed tutorials.

Discover New Influencers

Through RebelMouse's social-amplification tools, our users find new influencers with every publish. By leveraging proprietary technology, our Entry Editor has single-handedly created a new content lifecycle that's designed to overcome content saturation and put the power of content back into the hands of creators. Powered by keywords, users can send a variety of social signals — including commenting, Instagram "liking," and email outreach — without ever leaving the platform.

Schedule to Social

Prepare your post to be published on social right from within Entry Editor. You can send out posts live or schedule them to be published at a later date. Social influencers you've identified through Discovery can be tagged via @mentions in the post's copy and emailed right from the Schedule Social Posts tab.

Power your Articles with Assembler

The core unit of content on the web used to be the article. Whether you called it a post, blog, article, or column, it's always been your core content. You created it and measured its performance. It's what fueled you to go viral.

Social has completely changed that paradigm. Now, the core unit is much smaller. It's a Facebook video, an Instagram post, a tweet, a YouTube video, an interactive element, or even just an image. The core unit is now a particle, and a particle is — quite literally — part of an article.

We've created a tool called the Particle Assembler to help you break down your content into particles that can then be amplified and optimized on social. Click here for a full look at what Assembler can do.

Take Advantage of Infinite Scroll

Let your users binge your content. By serving up an endless feed of stories, they're more likely to read more than just the article they originally came for. Everything is about the feed right now because that's where your audience lives. The comfort of scrolling through articles, news, posts, and videos took over social media, and we weren't about to let that ship sail without getting on it.

Just like Facebook, we wanted to give users the option to show either a snippet of their content or the entire post. Improving the reading experience is part of the heart of this layout. As you scroll down our Social UX for Media layout, the URL in the address bar changes with each new post that moves into view on the screen. Each URL change counts as a pageview.

Add Media to Enhance Content

Using dynamic content, RebelMouse gives you the ability to add embed codes both into a post's teaser image and within the article's text. The Add Media Bar offers a variety of choices to bring richness to your post's content — including GIPHY, Facebook videos, YouTube, Instagram, and our Digital Asset Manager. Inserting content from the Add Media Bar will help bring awareness to your content within the social ecosystem. We also believe in the social media law of reciprocity, which posits that shares from you will be returned by shares in kind.

Establishing a SEO Winning Strategy

Search engine optimization is a key component in the success and visibility of your content after you hit publish. Our SEO toolset is designed to help editors create data-backed search phrases surrounding every story, and focus on meaningful adjustments to improve organic search performance. Effortlessly update your SEO headline, description, and URL slug so that search engines can best crawl, index, and understand your content.

Transform Posts into Newsletters

Do you have a piece of content that is performing exceedingly well? Using the Send a Newsletter tab, you can schedule these posts as newsletters from right within Entry Editor. You can then view stats and Velocity Alerts per post, which quickly let you know when an article is going viral. Take full advantage of these features by sending out a newsletter to the right targets at the right time so your subscribers never miss out on stellar content again.

Categorize Content

In the Sections dashboard, you can create and manage sections for specific topics and content within your site. You can then assign tags to sections that allow you to monitor the content flow into each.

In the Channels tab of Entry Editor, we allow you to associate both a primary tag and regular tags to a post. The Primary Tag field only lets you assign a single tag to it. It's built on the same principle as a primary section, where you can assign higher importance to certain pieces of content when processing and organizing your posts. By contrast, you can assign as many regular tags to your content as needed.

Establish a Workflow

Using stages, you can easily optimize your workflow process by assigning a different stage to each post before it's published. You can create as many stages as you'd like to best align with your team's workflow in a thorough and efficient manner.

After a post draft is completed, utilize stages to notify your content peers that it's ready for the next step in the content creation process. To do this, save your article in an appropriate stage — such as For Review, Copyedited, or Ready to Publish — that appears in the Stage dropdown menu in the Channels tab.

View Insights to Make Decisions

Don't ever wonder if your strategy is working out or not. We like to take big data and distill it into easily consumable insights, putting the decision-making process back into the hands of content creators. They're the ones that can use the data to take reach and engagement to the next level. Once you publish a post, you'll be able to view top-line statistics using the Post Stats tab.

Adjust Quickly with Multiple Layouts

It's important to have a healthy mix of content on your site. From video posts to listicles to ad-oriented posts, there's a need for various layouts to exploit these divergent content types to their maximum potential. That's where our Layout tab comes into play.

Inside the Layout tab, you can select any of the layouts previously created in the Layout & Design tool as A/B tests. Click here for a full tutorial.

Maintain Control with Version History

We make it easy to keep track of edits, and if you happen to make a mistake, you can always undo it. By leveraging the Version History tab, you can view the last 10 saved iterations of your post and revert back to any of them with the click of a button.

Give Your Content the Support It Deserves

The concept of distributive growth is still misunderstood across the industry, resulting in plummeting page views and lost monetization opportunities because of old, clunky tech. The RebelMouse Entry Editor is constantly being updated to take advantage of the latest distribution strategies. It isn't just a platform to upload articles to and forget about them.This has been a quick glance at the powerful tools RebelMouse offers to publishers who want to stay on the cutting edge. It's why we've quickly become the #1 WordPress VIP alternative.

Let's start working together today to create something big together.

Facebook Removed Its News Tab in the U.S. and Australia. Here’s How It’s Affected Traffic to Publishers

This article was originally posted on the Chartbeat blog. Chartbeat’s real-time content analytics, historical dashboards, and optimization tools help the world’s leading media organizations understand, measure, and build business value from their content.

After deprecating the Facebook News tab in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany last year, Meta has now done the same in the United States and Australia.

According to Meta, “The number of people using Facebook News in Australia and the U.S. has dropped by over 80%. We know that people don’t come to Facebook for news and political content — they come to connect with people and discover new opportunities, passions, and interests.”

Our own research has also shown Facebook traffic to news and media sites falling in the past few years. To understand how the deprecation of the News tab might further impact this trend, we looked at Facebook traffic in the U.S. and Australia before, during, and after the shutdown.

A Tale of Two Countries

Our data shows that referral traffic from Facebook fell in both the U.S. and Australia when comparing the months of March (pre-deprecation) and May (post-deprecation). In Australia, Facebook traffic to publishers in May was 8.3% less than in March. In the U.S., Facebook traffic declined 11.9%.

Chartbeat

Because of the general downward trend of Facebook traffic over the past years, we expanded the timeline a little further to see if these declines were merely a continuation of macro trends or if the deprecation of Facebook News has had an immediate measurable impact.

Chartbeat

In the U.S., despite a small rally in March, we see a similar month-to-month pageview decline of 11% when comparing January to May. In Australia, however, while Facebook traffic did decline in April, from the beginning of the year to now, raw traffic from the social network is actually up 20%.

Chartbeat

Is Australia a Special Case?

With such variation between raw traffic for these two countries, it’s worth zooming out a little further and examining how Facebook fits into the bigger picture. Though Facebook traffic comprises a much higher percentage of social traffic in Australia than the U.S. — 42.5% to 22.4% — when we look at Facebook traffic as a percentage of total traffic, both countries are between 3% and 4%.

Chartbeat

Despite Australia’s increase in pageviews from Facebook, neither country has experienced a measurable change in its percentage of total traffic, showing us that traffic trends have not meaningfully shifted since the deprecation of Facebook News.

How Other Updates and Outages Have Affected Facebook Traffic

This isn’t the first time news access on Facebook has been interrupted or altered. Typically, when Facebook is totally unavailable due to an outage, other channels have seen their traffic increase:

When Facebook is up, but news is unavailable, it’s a different story. The last time news and media access was blocked on Facebook in Australia, total traffic fell more than 30%. When the ban was lifted, referral traffic quickly rose from less than 10,000 pageviews per day to more than 100,000 and continued climbing thereafter.

Takeaways From the Research

  • Facebook traffic in the U.S. has decreased since the deprecation of Facebook News, but not measurably more than in other months of the year.
  • In Australia, though pageviews from Facebook have grown since the beginning of the year, Facebook as a percentage of total traffic has actually decreased slightly.
  • Social traffic is a more significant referral source in the U.S. than in Australia, but Facebook is a much larger portion of social traffic in Australia.
  • Facebook still remains the largest social referrer in our network, and our partners at Tubular Labs have shown that the audience opportunity on the platform is actually growing, as video views for media properties had an average increase of 11% in 2023.

Ready to make the most of modern publishing? Request a proposal to take your website to the next level with RebelMouse.

How to Grow Traffic for Your Brand With Reddit

Best Practices to Maximize Impact With the Social Community

The Reddit sales team joined Search Engine Journal for an informative webinar on maximizing brand impact with the ever-growing social platform. There’s a delicate balance between making meaningful contributions to the community and promoting your business. We'll help to navigate that.

Key insights from this webinar included:

  • Get to Know Reddit First: To truly have success, you need to understand the platform and its communities, which can vary in nature from one subreddit to the next.
  • Don’t Spam: Number one on the list of what not to do: Don’t spam. Just don’t.
  • Secrets to Success: Find your passion, build up karma, comment first, and eventually post. Create a subreddit for your brand if one doesn’t exist.
  • Advertise With Reddit: If organic efforts have failed or if you want to go to the next level and have a budget for it, advertising on Reddit can be highly effective.

We’ll walk you through each of these topics, like we did with YouTube best practices.

Get to Know Reddit First

Reddit has had rocketship growth in 2024, thanks in part to partnerships with OpenAI and Google. Search Engine Journal Managing Partner & Co-Owner Brent Csutoras set the scene with some mind-blowing stats on that growth:

  • 83 million daily active users as of Q1 2024; 306 million weekly
  • 37% YOY growth on search
  • International growth (50% non-U.S.)

Csutoras said it’s quite simply the biggest social community on the web with 100,000+ active communities, something no other website can say. “People want to talk to other people,” he said, summing it up well — and a refreshing sentence in this age of AI and ChatGPT.

As the internet has evolved, it’s led to a problem: Too much content, not enough answers. Reddit solves that, and by nature it weeds out low-quality content with users voting up and down and moderating themselves. “Searches have to really search for answers — they’re finding those answers on Reddit,” Csutoras said.

One clear signal that users find what they’re looking for on Reddit: The rise in search queries with the word “reddit.” People simply add “reddit” to their existing search queries because they know it’ll have the answers they seek. Check this out from Google Trends (2004–2024):

Reddit searches on Google Trends since 2004

Perplexity has noticed this, too, and they’ve added functionality for a “reddit only” search.

So Reddit is where people go to get answers to their problems and all kinds of questions. It’s where people talk to people. And it’s a community that polices itself through a voting system and other moderation tools built into the platform (including AutoModerator).

You need to keep all of this in mind to have success on the platform promoting your brand. You need to be solving problems or questions, participating in genuine conversations, and making sure to follow the rules that exist on each subreddit (specific communities). Rules are different from one subreddit to the next, so get to know them, and only then participate.

The other fun thing about Reddit: Users are typically anonymous. People can speak their minds and it leads to lively discussions. Being genuine and authentic, participating in communities you’re passionate about and are knowledgeable about, are some of the keys to success.

Now that you have a general understanding of Reddit, let’s talk about what not to do.

Don’t Spam

Don’t even try it. Spamming goes against everything that Reddit is, humans talking with humans about things they care about. Reddit cares deeply about every user, with its mission statement defined as “bringing community and belonging to everyone in the world.”

What is spam exactly? Csutoras says it’s whatever the moderators say it is. So again, a reminder to familiarize yourself with the rules of whichever subreddit you’re participating in.

Generally though, spamming includes behavior like:

  • Submitting unrelated/off-topic posts
  • Submitting too much
  • Submitting the same content across Reddit
  • Trying to subvert subreddit rules
  • Going against the community tone
  • Posting but not commenting (commenting is part of the community)

If the moderators don’t catch you, AutoModerator will. The automated moderation tools at Reddit have gotten better over time, and they’re quite good at weeding out bad content and spam.

One rule of thumb is the 9:1 rule. Csutoras explained this as “for every self-promotional post, have nine that are non-promotional.” Be a part of genuine, authentic conversations so that you, too, can be a part of the spirit of this rule.

Reddit also has tiers of contributor quality. If you have a legitimate email, you actively participate, and you’ve used the same account for a long time (account history), these factors can play in your favor, leading you to a higher tier. Your posts are more likely to be seen then.

Secrets to Success

Sometimes it’s not what you say, but how you say it.

Reddit Sector Business Lead Chris Khosrovani had a good example. Say you’re on a personal finance subreddit and someone is looking for a new 401(k) platform. Your brand has a solution! Khosrovani says this is a good opportunity to come in and say, “Hey, we’re the team behind X. Here is a link to our platform, here are all the benefits that you’d be able to take advantage of.”

Notice how that is worded. It’s personal, it’s genuine, it’s authentic. It’s not “Go to this link.” It’s adding value to the community, while still working in a link to drive traffic to your brand.

Reddit Director of Mid-Market Sales Leah Smith had another gem of advice, be an active listener before you post anything at all: “Really engage and kind of listen to the conversation on Reddit before you actively start interacting with everyone.”

That’s how you’ll know what does well on the platform, what doesn’t, the way people converse, how threads unfold, and so on. Then you’ll be informed to be active yourself.

Csutoras had some other great secrets to success:

  • Find Your Passion
    • Follow things you’re knowledgeable about
    • Have something to add
  • Build Your Karma
    • This is your reputation score
    • Upvote/Downvote
    • Comment on upcoming posts (“Rising”) that may get more visibility
  • Comment First
    • Learn what types of comments get engagement
    • Understand community interests and opinions
    • Provide value and be a person first (never be a company)
  • Then Submit
    • Once you get a feel for the platform, find the right subreddit, and familiarize yourself with its rules
    • Post what is most useful to that subreddit, things that add value
    • Check existing Top Posts for the past year to get a feel for what does well
    • Post at the right time — between 7am–9am ET is ideal, hitting multiple time zones, including internationally
      • Content usually fades within 24 hours
    • After you post, monitor activity, vote on comments, and respond to comments (have natural, human conversations)
  • Incorporate Your Brand
    • As long as it’s in line with the rules, work your brand in when you can, in an authentic way
    • Some subreddits don’t allow links at all, so really check the subreddit rules
    • Create a subreddit for your brand if one doesn’t exist already
      • Especially important with the growing connection to search
      • You can have whatever tone of voice you want, but pick the right moderators (people who understand Reddit)
      • Accept critical comments/posts

Case Study: Advocate.com

RebelMouse-powered Advocate.com is active on Reddit with their own user profile that shares links on relevant subreddits like r/lgbt that generate discussion and votes.

Advocate on Reddit case study

They have their branding with a logo and profile cover photo on their user page, and have generated 28,474 (and counting) post karma by using Reddit the right way, adding value to the communities they serve. They also have a verified email which gives them more credibility. In addition to posting, they post comments with how they’re approaching certain stories and ask questions.

Have you done all of the above, and you’re still looking to do more with Reddit?

The next logical step is to advertise with Reddit. There are some great case studies that you can use as inspiration for your own campaign.

“No matter what the size of the advertiser, a large-scale or a niche advertiser, or a small business advertiser, like a landscaping company — there’s an opportunity for you on Reddit,” Smith says.

The one thing that’s really unique about advertising on Reddit is that all of the ads are like posts. You can drive traffic with them or raise awareness. You can close the comments if you wish, but it’s best practice to leave them open.

Csutoras says that you can do these promoted posts in various ways through auctions on the platform (check out this full list of types of Reddit ads). For sensitive categories, including finance, alcohol, gambling, political, health & pharma, and dating, you can do managed campaigns, which are $10,000 or more quarterly and include takeovers.

It’s important to choose your targeting carefully, and that’s where the Reddit sales team can help. If you inquire, they’ll help you optimize and reach exactly the right audience based on tons of data. That’s where KarmaLab comes in.

“We’re targeting the users, not the communities,” Khosrovani said. One message can be delivered to one subset of users, another message to another group of users, and so on. The data drives the insights that the Reddit team provides to best optimize the ads.

One of the best places to start is simply monitoring the conversation, and Reddit Pro helps with that — a “free suite of tools for businesses to grow a meaningful organic presence on Reddit.” It includes AI-powered insights, performance analytics, and publishing tools that allow brands to do social listening and find opportunities to advertise.

There’s another easy, organic way to get to know your target audience better: “One thing you can do within a subreddit is filter for different views — Hot, Rising, Top. You can filter Top posts in the last X months and get a sense of what the most up-voted posts are, what was the context around them, and get a sense of how often people are posting,” Khosrovani said.

So whether you want to proceed in a completely organic way, or you want to invest in paid strategies, what are you waiting for? It’s time to up your game on Reddit.

Looking for more? Get in touch with one of our strategists today and we’ll work on a custom plan that works best for you and your business.

Google Case Study: Boosting Search Clicks With Structured Data

Google recently published a case study that highlighted the benefits of using structured data and optimizing URLs to improve crawling. The case study focused on video structured data in particular, and how it almost doubled clicks from search engine result pages (SERPs).

The case study is about an Indonesian publisher named Vidio that implemented video structured data best practices and saw significant improvements in search traffic and visibility.

Get Caught Up: What’s structured data? Structured data is a set of "clues" provided to Google’s crawler about what defines your content. Using schema, or a vocabulary you share with Google about every page on your site, you can tell Google’s crawler, Googlebot, the story of your content in human language. Click here to learn more.

Vidio Case Study: Implementing Best Practices

Vidio implemented all of Google Search’s best practices around videos, including the correct structured data markup.

There were two important attributes that Vidio used for their videos:

  1. The @VideoObject markup, which is a piece of code that tells Google’s crawler about each video, including the title, description, thumbnail, duration, and more.
  2. The @contentURL markup, which is a piece of code that points to an actual media object, which in this case was a video.

Then they tested each page with a video using Google’s URL Inspection tool, which determines if a page is correctly following all of its best practices.

Vidio’s URL Inspection tool report. From Google.

Vidio Case Study: Importance of Stable URLs

In addition to implementing best practices, the case study highlighted the importance of stable URLs.

Wait, what’s a stable URL? A stable URL, also called a persistent URL, is a web address that always links to a specific source, in this case, a video.

Content delivery networks (CDNs) are systems of distributed servers that deliver web content and media to users based on their location to improve load time. However, sometimes they can sometimes cause indexing issues because they often use temporary URLs for video files. These temporary files make it hard for Google’s crawler to index the videos correctly.

Start doubling your traffic with structured data. RebelMouse can help.

Click Here

Using stable URLs for each video instead of these temporary files helped Vidio get their content indexed more quickly, and easy to recall again. Stable URLs also help Google better understand user interests over time, which helps to reduce the risk of broken links or other inaccessible content that could hurt your search rankings.

Vidio Case Study: Huge Lift in Search Visibility

While this case study only focused on video, it illustrates the importance of using correct structured data to improve search performance. Even if it seems like something small, like making sure that Google can efficiently crawl URLs linked to videos, it can move the needle on your site’s discoverability.

Google said that Vidio experienced almost double the clicks after implementing the correct structured data:

“Vidio saw improvements in impressions and clicks on their video pages. While the number of videos that Vidio published from Q1 2022 to Q1 2023 increased by ~30%, adding VideoObject markup made their videos eligible for display in various places on Google. This led to an increase of ~3x video impressions and close to 2x video clicks on Google Search.”

Get More Clicks From Search With Structured Data

If something as simple as making sure your site’s video structured data is implemented correctly can trigger such a big lift in your search performance, think about what it would be like if your entire site was optimized with the right schema markup.

To summarize, complete structured data helps your site have:

✅ Enhanced visibility

✅ Better search rankings

✅ Richer search result displays

But while the correct structured data may seem simple to developers and SEO experts, there is a huge learning curve for content creators who already have a lot on their plate. That’s why it’s important to incorporate technical SEO strategies like structured data into your publishing process from the start.

RebelMouse is an AI-enabled CMS that automatically implements key structured data so that Google can better understand your site. Our out-of-the-box integration populates all of the standard schema data with information about article content, and we’ll make sure other elements like videos have the right structured data in place, too.

Our structured data integration is just one of the ways we make sure the sites in our network are set up for maximum visibility across search. If you’re interested in learning more about how we can take your site to the next level and help meet your business goals, request a demo today and let’s start working together.

5 Strategies Brands Can Use to Increase Conversions on LinkedIn

When most people think of LinkedIn, the first thought they have is that it’s the best place on the web to look for a job and market yourself to a network of potential employers. While that’s true, LinkedIn is now more than ever becoming one of the most powerful tools to drive conversions for brands. With traditional social media outlets like X (formerly Twitter) facing endless controversy, and other platforms dealing with lower user engagement rates, the natural professional environment of LinkedIn makes it a safe haven for brands.

In fact, data from Hootsuite found that 70% of marketers consider LinkedIn to be the most trustworthy platform for brands.

Keep reading... Show less

RebelMouse Publisher Blueprints


RebelMouse Blueprints represent years of collected expertise, rigorous testing, and proven results. Our design, strategy, revenue, and engineering teams have collaborated for months to craft the ideal version of every type of website, and we just released the first one: RebelMouse Publisher Blueprints.

We call them Blueprints because they are data-driven strategies brought to life, not just templates for a site makeover. RebelMouse Blueprints detail the technical architecture of a site, from smart caching for optimal performance to structured data for top Google Search rankings, and the user experience of each CTA and element is optimized for engagement.

Every decision is backed by extensive efforts to meet and often surpass external performance benchmarks and technical standards like Google’s Core Web Vitals and SOC 2 compliance. This includes multivariate testing, in-depth data analysis, adherence to Google News Initiatives' best practices, and more. And, of course, Blueprints are built on RebelMouse’s platform, the highest-performing and most-secure CMS on the market.

👷 See how RebelMouse client The Fulcrum grew SEO traffic with a Blueprint redesign!

How Blueprints Are Optimized

For SEO and User Experience

As we say here at RebelMouse: Good UX is good SEO. People often say they are optimizing their sites for search crawlers, but crawlers are trying their best to imitate humans. Focusing on the user solves for both SEO and user satisfaction.

Core Web Vitals

Google’s Core Web Vitals (CWV) measure how long it takes to load and interact with the elements of your page. This, combined with safety and security requirements and mobile friendliness guidelines, determines Google's page experience signals for ranking content. Not optimizing for CWV can hurt your organic search traffic, frustrate users, and impact revenue by being too slow to load ads. Per a Google study, “as page load goes from 1 to 3 seconds, the probability of bounce increases 32%” and if you extend that to 5 seconds, it’s 90%.” For all these reasons, our Blueprints use all of the below and more:

  • Ultra-light JavaScript application; cleaned and optimized CSS and HTML
  • Smart caching rules
  • GZIP compression, which reduces file size by up to 85%
  • A Progressive Web App (PWA) and a smart page load strategy
    • Blueprints preload fonts and load images ahead of time for certain screen sizes depending on network speeds
    • Ads and other key resources load right after the critical elements

Structured Data and Rich Results

Embedded at the top and throughout the first pages of search results are modules in which Google shows “rich results” that rely on structured data coded into your site. These results may show product reviews with prices and images or top news stories or videos, and to make it into these highly visible areas, you need to have the right technical setup.

Out of the box, RebelMouse provides structured data for articles, videos, images, site links, collections, bread crumbs, carousels, logos, and products. Just by creating a section or adding a video, the right schema markup is applied.

Something we’ve added to RebelMouse Blueprints out of the box is expanded author structured data for articles, which is vital for Google’s E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) search quality rater guidelines. This allows you to add more information about authors such as credentials, links to their profiles on social and other sites, affiliations with other organizations, and more. Google defines “trustworthiness” as “how transparent you are about how your content is created, such as clear sourcing, evidence of the expertise involved, or linked pages about the author or your news organization.” For this reason, we have paired the backend structured data with a front-end hover state so that users can see more about the author and their credentials, building trust through transparency.

Videos That Will Actually Index

In November 2023, Google released an update that wholly changed the requirements for video indexing and ranking for publishers. We did a deep dive using data, testing, and more, and discovered that Google had previously overcorrected in seeking context for videos (it used to be best practice to include substantial write-ups for videos so that crawlers could understand the content of the video they couldn't watch), and their results were overrun by videos stuck on top of articles that were only tangentially related to the accompanying story. The folks behind the search engine tried smaller fixes throughout the years, but eventually they just threw up their hands and said "we have to know the video is the point."

What this means in practice is that video has proven to be the main content of the page in a myriad of ways: The fewer words the better, the word “video” should be in your URL structure, videos should live within playlist elements, the size has to increase, and so much more. We took all of this and put it into the video pages of our Blueprints.

There Are No Pop-Ups Here

There are so many terms in UX design that are used interchangeably that it’s hard to follow which are good and which are bad. It’s more straightforward with pop-ups: They’re just bad. They disrupt the user experience in ways that not only annoy people, but also prompt them to block them through their browsers or with third-party tools, which causes Google to threaten your mobile search results. Our CTAs and ads have sticky elements, highlighted states, and user-initiated fly-outs. None of them make it hard to access content.

For Engagement

Calls to Action

Through our research, testing, and experience, we have gathered some clear guidelines for good CTAs. Some are linguistic like changing “Submit” in your sign-up CTA to something more actionable like “I’m in!” or “Let’s go!” And some are product and strategy specific, like not requiring anything except an email address for sign-up and enabling autocomplete to make that even easier.

We have included all of our best practices for CTAs in our Blueprints, from highlighted in-article CTAs, to sticky CTAs with suggested language best practices that create a sense of urgency.

These strongly align with the best practices of Google News Initiative.

Above-the-Fold CTA

It’s right there when you land on the homepage: Big and in contrasting colors. Commanding but not demanding. The copy creates some FOMO, but also tells you the cadence of the send and why the newsletter is valuable. The text for any CTA is customizable by the client (as are their choices of colors). We just included our best practices as guidance.

Highlight CTA

We had experience with a content group whose in-article CTA performed 185% better than their previous version. Looking at the design it was hard to see why. It looked even less inviting in 2D than their original CTA, and was just white with black text. Then we saw it live.

As the user moved through the page for the first time, there was a moment triggered by placement within the viewport — no longer than a second or two — in which the CTA shone brightly as the elements behind it shrank in gray.

We have adapted to that pattern and brought it to RebelMouse Blueprints. It is not obnoxious or intrusive and does not appear more than once a session, but it gives the user a moment to focus and consider, and that’s often all that’s necessary.

Sticky Elements

Depending on their goals, publishers can choose to have a sticky CTA or sticky ad in their right sidebar on desktop, and a sticky CTA or sticky ad anchored to the bottom of the viewport across devices.

Recirculation Units

Maximizing the amount of articles read per reader is the best way to grow your ad revenue and your reader's loyalty which will improve their propensity to financially support you.

—Google News Initiative

Google News Initiative recommends sticky headers, in-article related content modules, a numbered widget at the end of articles, and a sticky element in the right sidebar for desktop. Our blueprints have all of the above.

The Top 5

The Blueprint version of the unit/widget at the end of articles referenced above adheres to Google’s recommendation that you rank your articles ("1, 2, 3, …”) and limit the number of stories. This is all to allow readers to process information faster and avoid decision fatigue/the paradox of choice.

Related Content (Powered by AI)

Based on our testing and experience, in-line recirculation units perform better than those in sidebars because users engage more with elements in the post body, especially on mobile.

That’s why our Blueprints include related content recirculation modules on article pages inserted after the second paragraph to maximize time on site.

This module can be powered by a standard application of popularity and recency filters to stories within the same section, but the most powerful option is driven by AI. After being trained on your content, RebelMouse’s AI integrations give users spot-on contextual recommendations that are not dependent on tagging or taxonomy, and perform better than the standard approach.

Sticky Recirculation Unit for Desktop

Per Google News Initiative, this placement “will improve the widget viewability and CTR. You can also decide to replace this sticky format with other digital assets, like an ad unit, after a certain scroll depth. Images drive more engagement and should be displayed on the left.”

These are content-agnostic modules that display on a variety of pages, so we recommend either using your most popular or latest content depending on your goals.

Engaging 404s

Most 404 pages are a dead end for users, telling them the content is gone and the site has nothing else to offer in its place. With Engaging 404s, a user will see a compact notice that the page cannot be found, followed by AI-generated search results based on the URL slug (the editorially controlled part of the URL that comes after the domain and subfolders) of the missing link. Instantly, a negative user experience turns into a positive one, with relevant pages that match the user’s click intent.

AI-Powered Search

On-site search has been a pain point for decades because consumers expect a Google-level experience and their expectations are almost never met— until now. AI solves this once and for all, returning spot-on results regardless of your internal tagging, and regardless of the user’s spelling ability. Our data show a 20% increase in time spent versus non-AI search.

For Revenue

Our Programmatic Advertising Partnerships

If you are looking to avoid the quagmires we often see when internal development and design teams clash with third-party advertising partners over performance, usability, revenue, and who is to blame for which bad outcomes, you have come to the right place.

Using our performance tools and UX insights, our AdOps team works with developers to implement an ad setup optimized for CPM, viewability, and CTR in a way that doesn’t leave your Core Web Vitals in disrepair or users confused as to what to focus on.

The Blueprint programmatic setup includes Google AdX, Prebid, and Amazon UAM, plus our own proprietary software for boosting Google AdX CPM with dynamic bidding. We also offer a native video player that can be used for programmatic ads or in direct-sold campaigns with programmatic backfill to maximize revenue.

This advertising partnership is structured as a revenue share, meaning that there are no additional fees for the client. Our AdOps team handles all ongoing ad performance analysis, optimizations, and reporting for you without additional fees.

Third-Party Programmatic Ad Partners

If you choose to go with an outside ad provider, we can easily work with any number of vendors. We are also happy to recommend vendors for you to choose from to meet your specific needs.

Direct-Sold Campaigns

If your organization does direct-sold campaigns, our Blueprints can support your sales team in their efforts.

We offer a native (or outstream) video player that can be used in direct-sold campaigns with programmatic backfill to maximize revenue. RebelMouse fully integrates with JW Player and other major video platforms, which allows you to show in-stream ads.

We offer a “Boost Spot” for sponsored content. This means any piece of native content you wish to boost is placed in the second position of the home and section pages, and is the second story upon scroll on article pages. This has delivered fantastic results for our clients and their brand partners.

For Data Collection and Analysis

The Ideal Looker Studio

RebelMouse offers unique, customizable Google Analytics 4 (GA4) dashboards through Looker Studio that provide key insights into the metrics that matter most to publishers.

This gives our clients the ability to quickly understand the performance of their sites so that they can then make important decisions on the fly. Here's what you get from the standard setup:

  • General Site Performance
  • Content Performance
  • Primary Sections, Authors, and Primary Tags Performance
  • Audience and Demographics Performance
  • Loyalty Performance
  • Google Search Console Performance
  • Questions Search Performance
  • Source/Medium Performance
  • Referrals Performance
  • Paid vs. Non-Paid Traffic Performance
  • Layout Performance

Event Tracking

Blueprints come with an event-tracking strategy baked in for GA4. Out-of-the-box, your GA4 will track key CTAs and interactions which provide insights that matter most to publishers and marketers.

Events:

  • Newsletter CTAs
  • Social shares
  • “Keep reading” and “Load more” button interactions
  • Recirculation module clicks
  • Announcement bar clicks
  • Header and footer clicks
  • Hamburger menu clicks
  • Author profile clicks

Start publishing on a highly optimized site with ease. Request a demo and let's get you started with Blueprints today.

Engaging 404s: Keep Users on Site With AI-Powered Relevant Content

A 404 page can be a horrible user experience, but it can also be a delightful one. There’s no reason why a 404, also known as a “Page Not Found” error, can’t provide relevant, contextual content based on what the user was originally seeking out. That’s especially true now with the potential for AI to find and surface the best related content.

That’s why we’re thrilled to introduce a solution for this called Engaging 404s. It’s the latest in a string of AI-powered integrations we’ve launched that have improved the editorial and user experiences, including AI headlines, AI search, and AI recirculation. Instead of reaching a traditional “Page Not Found” error message, a user will land on AI-generated search results for the keyword phrase (URL slug) that the page was supposed to deliver on. Instantly, a negative user experience turns into a positive one, with relevant pages that match the user’s click intent.

Our team has built a custom layout for this, making sure that all best practices are incorporated and opportunities are maximized. Here’s how it works:

  1. It is clear to the user that this is a 404 page, but the text doesn’t take up too much space.
  2. Stories are above the fold, which allows users to see them before they lose interest.
  3. The URL slug is highlighted as the key phrase.
  4. Results are powered by AI, which is excellent with its command of language and how content is related to each other — it can even deliver results based on typos.

engaging 404s wireframe

RebelMouse-powered Brit + Co has a great example of this in action, which includes a custom design that we created for them. If you try to visit a page under the URL brit.co/hairstyle, you will find that no such page exists. But what you will find is the most relevant posts based on the phrase “hairstyles.”

hairstyles 404 page on Brit + Co

Likewise, if you go to brit.co/nail-polish, even though that page doesn’t exist, you still find relevant “nail polish” posts.

nail polish 404 page on Brit + Co

This new offering is sure to pique the interest of users to explore more on your site rather than become frustrated and bounce from it.

Intrigued? If you currently work with us, let your account manager know that you’d like Engaging 404s enabled for your site. We can even build a custom design if you’d like to maximize engagement.

If you’re not working with us, what are you waiting for? Get in touch and we’d be happy to change that.

AI Optimization: How to Appear in AI Search Results

  • AI is opening an entirely new world of search for digital marketers
  • So far, traditional SEO as we know it remains the best way to optimize for AI
  • Social media communities like Reddit are commonly a part of AI search results

The New SEO

One thing is clear about AI: It’s not going away. Generative AI will continue to have a dramatic impact on the future of digital media and those who adapt to this reality and prepare for what’s to come will be best positioned down the line.

OpenAI has changed the game, as people are increasingly using ChatGPT for queries they may have gone to Google with in the past. The rise of new tools like Perplexity.ai is another game changer. Now Google itself has joined the party with the introduction of AI Overviews, its own take on utilizing generative AI to answer search queries.

The Evolution of ChatGPT

From its initial launch to today, ChatGPT continues to evolve and make upgrades to its product. Part of those evolutions are based on user feedback and positioning its chatbot to deliver the best possible results.

Once widely ridiculed for hallucinations, the latest version of ChatGPT is much smarter and it’s continuing to get better. In April 2024, ChatGPT made a big change: Links are becoming more prominent. Instead of not providing sources for results, it is directly citing original sources and linking out to them in the paid version of ChatGPT.

For publishers, there are some things you can try to increase the odds of getting ChatGPT to link to you directly. Some publishers have been striking deals with ChatGPT where they partner and become direct sources, and that’s one way, as opposed to the other side of the spectrum where publishers sue OpenAI for copyright infringement.

Learn more about RebelMouse's AI publishing tools

Click Here

How do you get more links from ChatGPT? I asked ChatGPT directly, and here’s what came back (edited for clarity):

  • SEO Best Practices: Ensure your site is following SEO best practices, including the use of keywords, meta tags, and a mobile-friendly UX.
  • Quality Content: Publish high-quality, relevant, up-to-date content regularly.
  • Current Events: Cover both current events and trending topics.
  • Unique Insights: Create specialized unique content that sets you apart from competitors.
  • Backlinks: Increase the number of links to your site from reputable sources to improve your domain authority.
  • Social Media: Promote your content on social media channels that increase traffic and visibility.
  • Website Speed: Ensure your site loads quickly and efficiently. Slow sites are penalized.
  • Structured Data: Use structured data to help your content become clear to crawlers.

Sound familiar? The new SEO (optimizing for AI) certainly resembles the old one. That’s not particularly surprising as these are tried-and-true ways to provide value to users.

As a brand or publisher, another thing you can do to land in ChatGPT results is optimize for Reddit. That’s right: OpenAI has struck a deal with Reddit that gives it direct access to all of that community’s content. For its part, OpenAI says the Reddit firehose will lead to ChatGPT providing “uniquely timely and relevant information.” Reddit is a unique community that won’t tolerate spam, but if you invest time in being members of the community and provide value on topics you’re an expert in, you can still see results.

The Rise of Perplexity

Then there’s Perplexity.ai. Founded in August 2022, it was originally built on top of ChatGPT but it has since developed its own large language model and also works with OpenAI rivals like Anthropic’s chatbot Claude.

Perplexity is known for its unique search experience that delivers links front and center, clearly outlining sources and citations for every answer. This is still at odds with the free version of ChatGPT, even though the premium version now includes links.

With a simple “Ask anything” box, and catchy “Where knowledge begins” tagline, Perplexity has turned out to be particularly good at breaking news and analyzing news events, so it has caught the attention of publishers. It appears to emphasize different sites compared to Google, with knowledge bases like Reddit, Quora, and Yelp getting significant pull as you go toward more general questions and away from news itself.

How do you land in Perplexity’s search results? It appears that traditional SEO again comes into play, as relevant keywords are clearly a part of the ranking. Writing clearly and plainly about topics of interest is important. It’s also obvious that social media communities like Reddit factor into Perplexity’s answers:

Perplexity.ai responds with Reddit

AI Overviews Enters the Chat

Google’s official documentation says that generative search responses like AI Overviews are most helpful in cases “when you want to quickly understand information from a range of sources, including information from across the web and Google's Knowledge Graph.” They provide information in a “snapshot” and allow users to “explore the topic further” with links that appear alongside the response.

According to Google, publishers don’t have to take any action to participate in AI Overviews. They’re automatically eligible for inclusion simply by “following our regular guidance for appearing in search,” which can be explored on their Essentials page.

With that said, early results indicate that structured data is vitally important to appear in AI Overviews. And that makes sense, as that’s among the technical essentials that Google recommends in its best practices. With RebelMouse, we solve that with Particles, dividing an article up into parts of an article that are uniquely set up technically in the best structured data format. Make sure you use Particles in our Entry Editor to set yourself up for consideration in AI Overviews.

Appearing in AI Overviews could be huge as search continues to evolve. It shows at the very top of the search results page with the potential to deliver serious traffic. Just to reiterate: The best way to optimize for AI, according to Google, is to follow their normal guidance for optimizing for SEO. Be helpful to users, use the right keywords, explain topics thoroughly, keep your site’s technical SEO healthy, and you’ll be in position for a shot at AI Overviews.

All in all, how do you optimize for AI? First off, optimize for SEO like you normally would. Then, optimize for Reddit and other social media communities, which are clearly part of feeding the beast that is AI. This is the landscape as it exists today. We’ll see where it goes and update this post later with the latest guidance.

As an AI-enabled CMS, RebelMouse optimizes content for traditional SEO and AI-powered search. Get ahead of your competitors and request a demo today.

Interested in a Free Website Health Check? Check Your
Website's Health
Get Your Free Analysis Now

REBEL CASE STUDIES

REBEL INSIGHTS

RebelMouse's Active Core Web Vitals Monitoring System

RebelMouse's Active Core Web Vitals Monitoring System

Google core algorithm updates

Google Core Algorithm Updates: 2024 Trends and Learnings

EHN redesign lead media

EHN Redesign Leads to Explosive Growth and Higher Engagement

secure icon indicating a rebelmouse cms platform security update

RebelMouse Security Update: October 2024

journalist sits in front of an AI-generated chatbot to become more efficient

How Journalists Can Use AI: Add Context Based on Archives

Threads’ Unremarkable Problem

Threads’ Unremarkable Problem

The State of Core Web Vitals, INP, and Organic SEO in 2024

The State of Core Web Vitals, INP, and Organic SEO in 2024

how The Fulcrum grew SEO traffic with redesign

How The Fulcrum Grew SEO Traffic With a Blueprint Redesign

SEO growth case study with Best Local Things

From Launch to SEO Growth: Best Local Things Case Study

4 Powerful Ways Content Creators Can Leverage Google Trends

4 Powerful Ways Content Creators Can Leverage Google Trends

New Study: More Than Half of Searches Don’t Leave Google

New Study: More Than Half of Searches Don’t Leave Google