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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.

Rebel Insights

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.

Rebel Insights

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.

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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.

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

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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.

Mastering the Art of Newsletter Subject Lines: Six Tips to Boost Open Rates

If you think about the promotional emails and newsletters in your inbox, they probably seem like a lot of noise. However, email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to generate traffic and turn casual readers into loyal customers. In fact, one study found that for every $1 spent on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $40, which is higher than other digital marketing channels like search and social.

It makes sense, too. If you think about it, most people check their email once a day at a minimum. However, lots of people are active across email throughout the entire workday, and many users check email even earlier than that. Data from OptinMonster shows that more than half of users check their email before doing anything else online for the day.

OptinMonster

Email provides plenty of opportunities to catch your reader’s eye. With dwindling attention spans and plenty of content competition, your email subject line needs to be perfect — a task that’s both an art and a science.

Here are six tips to write subject lines that stand out amongst the crowd and will compel your readers to open up and engage with your content.

1. Keep It Short and Sweet

As you know, it can be hard to grab a reader’s attention when there’s plenty of other content they could consume in their inbox alone. That’s why brevity is important for subject lines, and ideally they should be 30–50 characters total. Not only does this optimize for short attention spans, but it also ensures that your subject line is not cut off in the email preview so that readers can see the full impact of your message.

Example of a short and concise subject line.

2. Use Language That Inspires Action

Words that prompt action from your reader can boost your open rates. When crafting your subject line, try to use verbs that create a sense of urgency. According to HubSpot, emails that use urgent language like “breaking,” “important,” or “alert” have higher open rates

Example of subject line that uses actionable language.

3. Personalize When Possible

Personalization can make your audience feel valued and can quickly grab their attention. Campaign Monitor found that readers are 26% more likely to open emails with a personalized subject line. When possible, including the person’s first name and other details can make the email feel like it was customized just for them

A little personalization can go a long way when crafting email subject lines.

4. Use Numbers

Making use of numbers can make your subject line appear more eye-popping and specific. Clear and digestible information will give the reader a better idea of the email’s objective. A/B testing by Campaign Monitor found that numbers in subject lines resulted in 57% better open rates.

Numbers are a great way to make your subject line pop.

5. Be Clear and Specific

It’s always important to stay away from any sort of vague or mysterious language in your subject lines, and instead try to clearly communicate what readers can expect from your email. This will also build trust with your audience so they never feel like they were tricked into opening an email.

It helps to clearly convey the content of your email.

6. A/B Subject Lines

The best way to know if your email subject lines are resonating with your audience is through A/B tests. With each email sent, conduct A/B tests to compare which types of subject lines perform the best across your readers. Pay attention to open rates, click-through rates, and any other engagement metrics to see what performs well. It’s best to review this data after every send and refine your subject line strategy as you go.

How A/B testing works. From Zapier.

Make Newsletters a Part of Your Publishing Process

Creating effective subject lines takes creativity, precision, and experimentation. Since the subject line is your elevator pitch to your content, it’s important to prioritize it with each email you send. But that can be hard with the full plate already in front of content creators who are always trying to stand out from the competition.

RebelMouse is an AI-enabled CMS that’s also a powerful platform for optimizing newsletters. Our integration with major email service providers like Mailchimp and Sailthru include A/B testing, automation, responsive design, content curation, and tools to seamlessly weave your email strategy into your publishing process.

Easily schedule newsletters in RebelMouse’s editing interface.

Ready to up your email newsletter strategy with perfect subject lines? Request a demo and let’s start working together.

A Look at How AI Will Change the Way We Search

Google Unveils New AI Search Features at I/O Conference

At the Google I/O conference this month, the search engine giant announced the rollout of AI Overviews in the U.S., in addition to a suite of new search features powered by artificial intelligence. These features include multi-step reasoning, planning assistance, AI-organized search results, and video search using Google Lens.

The advancement of generative AI has put Google in a position to redefine the capabilities of search, making it more intuitive and easier to find answers than ever before. Here’s a brief look at how you can expect the search experience to change.

One-Stop Search Results With AI Overviews

Google’s AI Overviews are complete responses to user queries directly from the search interface. This eliminates the need for users to piece together the information they are seeking from multiple sources. AI Overviews will now be rolling out to all U.S. users, and Google says they expect the feature to reach one billion people by the end of 2024. AI Overviews will also be customizable to offer a complete overview or simplified language in response to a search query.

Here is an example of an AI Overview using the “Simpler” mode:

Sourced from Search Engine Roundtable.

Answer Complex Questions With Multi-Step Reasoning

Google’s chatbot Gemini will enhance search by answering complex questions with what’s called multi-step reasoning. According to Google, multi-step reasoning will stop users from having to break down questions into multiple searches. Instead, Google says searchers will now be able to ask “the most complex questions, with all the nuances and caveats you have in mind, all in one go.”

Use Search to Plan Your Next Meal or Vacation

Google wants to expand the user journey to include multi-step planning for things like meals or vacations. Google provided an example where, thanks to AI, users can easily search for “create a 3 day meal plan for a group that’s easy to prepare” and receive multiple recipe ideas from across the web. These results will be easy to customize and tweak, and can also be exported to Google Docs or Gmail.

Here’s an example of what planning in search looks like:

Sourced from Search Engine Roundtable.

AI-Organized Results for Inspiration

If users aren’t quite sure what exactly they’re looking for, Google search will now have AI-organized search results with AI-generated headlines for users to explore and brainstorm new ideas. Google says U.S. users will see AI-organized results for dining and recipes, followed by movies, music, books, hotels, and shopping.

Below is an example of what these inspirational headlines will look like. You can see content grouped by headlines, such as “Anniversary-worthy restaurants” and “Live music and intimate settings.”

Sourced from Search Engine Roundtable.

Next-Level Video Search

With the help of Google’s image-recognition technology, Google Lens, users will soon be able to search with a video. This will allow users to receive AI-generated solutions to issues that they can see but are hard to describe.

Google provided the following example of how searching with a video could come in handy:

"Maybe you bought a record player at a thrift shop, but it’s not working when you turn it on and the metal piece with the needle is drifting unexpectedly. Searching with video saves you the time and trouble of finding the right words to describe this issue, and you’ll get an AI Overview with steps and resources to troubleshoot.”

Here’s what this experience will look like:

Sourced from Search Engine Roundtable.

Be Prepared for the Future of Search

These latest features are just a glimpse into how Google is revolutionizing the search experience with AI. Whether it’s simplifying the search process or enhancing the user journey with planning capabilities, the landscape of search is going to change dramatically.

This could be troubling for publishers who rely on traffic from Google Search. If users are able to satisfy their queries directly from the search engine’s results page, how can publishers protect their traffic?

RebelMouse is an AI-enabled CMS that uses generative AI to support the content creation process, not hinder it. Our AI-powered content suggestions, automated content optimization, and intelligent editing tools help maximize content potential and the user experience. Creating modern, personalized experiences on your website helps nurture audience loyalty, and in turn, protects your readerships as the industry adapts to AI.

Example of RebelMouse’s metadata optimizer.

Google’s new search innovations are impressive, and they will likely enhance the search experience for the entire web. At RebelMouse, we’re working alongside these advancements to make sure the sites in our network are also making the most of generative AI.

Looking to keep up, too? Request a demo today and let’s see how AI can transform your business.

FAQ: Everything You Need to Know About Google’s Core Updates

We talk a lot about Google’s core updates at RebelMouse. These large algorithm changes can cause dramatic shifts in web traffic, which in turn has the potential to greatly impact the sites within our network. But as we anticipate these updates, and inform our clients about them, we felt it was important to define exactly what a core algorithm update is and why publishers of all kinds should monitor them closely.

What Is a Core Update?

A core update is a significant change to Google Search’s algorithm, aimed at improving the quality of search results and how websites are ranked. These updates are notoriously vague, and often leave website owners and SEO experts scrambling to figure out what kinds of pages Google is targeting with each update so that they can make changes accordingly. The only thing we do know for sure is that core updates evaluate web pages for factors that improve user experience, such as quality, relevance, and helpfulness.

Here’s a handy little metaphor on core updates from Google:

One way to think of how a core update operates is to imagine you made a list of the top 100 movies in 2021. A few years later in 2024, you refresh the list. It's going to naturally change. Some new and wonderful movies that never existed before will now be candidates for inclusion. You might also reassess some films and realize they deserved a higher place on the list than they had before. The list will change, and films previously higher on the list that move down aren't bad. There are simply more deserving films that are coming before them.

Core updates happen periodically throughout the year. But note that core updates are holistic updates to Google Search’s entire algorithm, and they differ from other kinds of periodic updates from Google, like spam updates.

Why Should Website Owners Pay Attention to Core Updates?

By nature, Google’s core updates are designed to dramatically change search rankings and visibility. That means any website could be vulnerable to a drastic downturn in traffic as soon as a new core update is underway. If this happens, it means your site is hosting content that Google has determined is low quality, or even spam.

To protect your traffic alone is a good reason to stay on top of Google’s core updates. But here’s a list of the reasons why it’s especially important:

✔ ️Rankings and Traffic Changes: Like mentioned above, core updates from Google have the power to completely tank your rankings across search, which in turn tanks your web traffic. Staying on top of core updates allows you to monitor fluctuations in real time so that you can take the right steps to reverse any major dips to your site’s traffic.

Here’s an example of just how much traffic can be impacted by core updates. This is an SEO expert analyzing web volatility during Google’s March 2024 core update:

✔ Quality Guidelines: Just like Google’s algorithm is evolving, so are its guidelines on how the search engine defines quality content. Remember, every core update has the same mission — improving the quality of pages that make it to the top of search results. By paying attention to core updates, publishers can make sure they are complying with the latest regulations from Google to stay ahead of major changes.

✔ User Experience: Not to sound like a broken record, but core updates are all about improving user experience. If your site makes it a priority to stay on top of core updates, you will always be auditing your site for maximum usability. Making frequent improvements to your site’s user experience will only increase traffic and nurture user loyalty in the long run.

✔ Competitive Advantage: Most publishers and website owners have a lot on their plate, and staying on top of the latest SEO strategies isn’t usually the first priority. By understanding the factors that impact core updates, publishers can make smart changes to content, website structure, and SEO strategies to ensure they’re staying ahead of their competitors who may not be paying attention.

How Can I Prepare for Core Updates?

No surprise here. The best way you can prepare for a Google core update is by consistently delivering what Google calls helpful content. Helpful content is written solely to meet the needs of users and not to game or trick search engines. You can read more about what Google thinks is helpful content, including questions you can ask to assess your own content, here.

Google also has a set of principles called E-E-A-T that helps determine which content is most helpful. E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. This means Google is always looking to promote content that shows authenticity, demonstrates expertise on a topic, has been created by experts, and is trusted by readers.

From Moz.

In addition to creating quality content, you can also perform technical SEO site audits to identify any additional issues that could be impacting your site’s indexing across search. This could include eliminating spammy backlinks, unorganized site structure, duplicate content, or bad schema makeup. Click here to learn more about technical SEO.

Maintaining a website with people-first content that’s also optimized for user experience isn’t a one-and-done job. A successful SEO strategy requires frequent tweaking to make sure that your site is always optimized for maximum crawlability. Use insights from your site’s data to proactively make changes to your content and website to stay ahead of core updates.

What’s the Best Way to Monitor Traffic After an Update?

Monitoring your site’s web traffic when a core update is both underway and completed is the most critical way to see how your site is performing against the new algorithm. This is the exact data that can also fuel key insights so that you can stay ahead of the next core update.

Here are some of the best ways to monitor traffic after a core update:

✔ Google Analytics: Use Google Analytics to track changes to overall traffic and search-generated traffic. Analyze sessions, pageviews, bounce rates, and average session durations to get an idea if any user behavior has changed since the update. You can also monitor user engagement metrics like time on page and scroll depth to get a better understanding around if your user journey has been impacted by the core update.

✔ Google Search Console: Google Search Console monitors how your site appears in search results, and breaks down data by each keyword or set of keywords that your site is ranking for. Monitor any changes in impressions, clicks, CTR, and average positions of these keywords to see if your search traffic has been impacted by a core update.

✔ Keyword Ranking Tools: Keyword ranking tools like Semrush, Moz, and Ahrefs track the rankings of your desired keywords before and after core updates. Use these tools to see if you’ve gained or lost any visibility across your site’s top keywords.

✔ User Feedback: You can also monitor social media, reviews, or any general feedback directly from your site’s users to see if they’ve noticed any changes in your site’s visibility or performance.

Monitoring your site’s performance from those various channels should help you see if your traffic was negatively or positively impacted by a core update. Paying close attention to any changes in user behavior should help you get to the bottom of any low-quality pages that could be the culprit of your site’s traffic volatility.

Conquer Core Updates With RebelMouse

RebelMouse is an AI-enabled CMS that’s designed to anticipate Google’s core updates before they even happen. Our intuitive editorial tools set up content creators for success before each page is even published, and our deep understanding of technical SEO frequently puts the sites in our network at the top of Google’s search results.

Click here to read our timeline of Google’s latest updates this year. And if you’re interested in publishing on a platform that’s built to keep up with the rigorous and evolving standards of Google, let’s talk and figure out how we can grow and transform your business.

Content Creation Trends to Watch in 2024

As we approach the halfway point in 2024, it’s a good time to check in on what is making waves in the content creation world. At this point, it’s common knowledge that quality content is the ticket to any successful website, but because the landscape is always changing, just great content isn’t always enough.

For years it felt like creators were constantly pivoting to chase the next social media trend, but now that social platforms have less prevalence than they used to, the world of content creation looks more different than ever before. In fact, a recent study from Gartner found that 50% of consumers plan to abandon or significantly limit their interactions with social media by 2025.

So with user behaviors changing, what does the future of content creation actually look like as we head into the second half of 2024? Here are a few trends to watch.

AI-Generated Content

No surprise here that the rise of artificial intelligence( AI) is the top trend to watch for this year, and likely many years to come. The explosion of AI and predictive models like ChatGPT have changed the game for content creators and editors who already have too much on their plate. AI-powered editorial tools can help writers by generating ideas, suggesting headlines, and even drafting entire blogs, articles, or social posts.

AI-generated headline suggestions on RebelMouse.

However, it is important to remember that there is no replacement for actual human creativity. Instead, AI can be a powerful tool to enhance human originality and productivity by helping creators deliver the best content possible to its readers. Click here to learn more about how AI can transform websites.

Voice-Optimized Content

Voice-enabled devices and voice search have become increasingly popular in recent years, which means optimizing content for vocal interactions is important to consider as 2024 chugs along. Creating voice-optimized content means tailoring your content to align with the way people speak to voice assistants like Alexa, Google Home, or Siri. This means using casual, conversational language that’s easy to understand.

One perk of creating voice-optimized content is that it naturally will help you with your SEO strategy as well. By creating content that's optimized for voice, you should:

✔ ️Answer Common Questions: Anticipating questions that your audience may naturally ask and answering them succinctly benefits voice-enabled devices and increases your visibility across search.

✔ Structure Your Content: Use headings, subheadings, and bullet points to make it easy for voice assistants to understand the most important information. Having a good taxonomy across your website will also increase your search performance.

✔ Optimize for Featured Snippets: Voice assistants will pull information and answers from featured snippets in search results, so it’s important that your site has snippets that are concise and helpful.

Here’s an example of a snippet answering a question from voice search:

Sourced from Semrush.

While optimizing for voice search seems a little unnatural to content creators focused on writing and editing, it can actually maximize your reach. Prioritizing natural language queries will only help your audience find exactly what they are looking for.

Personalized Content Experiences

These days users have the liberty to be more choosy — which means the more that content meets their individual needs, the better. By creating content with individual readers in mind, publishers can connect with their users on a deeper level, which will help nurture loyalty and repeat visits. Also, taking the time to craft personalized content experiences demonstrates to your audience that you have a deeper understanding of their needs, which can be a key differentiator from your competitors.

Here are some examples of personalized content that can enhance the user journey::

✔ Personalized Product Recommendations: E-commerce sites can use data like past purchases and browser history to recommend specific products to users. The advancement of AI is making this even more efficient and a bigger revenue driver than ever before. Click here to learn more.

✔ Targeted Email Campaigns: Once you have insights about your audience, you can easily segment them by interests for email campaigns. Personalized emails can feature articles that meet these interests, special offers, and unique CTAs.

✔ Customized News Feeds: Using content aggregators and news feeds is a great way to cater content to users based on everything from past reading history to social media habits. This is also a perfect way to personalize content for readers across different platforms.

Content Localization and Globalization

One of the best parts of the open web is that it dissolves geographical boundaries. On the flip side, sometimes content can isolate certain users if it's not adapted to resonate with different groups of people in different areas of the world. You can localize your content by offering your website in different languages, changing messaging to connect with other cultures, and finding authors in different geographical areas to create content.

On RebelMouse, you can easily transform content into different languages with just a few clicks.

While it may seem like a lot of extra work, investing in localized content can increase traffic to your website from different regions, which in turn will boost your site’s engagement and foster a stronger connection with a variety of users.

Technical SEO

Google is the most popular website on the open web, and every content creator knows that it takes a lot to win the phrases that their audiences are searching for. Primarily, the ticket to any winning search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is creating quality, helpful content. But it takes a bit more than that these days to win the SEO game.

The prioritization of technical SEO has become more important as the content race continues on — and it makes sense. With Google’s massive control of web referral traffic, publishers and content creators need to make sure that their website is set up to easily grab the attention of Google’s crawler.

Google owns 84.9% of U.S. search engine referral traffic. From SparkToro.

Technical SEO is the behind-the-scenes actions you can take to optimize your website for efficient indexing by Google’s web crawlers. This includes fine-tuning your site’s performance, mobile-friendliness, crawlability, structure, and schema markup. If all of these technical aspects of a website are structured correctly, that tells Google’s crawler that your site is high quality — and that means higher rankings and more referral traffic from the web’s most important source. A good technical SEO strategy also improves user experience and makes it less likely for users to turn away from your site, which in turn will drive more conversions and secure growth for your business.

Click here to learn more about technical SEO.

Get Ahead of Content Creation Trends

If you were reading a list of content creation trends from several years ago, it would look totally different. There would likely be mentions of robust social media strategies and readable videos, and things like AI editorial tools and voice-friendly content would be nowhere to be found. Since the definition of what constitutes a successful digital strategy is always changing, so should your ability to embrace these industry shifts.

RebelMouse is a content management system (CMS) and creative agency that’s always anticipating these changes, often before they even fully take shape. Powered by AI, RebelMouse is poised to revolutionize your content strategy with an intuitive interface, intelligent editorial tools, and built-in solutions for technical SEO, personalization, and more.

Looking to engage new audiences through this year’s content trends? Request a demo today to check out how RebelMouse can help.

Best CMS for News Websites and Large-Scale Publishing [2024]

Explore the 11 best CMS platforms for news websites in 2024!

Key Findings

  • Selecting the right CMS is critical for news websites. Key features include intuitive interfaces, collaboration tools, SEO, security, scalability, and analytics.
  • The ideal CMS for news websites is based on your specific needs, whether for large-scale publishing, AI automation, omnichannel distribution, or smaller news outlets.
  • News publishers can seamlessly scale their operations to keep pace with a growing readership

Choosing the best content management system (CMS) for news websites is crucial for publishers since it impacts their online presence. The news industry is demanding and competitive, requiring innovation, creativity, and reliable systems for high-volume publishing.

According to statistics, digital publishing revenue is expected to exceed $27 billion by 2027, and the market is intensifying. Whether you're a publishing powerhouse or an independent news organization, you need a suitable CMS with robust technology for high-quality content.

This article will cover why a CMS matters for news websites, key platform features you should look for, the 11 best news CMS platforms, and how to choose the right CMS for news publishing.

Quality Isn't Enough Anymore. Publish With The Best Of The Web.

Click Here

11 Best CMS Platforms for News Websites

What Is a News CMS?

A CMS that caters to news publishing is an editorial hub that streamlines content creation for news of all kinds. The right CMS should offer unique tools and features that simplify creating, editing, and distributing content across news websites and social channels. With a digital news system, editors and journalists can collaborate, manage content, and scale their publishing capabilities beyond a typical platform.

Why Should Publishers Use a CMS for News Sites?

News websites can attract millions of readers by hosting thousands of articles online. Since large-scale news publishers post content every day, they require a high-performance system to meet demand. This level of content production requires a CMS that is fast, secure, and dependable for efficient output.

An efficient CMS offers several advantages for news websites:

  • Streamlined Workflow: A CMS makes content creation effortless for everyone without coding skills. The best news CMS provides a user-friendly interface and editorial tools to speed up work processes.
  • Collaboration: In a digital newsroom, editors and writers must communicate effectively. The right CMS supports communication channels for developing content drafts, monitoring changes, and making revisions, all within the platform.
  • Digital Asset Management (DAM): CMS platforms that provide a DAM integration improve bulk asset uploads and automatically convert images to modern formats for optimal web delivery.
  • Customized Publishing: The best news CMS offers customization options that align with your workflow and brand identity. Features that improve news websites include content scheduling, social channel integrations, banners, and sticky positions.
  • User Management: User management allows you to create different roles for members with specific permissions. Editors can control CMS access, ensuring only authorized personnel can publish or edit critical content.

A news CMS can increase content production for publishers, but not all platforms are the same. Before selecting a CMS, consider if the features and services align with your publishing needs.

What News Websites Need to Succeed Online

As a publisher, you need more than a content management system to boost online visibility — you need the right platform and playbook for publishing success. While high-quality content is crucial for marketing and increasing traffic from Google Search, it's ineffective on a poorly designed website. News websites need a dedicated team for success strategies and better access to advanced search engine optimization (SEO) tools.

Here's why using an experienced support team and a modern CMS for news publishing is critical for media sites in order to build and grow brand exposure:

  • Expertise Across Functions: A strategy team can help you maximize CMS features by offering guidance on improving your marketing campaigns.
  • Access to Innovative Products: A team-supported CMS provides access to new software, helping users upgrade their content strategy with exclusive products like AI technology and automation tools.
  • Technical Know-How: Although a modern CMS simplifies content organization, technical tasks like custom web solutions or specialized security needs may require help from a web developer or IT specialist.
  • Data Analysis: To guarantee meeting your business goals, a news CMS should provide analytics such as user behavior, social media insights, conversion tracking, A/B testing, and first-party data reports to ensure that your efforts are on the right track.
  • Growth and Scalability: A CMS team ensures news websites operate at peak performance, supporting increased online presence and high-volume publishing for growth and scalability.

With a skilled support team, news publishers can optimize their CMS and website for strategic content creation, data-driven decisions, and audience engagement.

Essential CMS Features for News Websites in 2024

You've learned how a CMS helps news publishers, now let's explore some key CMS features that push the competitive envelope. Beyond content generation, a modern CMS should include tools for brand exposure, user behavior tracking, AI-powered enhancements, SEO, Core Web Vitals monitoring, and opportunities for earning revenue.

Consider the following CMS features to help you achieve publishing success:

1. Comprehensive Editorial Dashboard

The best CMS for news sites offers an editorial dashboard with a suite of tools to manage content. It streamlines actions like assigning stories, tracking progress, scheduling publications, and collaboration. This improves efficiency and ensures a smooth workflow, especially for breaking news.

Your dashboard should include:

  • User-friendly content editing tools
  • SEO content and metadata suggestions
  • Image optimization
  • Keyword search and discovery
  • Google Analytics and Google Search Console integrations
  • Access to HTML code
  • Structured data mapping
  • Mobile responsive testing

2. Multimedia Support

Today's audiences expect diverse content. A CMS that supports image and video embedding, audio, interactive elements, and customizable layouts allows publishers to present news in exciting ways. Impressing your audience with entertaining media will increase user retention and experiences.

3. User-Friendly Interface

A user-friendly CMS enables staff to contribute content, regardless of technical skill. Intuitive interfaces with easy site navigation, color schemes, and layouts improve user satisfaction and help journalists focus more on creative creations and less on complex systems.

4. Advanced SEO Features

SEO is the backbone of capturing organic traffic. News websites profit from advertising revenue and SEO tactics can help boost clicks and impressions. Using a CMS with smart SEO tools built in, like keyword tags, metadata editing, sitemap generation, and keyword search volume discovery, can improve publishers' search rankings and reach.

5. Robust Security and Scalability

News websites are prime targets for cyberattacks. A secure CMS keeps hackers away from sensitive data and prevents breaches. Look for CMS platforms that offer security features such as SOC 2 Type 2 compliance, plugin hack resistance, and AWS GuardDuty to ensure site security.

Scalability allows the platform to handle growing or spiking traffic and content volume without compromising performance. If you are a high-volume news publisher, ensure your CMS can accommodate thousands upon thousands of articles and loadable elements.

6. Analytics and Reporting Tools

Understanding user behavior is key to driving interest. Built-in CMS analytics offer insights into traffic sources, popular content, engagement, and browsing patterns. Platforms leveraging first-party data can help you better personalize your website's content to your audience's preferences.

7. Audience Engagement Features

To build a loyal community, news websites must encourage visitor interactions. A CMS with interactive features and communication channels like comment sections, polls, quizzes, and social media integrations drive more organic traffic and promote strong reader engagement.

8. Omnichannel Publishing

Consumers read news articles on multiple devices and platforms. The best CMS for news websites enables seamless connectivity with other systems via omnichannel distribution. A compatible platform allows publishers to link to websites, social media, mobile apps, and email newsletters, ensuring readers can access content from anywhere.

9. Monetization Opportunities

News publishers must monetize to generate revenue and expand their business. A news-focused CMS easily integrates with ad platforms and subscription services, allowing publishers to profit from content and sponsorships.

Here are some revenue strategies that benefit publishers:

  • Membership subscriptions
  • AI-powered promotions
  • Email newsletters
  • Sign-up walls
  • Programmatic advertising

10. AI-Powered Technology

Using AI is no longer a luxury, but rather a necessity. AI automates repetitive tasks like content tagging, image optimization, scheduling, and personalization, saving time and boosting efficiency. A modern CMS can seamlessly integrate with AI, improving publishing performance beyond the limitations of older platforms.

The following AI-powered services enhance CMS publishing and the user experience:

  • AI-Driven Content Recommendations: AI-powered content recommendations keep readers engaged by suggesting relevant articles based on their browsing history.
  • AI-Powered First-Party Data: AI-powered first-party data analyzes user preferences, and then offers tailored content suggestions.
  • AI-Headline Generator: Headline generators create headlines, social captions, meta descriptions, universal AI prompts, and more to boost publishing.
  • Editorial Assistants: AI editorial assistants speed up content creation by tailoring it to your brand, tone, and style through programmed prompts, ensuring audience relevance.

11. Cross-Network Publishing

Managing multiple news sites and publishing stories across platforms can be time-consuming and costly. Cross-network publishing is distributing content across several web domains using a single platform. This CMS feature enables publishers to provide consistent messaging, saving time and effort.

12. A/B Layout Testing

Testing different website layouts helps publishers identify the content and design elements that appeal most to their audience. A platform that supports A/B testing is the top CMS for news publishers looking to make data-driven decisions, improve website design, and elevate the user experience.

The Top 11 Content Management Systems for News Publishers

When selecting a CMS, publishers should consider a modern platform that provides customization, cross-network distribution, performance, secure hosting, strong customer service, smart SEO tools, and an intuitive interface for streamlined workflows.

Here are the 11 best CMS platforms for news websites in 2024:

1. RebelMouse

RebelMouse CMS home page

RebelMouse is a dynamic CMS for news publishers looking to scale their site’s speed, engagement, and audience growth. Known as the fastest and most secure CMS of 2024, RebelMouse goes beyond content management. It's a digital experience platform (DXP) loaded with SEO-focused editorial tools for ranking higher, content performance tracking, customizable CMS features, and premium AI-powered web solutions to help publishers jump ahead of their competitors.

RebelMouse is the only CMS that guarantees green Core Web Vitals for top-level website performance, automatic site updates, 24/7 customer support, smart web analysis, and robust publishing functionality for driving organic traffic. With an intuitive interface that simplifies content management for non-technical users, RebelMouse is the best CMS for news websites, traffic growth, and building a loyal audience.

RebelMouse CMS Publishing Tools

  • Built-in keyword finder
  • SEO-optimized tags
  • Automated internal and external linking
  • One-click URL optimization
  • Streamlined external linking
  • Metadata optimizer

RebelMouse CMS publishing tools

Optimize Content With AI-Powered Integrations

RebelMouse AI headline and metadata generators

Team-Supported Engagement Analytics

RebelMouse engagement analytics dashbaord for No Film School

RebelMouse Benefits

  • Automatic site upgrades
  • Custom AI technology personalized per client
  • 24/7 client support
  • Enterprise-grade hosting
  • Optimized content delivery network (CDN)
  • Data analytics for web and content optimization
  • Integrated with Google Search Console for keyword ranking
  • Programmatic ad management
  • Multi-layered security
  • Built for growth and scalable publishing
  • Performs technical SEO reviews and improvements
  • Free website health check offered

RebelMouse Cons

  • Not suitable for beginning blogging businesses
  • Not open source; limited control over back-end codebase

Best For

  • RebelMouse is ideal for independent to enterprise-level news organizations looking for a high-performing, fast, mobile-responsive, highly customizable, and intuitive platform backed with 24/7 technical support and reinforced security.

2. Drupal

Drupal CMS home page

Drupal is an open-source platform built for news organizations of all sizes, especially high-volume publishers. It offers an advanced interface for teams, allowing for smooth content creation and management. Its customizable themes and site templates help publishers design news websites that reflect their brand identity. Large news organizations can leverage Drupal's robust features to manage complex content structures and workflows.

Drupal Benefits

  • Open-source platform
  • Customizable platform
  • Ideal for large-volume publishing
  • Free themes and modules
  • Detailed taxonomy for easy navigation

Drupal Cons

  • Steep learning curve
  • Setup may require developer-level expertise or technical support
  • Costly for small organizations looking to customize
  • Complex or difficult-to-upgrade platform
  • Ongoing hosting and development costs
  • Limited security support

Best For

  • Drupal is best for larger news organizations with complex content structures needing website personalization and the ability to scale.

3. WordPress

WordPress CMS home page

WordPress is a powerful and user-friendly platform for news publishing. It offers a balance of features, affordability, and scalability for publishers of all sizes, from bustling newsrooms to solo bloggers. WordPress has a vast library of free and premium themes for design lovers to craft a functional and aesthetically inviting website.

Whether you're a small blog or a larger news organization, WordPress can grow with your traffic and content volume for expansion or scalability. However, a different CMS may better fit news organizations with particular customization needs. WordPress shines with user-friendliness, but complex modifications require plugins that could impact performance and security.

WordPress Benefits

  • Simple, user-friendly dashboard for content management
  • Inclusive CMS for small bloggers or large media companies
  • Free themes and plugins
  • Cost-effective for beginners
  • Built-in SEO tools
  • Designed for scalability

WordPress Cons

  • Vulnerable to hacking and malware
  • Outdated plugins may cause performance issues
  • Requires regular platform updates for advanced security
  • Deep customization may demand coding skills or pricey plugins
  • Ongoing cost for maintenance, customization, or website upgrades

Best For

  • WordPress works well for local publications and news organizations that often need an easy-to-use dashboard to post content without extensive customization.

4. Joomla

Joomla CMS home page

Joomla is a free and open-source CMS designed for flexibility, customization, and functionality. Users can craft a unique website with free templates or custom designs, and easily manage content using Joomla's publishing tools, codeless editing, and categorization.

News publications can reach a global audience with multilingual publishing and smart user management, facilitating smooth collaboration between journalists and editors.

For technical support, Joomla's extensive documentation, tutorials, and supportive community ensure you're always on track. It's the top CMS for news websites seeking a unique, user-friendly, and feature-rich online experience.

Joomla Benefits

  • Easy-to-use interface for creating, editing, and scheduling news articles
  • Multiple extensions and templates for web customization
  • Create different user roles with varying access levels for journalists, editors, and administrators
  • Multilingual support
  • Fit for small news blogs to large news portals
  • Community of developers for technical help

Joomla Cons

  • Steeper learning curve compared to some beginner-friendly platforms
  • Lacks robust security features and maintenance compared to competitors
  • Requires extensions for full site functionality that may impact or slow down site performance
  • Self-hosted platform
  • Requires technical knowledge for advanced site personalization

Best For

  • Joomla is ideal for news websites that require a scalable, cost-effective, and adaptable platform, and are comfortable managing a self-hosted solution or hiring in-house developers.

5. Quintype

Quintype CMS home page

Quintype is a headless CMS and an all-in-one content management platform for digital newsrooms that streamlines your workflow with rich editing tools, multimedia support, and mobile-friendly publishing.

Quintype goes beyond content creation. It offers post scheduling and content distribution across the web, apps, and social media, all while gaining deep audience insights and generating revenue through subscriptions and advertising. This cloud-based platform scales with you so that you can focus on your journalism.

Quintype Benefits

  • Mobile-first design
  • Analytics for audience tracking and data-driven decisions
  • Integrates subscriptions, advertising, and other revenue streams
  • Secure access with features like two-factor authentication
  • Built for scalability and growth

Quintype Cons

  • Limited customization
  • Potentially costly for smaller publications
  • Difficult for users to migrate content or switch their CMS

Best For

  • Quintype is a strong option for news publishers seeking a modern and feature-rich platform. It's ideal for mobile optimization, content workflows, and monetization. However, consider the potential limitations around customization and the challenge of switching platforms before deciding.

6. Labrador

Labrador CMS home and book demo page

Labrador is a top CMS for professional newsrooms and high-traffic news sites that streamlines the publishing process with collaborative tools, AI integrations, and a user-friendly platform built for speed and efficiency. With Labrador's advanced editing features that accelerate workflows, journalists can focus on crafting exceptional content. At the same time, publishers benefit from the flexibility of a headless CMS and the ease of scaling with Labrador's scalable architecture.

Labrador Benefits

  • Paywall monetization opportunities
  • AI-powered features
  • Built for growth and scalability
  • Headless CMS functionality

Labrador Cons

  • Website lacks detailed disclosures about CMS
  • Less established compared to competitors
  • CMS pricing is unavailable without a consultant

Best For

  • Labrador is valuable for news websites that value scalability, speed, and teamwork. However, the lack of comprehensive CMS information and a smaller user base may make it worthwhile to look into other possibilities.

7. Ghost

Ghost CMS home page

Ghost is a CMS designed for news publications, emphasizing user-friendliness and audience interaction. It provides a simple editor, integrated membership and subscription features, newsletter administration, and an intuitive user interface. Ghost stands out for its focus on content creation, security, and building connections with readers.

Ghost is a reliable choice for independent journalists, smaller news outlets, and bloggers who prefer a streamlined publishing experience — even though it may lack extensive customization options and a large plugin library compared to some competitors.

Ghost Benefits

  • User-friendly interface
  • Simple learning curve
  • Paid subscription and revenue stream opportunities
  • Email newsletter targeting built into the platform
  • Free and paid hosted platform options
  • Ideal for small and independent publishers

Ghost Cons

  • Limited customization
  • Suited for basic web functionality
  • Poor functionality for complex websites

Best For

  • Ghost is ideal for news publishers who value a simple, secure platform with built-in membership and newsletter tools. Ghost may not be the best fit if you need a highly customizable website with a vast plugin library.

8. Arc XP

Arc XP CMS home page

Arc XP is a scalable solution for managing and distributing content. Designed for larger organizations with complex workflows, Arc XP streamlines content creation with advanced management tools and a headless architecture. Journalists benefit from a DAM-supported system for easy photo and video integration, omnichannel distribution, and subscription management for reader revenue.

Some downsides to Arc XP include high pricing and a difficult learning curve. Overall, Arc XP enables news organizations to create websites that perform well, target content wisely, and increase audience engagement across all platforms.

Arc XP Benefits

  • Supports subscription models for revenue generation
  • Provides tools to manage, store, and integrate photos and videos
  • Promotes targeted content delivery across platforms
  • Supports commerce functionalities
  • Built-in tools for omnichannel management

Arc XP Cons

  • Costly for smaller news organizations
  • Steeper learning curve

Best For

  • Arc XP delivers an agile CMS solution for large news websites. Its extensive features can improve audience engagement, personalize content delivery, and streamline workflows, even though it can be costly and complex for smaller publishing outlets.

9. BLOX Digital

Blox Digital CMS home page

BLOX Digital provides news publishers with tools for content creation, website management, and audience engagement. While it has a user-friendly interface, streamlined workflow, and newsroom-specific features, it may come with a higher price tag and less customization than alternative CMS options. BLOX Digital is a top choice for established news websites looking for a comprehensive solution for efficient content creation, website management, and audience growth.

BLOX Digital Benefits

  • Supports user management and collaboration
  • Drag-and-drop website builder
  • Mobile-friendly templates and SEO optimization tools
  • Built-in commenting system, social integration, and email marketing tools
  • Tailored features cater to the specific needs of news publishers

BLOX Digital Cons

  • Costly
  • Steep learning curve for new users
  • Limited customization

Best For

  • Newspapers and other traditional news organizations that want to move online or improve their digital presence with a comprehensive platform.

10. Eidosmedia

Eidosmedia CMS home page

Eidosmedia is a CMS for mid-sized and large news organizations focused on digital publishing and print capabilities. Their system offers multi-channel publishing, AI automation, and subscription management to boost content output and accommodate complex layouts. This CMS is ideal for established newsrooms seeking to streamline workflows and content creation, but it may be challenging to learn and expensive.

Eidosmedia Benefits

  • Integrated paywall and subscription management
  • Multi-channel publishing
  • Decoupled CMS for layout design flexibility

Eidosmedia Cons

  • May present a challenging learning curve for users
  • Costly and geared toward larger news publishers

Best For

  • Eidosmedia is better suited for well-established news organizations with complex publishing needs that require valuable tools for efficiency and reach. For smaller news organizations seeking a cost-effective solution, Eidosmedia may be too expensive.

11. Hocalwire

Hocalwire CMS home page

Hocalwire is a digital newsroom CMS built specifically for news organizations. Hocalwire offers a streamlined workflow for managing content from creation to publishing. With collaboration tools, mobile app creation, and AI-powered personalization features, this CMS is ideal for news sites looking to increase efficiency, audience engagement, and revenue potential.

At its most basic plan, the starting price of $500 per month might be steep for smaller publishers, and its focus on streamlining may limit customization options compared to traditional CMS platforms.

Hocalwire Benefits

  • AI-powered features to personalize news feeds
  • Supports collaboration, growth, and scalability
  • Fast speed and performance
  • Streamlined content management and monetization

Hocalwire Cons

  • High pricing for smaller news publishers
  • Limited customization and web flexibility

Best For

  • Hocalwire is an ideal CMS for established news organizations that produce a large volume of content and need a feature-rich platform to manage their digital workflow. The pricing structure may be unsuitable for individual bloggers or smaller news outlets.

How to Build the Best News Website

Building the best news website involves a lot of strategic planning. To develop and launch the best website, follow these steps:

  • Target Audience and Content Strategy: Identify your target audience and tailor content to their interests. Develop a content strategy that delivers valuable and engaging news coverage.
  • User-Friendly Design: Prioritize the user experience with a clean, clutter-free design that is easy to navigate and visually appealing. Mobile responsiveness is crucial for today's audiences.
  • SEO Optimization: Optimize website content and structure for search engines to improve organic discoverability and attract readers.
  • Content Delivery Network: Cross-network publishing will position you for success to increase your digital footprint and site traffic. To optimize multi-domain publishing, make sure your platform uses a highly optimized CDN.

How to Choose the Right CMS for News Publishing

Choose a CMS that meets your news publishing requirements while accommodating your company's growth. Prioritize essential features within your budget and ensure that your platform is streamlined for high-volume publishing, analytics, social media, and marketing.

RebelMouse is the leading CMS for high-traffic news publishing. Our feature-rich platform provides the tools to streamline workflows, increase organic reach, unlock new revenue streams, implement AI personalization, and foster deeper audience engagement.

Ready to transform your digital presence with the best CMS for news websites in 2024? Schedule a demo today to see how RebelMouse can help your news organization reach new heights.

FAQ

For more information on CMS options, here are some commonly asked questions:

1. What security features should a news website have?

News websites require a highly secure CMS environment to fend off threats like malware and data breaches. Enterprise-level security features, such as SOC 2 Type 2 compliance and SSL/HTTPS, are essential. Developers may utilize SOPs for data encryption and tools like AWS GuardDuty and AWS WAF.

2. How does a CMS affect SEO for news publishers?

Fast loading times are critical for high-traffic news websites. To maximize SEO, your CMS must run at peak performance, ensuring rapid loading times and meeting Google’s Core Web Vitals standards. Regardless of SEO strategy, a poorly performing website may decrease Google's trust in a news site and reduce search engine visibility.

3. Which CMS is better than WordPress for news publishing?

Maintaining a modern WordPress site can be expensive due to technical SEO issues, plugin bugs, and malware. RebelMouse outperforms WordPress as a CMS by eliminating expensive updates and unsecure add-ons. RebelMouse ensures fast loading times and flawless technical SEO performance.

4. Should my news website be mobile responsive?

Mobile accounts for 58.21% of global internet traffic, compared to 39.76% for desktop. With mobile devices accounting for most of the web traffic, having a mobile-responsive news site is essential. A mobile-friendly website improves accessibility, expands reach, and keeps visitors informed and engaged.

5. How important is scalability for news publishing?

Scalability is vital for growing news websites. A CMS must support expansion to increase profits, reach broader audiences, adopt new personalization technologies, and enhance online presence without compromising speed or user experience. Scalability ensures smooth operations, even during traffic surges.

How to Enable Multi-Factor Authentication on RebelMouse

What Is Multi-Factor Authentication and Why Does It Matter?

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is a security mechanism that requires users to provide two or more verification factors to gain access to a resource, such as an application, online account, or a VPN. Unlike traditional authentication methods, which rely on a single factor like a password, MFA adds an additional layer of security by requiring extra verification from something the user knows (password), something the user has (security token or smartphone app), and/or something that’s unique to the user (biometric verification).

The significance of MFA in today’s digital landscape cannot be overstated. With the increasing prevalence of data breaches and cyber attacks, relying solely on passwords for security is increasingly risky. MFA enhances security by ensuring that even if one factor, like a password, is compromised, unauthorized access to an account is still prevented without the second factor.

For RebelMouse, implementing MFA means safeguarding user accounts and sensitive data from unauthorized access, which solidifies trust and reliability in the platform and your website.

How to Enable MFA for a User

To bolster security for RebelMouse users, enabling MFA is a straightforward process designed to be user-friendly and efficient. Here’s how users can activate MFA for their accounts:

First, navigate to the Multi-Factor Authentication Management page by appending /r/dashboard/multifactor_management to your site’s URL.

Then, tick the checkbox that says Enable Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). Upon activation, a QR code will appear on the screen.

The QR code can be scanned using any authentication app of the user's choice. Examples of authenticator apps include:

  • Google Authenticator
  • Authy
  • Microsoft Authenticator
  • LastPass Authenticator

After scanning the QR code, the authentication app will generate a temporary code. Every time the user needs to log in with MFA, they will need to open the app and copy the temporary code.

Login Process With MFA

After MFA has been enabled, the login process will include an additional step for verification:

  1. Enter your email and password as usual.
  2. When prompted, open the authentication app on your device and enter the code displayed for your account. This code refreshes periodically for added security.

Limitations

It's important to note that the current implementation of MFA for RebelMouse is designed to work exclusively with email accounts. This means that the primary method of user identification and authentication is through their registered email address. Users should ensure that their email accounts are secure and that they have access to their authentication apps to avoid being locked out of their accounts.

If you have any questions about MFA on RebelMouse, email support@rebelmouse.com or talk to your account manager today.

RebelMouse for News Publishers

RebelMouse is the leading CMS for news publishers, providing a modernized, high-performing, and customizable CMS built for speed and innovation. RebelMouse helps news publishers take control of their digital future with technology that solves critical business challenges and leapfrogs their competitors. For news publishers needing better functionality, security, and scalable approaches, get with RebelMouse to help you own your destiny and punch above your weight.

Trusted by News Publishers Globally

list of trusted RebelMouse clients and their company logos

Technology That Keeps News Sites Modern and Cost-Effective

There’s no room for bad technical SEO, slow-loading pages, or bad Core Web Vitals. But the backlogs developers face under WordPress and Drupal paradigms are enormous. Keeping what seems to be a basic site modern can cost millions a year without RebelMouse.

The Platform and Playbook That Maximize Organic Reach to News Content

​Producing fantastic content is key to marketing today. But trapping that content on a poorly built website is wasting precious resources and missing opportunities. We ensure the fastest, most stable, and most secure performance with perfect technical SEO. Our platform is strategic, guiding marketers to success across traffic and revenue.

A Powerful Editorial Experience: Strategic, Guided, and Efficient

  • Content creation and editing tools guide writers and editors to drive more traffic
  • Easy to publish beautiful long-form pieces
  • Works perfectly on mobile
  • Out-of-the-box workflow that is easy to further customize and configure
  • Empower editors with AI suggestions for metadata and headlines
  • Google Search Console data and stats are built into the editorial experience
  • Ongoing strategy support from the RebelMouse team for editorial success

Fully Capture All News Revenue Opportunities

  • Paywalls and memberships
  • Sign-up walls and email capture for newsletters, etc.
  • Self-serve ads for local or niche advertisers
  • Affiliate eCommerce integrations
  • Option for RebelMouse to handle all programmatic ads (or bring your own partner)
  • Native advertising integrated out of the box

The Best Platform for Technical SEO

RebelMouse is the only CMS that can guarantee green Core Web Vitals by contract. Our platform gives you the best SEO site health scores, and our strategy team trains teams to use the tools to create growth. AI is integrated natively to optimize structured data and taxonomies, as well as make editors efficient.

AI Natively Built Into the Platform

  • Readers get AI-powered content recommendations trained with stats data
  • Editors get insights and assists with metadata and optimizing content for distribution
  • Out-of-the-box personalized logged-in experiencing powered by AI

The CMS That Collects First-Party Data to Grow Your Business

  • IAB taxonomy support for content-related ads to boost programmatic revenue quickly
  • Progressive profiling for efficient creation of zero and first-party data
  • Support for any required integrations, such as Salesforce, SAP, HubSpot, etc.
  • Logged-in experiences for users to enhance the user experience and gather additional zero-party data for customizations

Optimized to Manage Many Domains With Smart Site Networks

  • Connect multiple sites across your portfolio for cross-network publishing and SEO boosts
  • Create once and publish X times to boost big cultural moments
  • Editorial workflow for smart and efficient content rewrites where needed
  • AI-powered content teasers across sites
  • Universal search across the entire site network
  • Frontend layout deployment can cross multiple sites at once

Leverage Our Distribution Channel Partners

  • Out-of-the-box technical integrations
  • A partner contact we can reach out to and get relationships started for you
  • Flipboard
  • Nordot
  • MSN
  • Yahoo
  • Apple News

Loved by News Publishers Who Have Grown on the Platform

Customize Editorial Experiences Extensively

  • Custom workflows and groups
  • Assign permissions depending on multiple factors
  • Customize content editors based on roles or content types
  • Share content between multiple sites
  • Tag content for smart rewrites or publish automatically across sites
  • Smart “Breaking News” banners

Manage Any Content Type

  • Articles
  • Blog posts
  • Product pages
  • Events
  • Videos
  • Live blogs
  • Custom content editors
  • Build community content applications quickly

Native Access to AI-Powered Search

  • Natural language queries
  • Taxonomy opportunities
  • Search has been a pain point for websites for decades
  • Consumers expect Google-level experiences and are delivered less
  • AI solves this once and for all — it’s the leapfrog solution that makes website search a tremendous experience
  • Users can have typos in their queries or use the wrong words, and AI resolves it all to find what they were looking for anyway

Robust Digital Asset Management

  • Automatically convert images into modern formats automatically
  • Bulk upload of assets
  • Seamlessly integrated into content editors
  • Manage rights and permissions
  • Easy to delete images for fair use requests, etc.
  • Custom workflow support

Build and Deploy Multivariate Tests

  • Test layouts against each other
  • Integrated into GA4 for analysis
  • Server-side rendering for fast performance
  • Test (or automate with AI) multiple teaser headlines for articles
  • A/B tests for multiple frontend layouts or features
  • Manage split-traffic tests for data analysis
  • Use conditional layouts to isolate variables
    • This can be based on content or user variables

Built on a Modern and Elegant Infrastructure

  • AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)
  • AWS-managed DBs
    • RDS, DocumentDB, ElastiCache
  • Vector database (AI Search Tools)
  • Istio (Routing System)
  • Let's Encrypt (SSL)
  • RabbitMQ (Event Bus)
  • Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD)
    • ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, TeamCity

Enterprise-Grade, Audited Site Security

  • SOC 2 Type 2 compliant
  • Penetration testing on demand
  • Highly secured CMS environment
  • The WordPress plugin ecosystem is a nest of security issues and stability problems that we’ve built a new approach to
  • DevOps/DevSec
    • SOPs (to encrypt secrets in GitHub repositories)
    • AWS GuardDuty
    • AWS WAF
    • GitHub Dependabot

RebelMouse Culture Matters

  • Global
  • Diverse
  • Empathetic
  • Talented
  • Kindness matters
  • Responsible
  • Very low employee churn rate
  • A positive culture to work at
  • A positive culture to work with

Join RebelMouse to Scale Your News Publishing

RebelMouse is the leading CMS for high-traffic news publishing. Our feature-rich platform provides you with the tools you need to streamline workflows, increase organic reach, unlock new revenue streams, implement AI personalization, and foster deeper audience engagement.

Ready to outperform your competitors and transform your digital presence? Schedule a demo today to see how RebelMouse can help your news organization reach new heights.

A Guide to Google’s Algorithm Updates and Changes in 2024

Helpful Links

A Brief Guide to Google’s New E-E-A-T Strategy

FAQ: Everything You Need to Know About Google’s Core Updates

What You Need to Know About Google’s Helpful Content Update

A Guide to Google’s Algorithm Updates and Changes in 2023

How to Optimize Your Website for Search

Search is the #1 Traffic Builder. Stay Up On The Google Game.

Click Here

The March 2024 Core Update Is Complete

Google recently announced that the March 2024 core update was completed on April 19, but did not actually announce its completion until a week later on April 26. In total, the update took 45 days to complete and caused tremendous volatility across the open web during its rollout.

In its post on X (formerly Twitter), Google included a link to a form for publishers to submit feedback about the update, as well as resources on how to recover from dips in search traffic.

Some publishers reported a 60% drop in traffic as the update was rolling out. The reports of huge traffic hits were not unexpected — Google said in its announcement to expect the March 2024 core update to be more complex than usual because it involves updates to multiple core systems. Google is notoriously vague about the details of its updates, but they did say that the March 2024 core update “marks an evolution” in how they identify the “helpfulness of content.”

💡 Reminder: In August 2022, Google rolled out a major algorithm update dubbed the “helpful content update.” The helpful content update uses machine learning to deprioritize content that isn’t, well, helpful. According to Google, that includes content that is unoriginal, is low quality, and was created primarily for search engines — not for the benefit of users. Since its initial rollout, Google will periodically make adjustments to algorithms to continue to prioritize content that is considered helpful to users. Click here to learn more.

Elizabeth Tucker, Director of Product at Google Search, told SEO expert Barry Schwartz that the March 2024 core update officially made helpful content part of its core ranking systems. Like mentioned above, helpful content updates would previously roll out individually. With this change, helpful content updates will now be a part of core updates.

"This update involves refining some of our core ranking systems to help us better understand if webpages are unhelpful, have a poor user experience, or feel like they were created for search engines instead of people. This could include sites created primarily to match very specific search queries.

We believe these updates will reduce the amount of low-quality content in Search and send more traffic to helpful and high-quality sites. Based on our evaluations, we expect that the combination of this update and our previous efforts will collectively reduce low-quality, unoriginal content in search results by 40%,” Tucker said.

Google said there’s nothing content creators need to do to adjust to this core update, except — of course — to create helpful, reliable content for users. Luckily, Google did publish a new FAQ page about what qualifies as helpful content. Click here to check it out.

Schwartz put together a brief list of what he knows so far about the March 2024 core update over at SEO Roundtable:

  • Name: Google March 2024 Broad Core Update
  • Launched: March 5, 2024 at around 12 p.m. ET.
  • Rollout: Completed 45 days later on April 26, 2024 at around 4:09 p.m. ET.
  • Targets: It looks at all types of content.
  • Penalty: It is not a penalty; it promotes or rewards great webpages.
  • Global: This is a global update impacting all regions, in all languages.
  • Impact: Google said it will result in a 45% reduction in low-quality unoriginal and unhelpful content in its search results.
  • Discover: Core updates impact Google Discover and other features; also feature snippets and more.
  • Recover: If you were hit by this, then you will need to look at your content and see if you can do better with Google's core update advice.
  • Refreshes: Google will do periodic refreshes to this algorithm, but may not communicate those updates in the future.

Fluctuations in web traffic could still occur even after this core update is completed. Click here to learn more about how you can prepare for core updates.

March 2024 Spam Update Completed

Also on March 5, 2024, Google rolled out a new spam update that took 14 days to complete. In this update, Google targeted three malicious practices that they’ve seen has become more prevalent across the web:

  1. Expired Domain Abuse: This is when someone uses an expired domain to take advantage of the previous owner’s search visibility to post low-value content. Click here for more information.
  2. Scaled Content Abuse: This type of spam is when someone generates numerous pages of low-value content to manipulate search rankings. The new policy around scaled content abuse in the March 2024 spam update has expanded to include auto-generated content, allowing action against scaled content abuse regardless of whether it's created through automation, human effort, or a combination of the two. Click here for more information.
  3. Site Reputation Abuse: This occurs when a site publishes third-party pages with little oversight from a first party to manipulate search rankings. Often these pages are full of advertising content that serves no value to readers. Google's new policy distinguishes acceptable third-party content, such as native advertising, which doesn't intend to manipulate rankings and serves regular readers, from abusive practices. Click here for more information.

Much like frequent core updates are centered around the continued prioritization of helpful content, Google will also periodically tweak its existing regulations around spam content with updates throughout the year. Click here for even more details from Google about the March 2024 spam update.

Keeping up with Google Search’s updates is a huge undertaking for publishers and content creators that already have a huge task at hand — creating an experience that builds loyal audiences. At RebelMouse, we anticipate these algorithm changes proactively, and continue to update our platform and guide our clients on how to maintain maximum visibility across search no matter what.

If you would like to stay ahead of the search game, let’s connect to figure out how we can work together and grow your business.

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