First, I love the Newspaper theme. There are so many good features and it has amazing UI. However, since adding the theme, I’ve noticed decreased organic SEO traffic. We are using Yoast as our SEO plugin and here is the basic report they are showing:
My questions:
1. Is there a way to auto-add focus keywords or use a better SEO plugin that works with Newspaper to increase our organic SEO rankings?
2. Is there anyone in this group that has had amazing SEO results using Newspaper?
3. Can I hire someone to help fix our organic SEO and improve our results.
Thanks forum readers!
We have amazing SEO results, but that’s because the content was created from the get go without concern for the “template” impacting SEO.
Meaning, the theme does not add/change your actual post content, title, meta data, h2/h3 tags in post or basic SEO practice of having your primary keywords in post title, meta title, first paragraph, description, and used couple of times in the actual post.
So, if your page is about chicken soup and that isn’t used properly it won’t rank as such, and regardless of theme/template/fonts/style/colors used.
Perhaps you mis-understand ‘focus keywords’ — what that means is that for any given page/post about something, like “chocolate recipe” — that “focus” keyword is used to “test” the SEO value of that post under that phrase. So, the “focus keyword” for that page might be “chocolate recipes” and you’d need to ensure that page is “optimized” for that content.
You can’t auto-magically add more content to posts without knowing what each post is supposed to be focused on; meaning if you have an article about Fords, just randomly inserting 20 instances of “FORD” on the page isn’t going to help anything.
You could hire us to help on this but frankly, the best course is simply look at your content and the posts you wish to rank well and really look at them one by one, and use the tools to ‘review’ that post/page. Yoast SEO then can help you “analyze” that — just because there was no focus keywords entered in yoast panel doesn’t mean there are none. Any page on any topic has built in focus keywords just by having the text in there.
So, my suggestion would be to read through the YOAST documentation and tutorials in depth to better understand what it actually does in this context (pun there).
We’re not cheap; but we’ve been doing SEO for 21 years now. But the point of using Yoast is to educate you on how you can do it yourself.
Start with good content about something. Then optimize that post using Yoast as an aid, but not always the 100% accurate expert. It’s an opinion, not the law. YOu can use it as help, not a requirement.
Hope that helped just a little 🙂
Also note YOAST recently rolled out new algorithms for search incorporating AMP, emphasis on local search, new x-factors rolling out for https (and now caution in Chrome browsers for non-https sites); so everything got shuffled a bit recently regardless of theme, platform or content.
If you don’t have https, now would be good time. You can also follow whassup with Google changes on sites like SearchEngineLand, Google blogs and forums, etc.
🙂
Thanks for the reply Chris S. We have over 16,000 posts, are you saying that we need to “touch” each one to make it more SEO friendly? I would be interested in learning more about your services if there is a way to speed up this process.
Hi, note i meant to say google rolled out new algorithm.
Yes, you need to use yoast tools for optimizing meta data but only you can materially change your content to be more focused on a topic. Common sense you cant just add random paragraphs of text to your posts for seo.
Good seo is about the baseline content on page… everything else supports that.
You might go download googles official guideline doc for seo best practices and read the yoast tutorials as first step.
But upshot not theme related.
Chris S., I’m very good at SEO…been doing this for a long time. All of our 16K+ articles have great optimized content. My question is about whether Newspaper adds value to SEO or makes it harder to rank high organically. Is there a US number I can call you at to discuss this further…?
Sorry. I’m not available for consulting at this time, and don’t promote my own services via this forum.
If you’re very good at SEO, then you likely don’t need me.
See Google’s info about changing site layout and how this can impact initial SERPS.
Also, read the YOAST tutorials in regard to your original question regarding “focus keywords” which has nothing whatsoever to do with the theme.
Main factors are
a) good content
b) optimizations for Google; page speed, https, AMP compatibility; meta data and markup
c) basic site optimizations for caching, minification, compression, ttl, opcache/memcache, http/2, mod_pagespeed, et al
Theme is not the mission critical aspect of any of that.
Good luck!
