Unlike bloggers for smaller brands, publishers churn out large volumes of content, and best SEO practices must be tailored to reach a more diverse audience. Where brand blogs rely on niche interests, publishers must cast a wider net to gain and maintain interest and engagement. From refining site structure to avoiding duplicate content, here are the top SEO tips and tricks to ensure publishers attract the most traffic with winning content.

Know Your Audience First
Producing article after article without looking at the data on how readers are engaging with articles (or if they’re engaging at all) is a lost opportunity. To understand what readers want, publishers must consider how much time readers are spending with an article and whether they’re sharing it with others. By knowing what excites readers, publishers can continue producing data-powered personalized content and optimize it to attract new readers.

Refine Site Structure
How a website is structured affects how search engines crawl, interpret and rank pages. Larger sites have much to offer in terms of diverse content, but only if it’s organized well. To improve site structure, publishers must focus on the following:

• Pagination — dividing content across different pages;
• Categories and Tags — helping readers access specific topics
• Internal Linking — connecting pages for easy information flow
• Sitemap — categorizing a large volume of links by tags

Don’t Overlook Evergreen Content
Producing timely topical content can attract a lot of traffic, but only in the short term. By using evergreen content, publishers ensure a steady flow of traffic based on relevant keywords used within articles.

Optimize for Search
Writing good content is one thing; making sure people see your content is another. As long as search engines are ranking content for frequently searched phrases, publishers are able to maintain a steady stream of new traffic to the site by including key words and phrases in the site’s content. Publishers should also remember that there’s a difference between desktop vs. mobile optimization and take steps to ensure both.

Optimize Images
When images are used well, they drive readers to the site and help them understand an article on a deeper level. With AI-powered visual search on the rise and humans processing visuals 60,000 times faster than text, images are increasingly important in today’s best SEO practices. Aside from choosing the right visuals, publishers should optimize image titles and descriptions, use alt tags, include captions and size images appropriately.

Avoid Duplicate Content
When producing a large volume of content, publishers may be tempted to recycle old stories (their own or those from other sites), but they should resist the temptation. Google explains that if it suspects a website is trying to manipulate rankings and deceive users, it will “make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved.” Hint: that’s not a good thing. Stay on the good side of Google by taking an audience-driven approach, not only attracting readers to the site, but making them want to stay there.