SEO: The power of Google news!

It’s now common knowledge that SEO is not a science but an art! A SEO consultant will improve your website ranking for sure but can NOT assure a specific rank for it (or he’s a liar). I’m still amazed to see start ups spending a LOT of money in SEO consulting, SEM consulting and advertisements to improve their ranking and never using Google news.

• Google News: Based on Newspaper/Information websites RSS flow => real time
• Google engine: Based on website parsing => NOT real time (can be if your website is “popular”)

Let’s take a concrete example: You have a start up whose the purpose is to help customers finding the good restaurant in the good location (reviews, community etc…)
Let’s call this start up: FindTheHype.com

You need some traffic. A lot of traffic. Your first option is, of course, to ask for the full package (which is also very expensive):

• SEO consultants + hiring a SEO team to improve your natural ranking
• SEM research
• Purchase of Adwords
• Facebook applications
• Twitter
• Links generations (blog clouding)

You could also just hire two journalists who are going to feed a news/information website which will be separate but related to your core website.

Let’s call this website: HypeNews.com

The purpose of this method is to have enough content on HypeNews.com on a daily basis to apply and be accepted to Google and Yahoo news (it takes roughly 3 weeks from the application date).

Once you have been accepted, you have basically won! You can write any article with a Google-friendly title to beat you competitors on the most competitive queries. The trade off is that it doesn’t last very long (maybe few hours).

But you can basically push and control your traffic and redirect the users of HypeNews.com (information website) to FindTheHype.com (your start up).

To sum up, you basically use an information website to trust the first places on Google for few hours and then redirect the traffic to your main website. And believe me, two journalists who are going to write 5 to 7 articles a day on some CMS are way less expensive than a team of 5 “SEO expert”.


STOP THEORY!

Here’s a concrete example from my own experience (sorry it’s in French):

Our start up is about education/students and is called Bankexam.fr. We launched an information website called Keek.fr only for an SEO purpose. We have been accepted lately to Google News and here is the result.

We lately talked about some party (called special coke) launched by the government for the students body.




As you can see, we are showing up before the official government (.gouv) website. This example is not very relevant but I had to take something recent enough.

However, we need to push sometimes some content on very competitive queries. In June for example, all the education related websites want to be first on a 5 hours time window on “Resultats Bac” which are the results of the Baccalaureat (our national SAT). Can you now feel the power of Google News and how we can trust the first place without having to fight for natural SEO?

Of course you need to be accepted to Google News and not every start up can rely on an information website whose content is not that far from their core business. But if you can afford it, it is so worth it!