My name is Larry Johnson, and I’m the editor and publisher of the Cobb County Courier, a local independent news site in Cobb County Georgia.
I’m starting this blog (and I have no illusions that it’s anything other than a blog) to flesh out techniques and policies in my role as publisher.
You won’t find a lot of graphics here, except for statistical charts, graphs and tables.
Another reason I started it is that I tend to get obsessive about projects. I’m a member of LION Publishers, and have posted frequently about this on their Facebook group. I began worrying that I risked seeming to spam the group, so I moved the discussion to this blog, where people can visit as they choose.
The specific event that led to this blog was that I monitor Google’s news tab carefully, and the Courier has been pretty successful in ranking pretty high when we keep our content fresh.
But in about March I began noticing that the Patch chain of sites, which has made Search Engine Optimization its business model, often managed to beat not only the Courier, but the much larger Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Marietta Daily Journal in the page rankings, often with absurdly weak content.
So I started a project to, as I jokingly called it, “out-Patch the Patch.”
I began really bearing down on Search Engine Optimization.
I made heavy use of Yoast to improve my rankings, started checking my site against Google Page Speed Insights frequently (I’m still not where I want to be in that respect) installed Hummingbird and Smush, and finally, when I realized my hosting platform was just innately weak, switched platforms.
The results exceeded my highest expectations.
I went from 20,000 pageviews in a good month, to regularly exceeding 100,000, and this improvement was almost immediate and has lasted for three solid months so far.
Here’s a screenshot of Google Analytics comparison of the past 30 days (the blue lines) versus the same period last year (the orange lines).
So what does that have to do with this blog?
I find it best to diagnose things by writing them out, and writing them out in public gives me the opportunity to get feedback from readers.
And I really need to systematize the approach I’ve been using, really understand which changes led to the results, and build on it.
In particular, and I’ll deal with this more in the next post, I need to understand why Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is now more than 50 percent of my total traffic, and how to take advantage of that enormous increase.
The AMP increase has a lot of implications for how I sell advertisements, how much attention I pay to social media promotion (since Google is funnelling a large majority of my traffic to me) and how to transform readers who came to me through a web search into regular readers.
So my next post is going to think out loud about AMP, a subject I’m just beginning to wrap my head around.
Publishers Notebook 