How you can get more SEO traffic with live blog pre-rendering

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In today’s digital landscape, standing out in search engine rankings is essential for driving traffic and ensuring your content reaches the right audience. We at Norkon understand the challenges of optimizing live content and enhancing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for news publishers and delved into facilitating the pre-rendering of live blogs for media publishers.

This blog post explores how news publishers can pre-render their live blogs to elevate their SEO strategy, ensuring their content not only attracts visitors but also ranks higher in Google’s Top Stories and Discovery.

SEO for News Publishers: ranking in time

For media and news publishers who rely on a live content strategy, maintaining high SEO standards ensures that content is discoverable and ranks favorably in Google’s search results.

Live blogs are highly engaging, providing real-time updates that audiences love. However, their dynamic nature can make them difficult for search engines to crawl and index effectively. Without the right approach, your live content could miss out on the exposure it deserves.

Optimized live blogs lead to:

• Drive organic traffic by ranking higher in Google’s search results
• Ensure real-time updates are indexed quickly, appearing in Google’s “Top Stories” or Discover feed
• Enhance audience engagement, turning visitors into loyal readers or subscribers.

SEO isn’t just about headlines, meta descriptions, keywords, and backlinks; it’s deeply intertwined with how your content is rendered and presented to your audience and to search engine crawlers. Effective SEO leads to increased organic traffic, higher audience engagement, and ultimately, better conversion rates. However, optimizing live blogs presents unique challenges, particularly when they are powered by modern web technologies like JavaScript.

Understanding the Challenge of Client-Side Rendering

Modern websites often rely on Client-Side Rendering (CSR), where JavaScript frameworks render content directly in the reader’s browser. While CSR enables dynamic and interactive experiences, it poses significant challenges for SEO:

1. Delayed Indexing by Search Engines: Although Google has improved its ability to index JavaScript-rendered content, the process is resource-intensive. Rendering content on the client side consumes substantial CPU cycles, leading to delays—often several hours or even days before the content is fully indexed. This is, of course, not an option for live blogs that are supposed to break the news and cover minute-by-minute reporting.
2. Inconsistent Rendering: Not all search engines handle CSR effectively. This inconsistency can result in uneven SEO performance across different search platforms.
3. Impact on Performance Metrics: CSR can negatively affect performance metrics like Time To First Byte (TTFB), which are critical factors in Google’s page experience signals that influence search rankings.

How Server-Side Rendering (SSR) solves these problems

To address the limitations of CSR, it is best practice for publishers to do server-side rendering (SSR) instead. Implementing SSR ensures pre-rendered content is delivered as fully-rendered HTML, crucial for SEO. Best practice is to implement SSR using a JavaScript library to improve SEO visibility and crawl speed. This enables Google to pick up your live blog right away.

That’s why we have built a Live Center pre-rendering service to help you tackle the technical challenges associated with modern web technologies and enhancing the SEO performance of your published content.

SSR pre-renders content on the server, delivering fully rendered HTML to the client. This strategy offers multiple SEO advantages:

• Faster Content Delivery: SSR improves TTFB by serving pre-rendered content, enhancing the user experience and positively impacting search rankings.
• Enhanced Crawlability: Fully rendered HTML ensures that search engine crawlers can efficiently index your content without delays, leading to more timely and accurate indexing.
• Consistent Rendering Across Platforms: SSR provides a uniform rendering experience for all search engines, mitigating the inconsistencies associated with CSR.

Live blog optimization with your existing internal resources

News publishers relying on a live blog strategy vary from small, local publications to large media groups with sometimes international reach. Accordingly, the in-house capacity, level of technical expertise and available resources can range broadly from a team of 5 to roughly 100. Whether you’re a large enterprise with an in-house development team or a small-to-medium enterprise (SME) with limited technical resources, here are two possible approaches to prerender your live blog with Live Center:

Larger Enterprises with Internal Tech Teams

For publishers with robust in-house development capabilities, Live Center provides comprehensive support to implement SSR strategies effectively:

• SSR Script Example: We offer an SSR script example that serves as a foundation for integrating server-side rendering into your live blogs. This script can be downloaded, customized, and adapted to fit your specific requirements.
• Detailed Technical Documentation: Our extensive documentation guides your development team through the implementation process, ensuring a smooth and efficient integration of SSR into your existing systems.
• Empowerment and Control: By providing the tools and documentation needed for customization, Live Center empowers larger enterprises to take full control of their SEO optimization strategies, ensuring optimal results tailored to their unique needs.

Small-to-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) Without Technical Resources

Understanding that not all publishers have access to extensive technical teams, Live Center offers streamlined solutions that simplify the implementation of SSR:

• Pre-Rendering Functionality: For SMEs or publishers with limited technical resources, our pre-rendering functionality offers a simplified alternative to traditional SSR methods.
• Leveraging Puppeteer: Utilizing tools like Puppeteer, a headless browser, Live Center enables smaller teams to generate pre-rendered HTML scripts effortlessly. Puppeteer automates the rendering process, reducing the need for extensive coding expertise.
• Minimal Effort Deployment: Our solutions are designed for ease of use, allowing smaller teams to deploy pre-rendered content with minimal effort. This approach ensures that even publishers without dedicated development resources can benefit from enhanced SEO performance.

By accommodating both large enterprises and SMEs, Live Center ensures that all publishers, regardless of size or technical capability, can optimize their live content for search engines effectively.

How Live Center’s Pre-Rendering Service Works

Our Pre-Rendering Service leverages a headless browser to render your live blog content fully before it reaches the end user. Here’s a breakdown of the process:

1. Request Handling

When a reader requests a page containing your live feed, the Pre-Rendering Service intercepts this request and initiates the rendering process.

2. Rendering with a Headless Browser

A headless browser renders the live blog content on the server side. This pre-rendered content is then cached for efficient retrieval.

3. Delivering the Rendered Content

The service can return two types of results:

• Full HTML Page: Provides a complete HTML page with the feed, including all necessary styles and scripts.
• HTML Feed: Delivers only the content of the feed, allowing the host to incorporate it into the existing page structure.

4. Integration with Hosting Solutions

The pre-rendered content is fetched server-side by the hosting solution and seamlessly inserted into the requested page. This ensures that both the host’s site and the feed content load together in the initial document, enhancing SEO and sometimes performance based on user conditions.

–> Read up our technical documentation for more details

Benefits of Using Live Center’s Pre-Rendering Service

Implementing Live Center’s Pre-Rendering Service offers a multitude of benefits:

• Enhanced SEO Performance: Fully rendered HTML ensures that search engines can efficiently crawl and index your content, improving your search rankings.
• Improved Reader Experience: Faster load times and reduced delays in content rendering lead to a smoother and more engaging user experience.
• Scalability: Our service is designed to handle high traffic volumes, ensuring consistent performance even during peak times.
• Flexibility: With options to deliver either full HTML pages or just the HTML feed, our service seamlessly integrates with various hosting solutions and frameworks.
• Reduced Server Load: By handling the rendering process on the server side, you can alleviate the computational burden on client devices, especially beneficial for users with limited resources.
• Tailored Solutions for Diverse Needs: Whether you’re a large enterprise with an in-house tech team or an SME with limited technical resources, Live Center provides customized SSR solutions to fit your unique requirements.

Conclusion

In the competitive digital arena, ensuring your live content is optimized for search engines is non-negotiable. Live Center’s Pre-Rendering Service provides a robust solution to the challenges posed by client-side rendering, leveraging server-side techniques to enhance your Google SEO performance, improve load times, and deliver a superior reader experience. Whether you’re managing a dynamic blog, a live news feed, or any other form of live content, our service is tailored to help you achieve higher visibility and better engagement.

TVNZ witnessed a drastic improvement:
“Live blogs frequently rank among the top-performing content and have become a significant source of web traffic for the 1News.co.nz site.”

Ready to Take Your SEO to the Next Level with Live Center?