SEO: How can ICD beat Bleeding Cool and Comics Beat?

I recently looked at the SEO for Indie Comix Dispatch (ICD) and was asked about moving up in Google rankings for “indie comics news” and similar keywords. I most often see ICD ranking in the 3-4 range, which is pretty decent, but below bigger sites like Comics Beat and Bleeding Cool. Here is what I see after doing a Google search:

How can we move our favorite indie comics site up further for indie comics news and get past the big boys? In this article, I’ll give two major strategies as well five smaller tactics. 

These SEO tactics are useful for any creator, retailer, or comics blogger who wants to rank their personal site higher for certain search terms. 

Indie Comics News: Two Strategies for Ranking Higher

Strategy #1: Add the keyword “news” more often. Right now I see it appear on the homepage 15 times, which is pretty good! Let’s bump that up to 20+ times in the content. Make sure not to overdo it. Also use compound phrases like “comic news” and “indie comics news” more often. 

This one is the easiest to implement but won’t move the needle as much as the next one…

Strategy #2: Get backlinks from relevant comic websites and blogs. Backlinks are very much a strong SEO signal to Google. Do you have a creator site and enjoy reading ICD content? Have you ever been a guest on the pod and have a blog? Please link to us! 

The most useful link is a text backlink that says indie comics news or similar. Links from images are ok also. 

I added both to the footer of my personal benogrady.com blog. Here is what it looks like. 

Make sure the backlink is dofollowed and has the full URL for ICD, which is this: https://indiecomixdispatch.com/

This one is harder to control and takes more time, but has the biggest impact. So again, please link to us if you love ICD content! 

5 More Tactics for Boosting Your SEO

• Reorder the homepage title to put the best keywords up front. Would look like this: Indie Comics News, Reviews, Podcasts, Articles | Indie Comix Dispatch

Notice how Indie Comics News is right at the front with the branding last? That’s a best practice.

And here is how it should look in Google results:

• Create a “news” category and put all news articles into that category. There should be an archive page you can visit. You can visit ICD’s comic news page right now. 
• Add the News page to the main navigation. This is a strong signal to search engines that your news content is important.
• Add internal links throughout the website that links to the News page. These can take on the form of simple text links or sidebar links or really any kind of link. These are called internal links and they help boost SEO. 
• Add breadcrumbs to your site, with news as part of the taxonomy. 

Here is what breadcrumbs look like. These are clickable links that also act as internal links:

So my top two tactics to move up in Google search are adding the “news” keyword more often and gaining backlinks from friendly websites. The backlink one will have the biggest impact. Don’t be afraid to ask comic friends for backlinks directly, either by posting, email, DM, or whatever channel you prefer. It makes a big difference!

This article is the second in a series of SEO articles. Also check out my 3 SEO Tips for Indie Comics Creators.

Ben O’Grady is an SEO Manager for Disney Streaming and a long time SEO and WordPress expert. Any SEO questions hit him on his Instagram or email benogrady@gmail.com