INN and RebelMouse: Growth Through Best Practices

Investing News Network (INN) has been a trusted source for investors since 2008 with over 150K posts published. Our partnership with them began in 2020 when we launched a subfolder for Cannabis Investing on the INN website. We powered this vertical and all of the content that was assigned to it.

Quickly we realized that the subfolder outperformed the rest of INN’s site and decided to migrate the full site, as well as an Australian version of it, to RebelMouse in 2021.

At the end of 2023, we decided to merge both the main and Australia sites with the goal of building one destination for all investor-focused news and educational content on topics within the resource, cannabis, tech, and life sciences sectors.

Last year (2024) was all about getting the most out of RebelMouse features and combining our expertise areas to drive growth. We had a plan to optimize the site fully in a way to follow best practices and it was really fun to join each call in the last couple of months of the year saying things like "yesterday was the best traffic in the last 12 months."

Like most publishers, SEO traffic is extremely important for INN, and that is where we spent a lot of our time.

The last quarter of 2024, compared to the previous year, is probably the best indicator of the improvements we made:

Even though INN experienced short-term dips throughout the year, every time we would recover that traffic quickly and see better results than before the previous dip. We’re proud to say that we also saw growth after Google Search’s core algorithm updates, an indication that INN follows SEO best practices.

The graph above shows the duration of Google Search’s core updates and algorithm changes. At times, the site demonstrated resilience by maintaining a steady trajectory despite the search engine volatility. Remarkably, toward the middle and the end of 2024, the site saw a significant increase in traffic despite Google Search’s updates and changes.

Great Editorial Team + Great Tech + Best Practices = 🚀🚀🚀

It’s important to recognize that we were starting from a great place knowing that INN’s editorial team does an excellent job at building content that really serves their audience.

INN’s editorial team consists of experts who are focused on providing high-quality content in a way that is helpful to both amateur and professional investors.

Pairing great content with great tech, and then making sure all teams follow the best SEO practices that will ensure the best experience for end users was a cornerstone of our success.

Carmen Reategui, the account manager for INN, summarized this partnership perfectly:

“Collaborating with Investing News has been a rewarding journey of growth through best practices. Their trust in our strategic and technical teams' proposals made it easy to combine their editorial expertise with our strategies, delivering a seamless user experience and measurable results — even through challenges. Can’t wait to see what we’ll achieve together in 2025!”

SEO Optimization Is a Tool to Serve End Users Better

Another important thing to recognize is that we all approach SEO work as something that is continually evolving and that ultimately needs to serve the end user. We all understand that this is a long-term investment, quick wins are rare, and compounding benefits are the true reward.

This is why the process itself is really important. We meet every two weeks with a fresh site crawl and analyze the results together. This is usually a Semrush-provided site health audit that we often pair with results from Screaming Frog.

Ahead of the call, our team analyzes the results since one issue reported by these tools can have several different root causes and it’s important to address them with a proper solution.

We split the action items into three buckets when it comes to how to deal with the issues:

1. Find a programmatic solution in the form of a script or template update
2. Find low-hanging fruit that can easily be achieved with manual work
3. Build product solutions that solve or prevent issues that we find

During the call, we analyze the results with INN and identify the root cause(s) of them. After we understand that part, we brainstorm solutions in order to find the most efficient approach. Sometimes it’s simply easier to manually update things instead of spending development time on an automated solution. Sometimes so many pages are affected that it doesn’t make sense to do things manually. After classifying how specific issues will be dealt with, we assign things that can be solved programmatically to respective development teams to generate a scope of work for the changes that’ve been proposed. After we receive the scope of work, we have a better understanding of associated effort and cost in order to decide what to prioritize.

This covers 80% of our calls. We have calls where we’re so clear on the next steps from the crawls that we can be very efficient by sharing our recommendations and then moving on to focus on other elements and tools of SEO, such as Google Search Console or user experience (UX).

Google Search Console is an extremely helpful tool, not just for monitoring traffic and reviewing results, but also to identify other opportunities for improvement:

1. The Core Web Vitals report is really important, and achieving green Core Web Vitals scores for INN was a project where we all learned a lot. One of the key elements to passing Core Web Vitals was optimizing the logged-in experience. Our logged-out experience was fully optimized, but that wasn’t reflected in the Core Web Vitals report. This is when we identified the opportunity to optimize the logged-in experience as well. After refactoring the site’s code and providing a lighter experience for logged-in users, we started seeing INN’s Core Web Vitals improve.
   
   
2. The indexing report is something we pay a lot of attention to since this report can provide us with insights into what Google Search is seeing, how they’re finding some of the pages on INN’s site, and, based on that, if something needs to be changed.
   
   
3. Crawl stats can be a great indicator of site speed and the types of pages that Google Search crawls the most.

UX is a huge part of SEO, and we want to make sure that all of the efforts that INN’s editorial team puts forth is amplified by a great user experience. We spend quite a bit of time on UX, and some of the key changes we made in the last year were focused on:

1. Authorship: We made sure that it’s clear to an end user that the site’s content is created by real experts, and that it’s easy for users to get in touch with authors or learn more about their background.
   
   
2. Recirculation: We included related recirculation units so it’s easy for end users to go deeper and find out more about a topic that they’re interested in.
   
   
3. Layouts: We have different site layouts for different types of content and users so that it’s easy for end users to find more content that is relevant to them.

Another great benefit of work like this is building out new products and automations that solve SEO issues. Our Broken Links Dashboard is one such star and a favorite of the INN team since it allows them to manage broken links in one place. With just a click, they can easily:

• Replace a broken link with a new valid URL and set up a redirect from the broken link to the new one.
• Unlink a broken link (or links en masse) from the whole site.

Work Outside of SEO

We strongly recommend to everyone to diversify their traffic and revenue sources. Over the past year, the INN team has joined platforms like NASDAQ and MSN.

Our Feed Builder makes it simple for publishers to build any kind of content feed they need. That ability coupled with their great content made it so they were easily accepted by those platforms.

List of Work Performed in 2024

In addition to our meetings, brainstorms, and many audits, our technical team played a major part in our success. When we looked over the list of tasks that were completed over the past year, we found it very impressive that we delivered over 100 different tasks (both big and small). Here are just some:

• Crawlability Improvements
  
  • Duplicates: Part of INN’s work is publishing press releases from key companies so that INN can serve as a one-stop shop for investors. This is an automated process, which means that the same story can be sent twice on occasion. To solve this, we ran a script that:
    • Identified duplicates.
    • Unpublished duplicate content.
    • Redirected the URLs of duplicates to the URL that was kept.
      
  • Broken Links: INN has been the greatest champion of our Broken Links Dashboard. Their team regularly reviews the dashboard and updates links in a way to best serve the end users who see those URLs.
    
    
  • Redirects: We implemented redirects that were necessary to get end users to the right pages, and we removed a lot of redirects that were obsolete or taking users to broken pages or another redirect. We also replaced all links to redirects with links to final destination pages.
    
    
  • Canonical Cleanup: We made sure each page that needs to be crawled and indexed by Google Search has a self-referencing canonical, making sure that there are no pages with a canonical that points to a redirect or broken URL.
    
    
  • Pagination URLs: We reviewed INN’s category pages and discovered that a lot of them were referencing pagination in code even though it wasn’t available to end users. This was code that was carried over from their old site setup so we cleaned that up.
    
    
  • Noindex Tag: Press releases older than five years needed to be addressed. INN has a large archive of press releases that can be found in different places. This content should be available to their end users to ensure that they have everything in one place. However, it’s not necessary to index that content since it can be found elsewhere on the web. Since this was a massive change, we started with “noindexing” older content. Once we confirm that there are no negative consequences from doing that, we will expand this practice to newer press releases as well. It’s important to not blindly apply rules, but rather test, review, and make data-oriented decisions.
    
    
  • Sitemaps: We cleaned up sitemaps that were hardcoded. By doing this, we made sure we submitted only the pages we wanted to be crawled and indexed by search engines, while also following sitemap best practices.
    
    
  • Site URL Structure: INN’s URL structure was updated to reflect their new strategy for different regions and editions of their content.
    
    
  • Nofollow Links: We removed nofollow attributes across internal links that needed to be indexed and crawled by search engines.

• Improved Internal Linking

• Recommendations: We exposed recirculation units with related content to allow end users to dive deeper into the topics they’re already reading about.

• SmartLinks: Our SmartLinks Dashboard is another feature that the INN team uses often. It’s a great tool to connect category or company pages with phrases and keywords that are commonly used. For example, whenever “company X” is mentioned, a hyperlink to that company page is automatically added.

• UX Improvements: UX is an important part of SEO, and it’s all about providing the best experience to an end user by making the content load fast, the site easy to navigate, and removing broken experiences. Some of the things we performed included:
  
  • Focusing on performance and page load.
    • We made massive changes and refactored the code to make sure the site passes Google’s Core Web Vitals.
    • We reformatted some pages, such as tag pages, to make sure they load faster.
      
  • Giving users what they're interested in and introducing Watchlists:

• Introducing Table of Contents based on the recommendation from Craig Kanalley, our VP of Strategy. We allow users to more easily navigate through content:

• Removing broken images from the old setup that were migrated but expired over time.
• Reviewing content streams across category and tag pages to ensure the same story wasn’t exposed multiple times on the same page.
• Cleaning up broken embeds.
  • Similar to broken images, especially across old content that was migrated, there were embeds that are simply no longer supported (e.g., Flash) that were removed.

• On-Page SEO: H1 headings, page titles, and meta descriptions were added or updated to best reflect what a respective page is about. We also made page titles uniform to include Investing News Network’s short name: INN. We didn’t have strict rules in palace before, so some content had “INN” appear in the page title and some didn’t. We know that Google rewrites most page titles, but we still wanted to use the improvement opportunity to bolster INN’s branding.
  
  
• AI Adoption: When used strategically and responsibly, AI can really elevate editorial teams and remove many dreadful tasks from their workflow, allowing them to focus on what truly matters — creating content that is trustworthy and helpful.
  
  • We added title optimizers in Entry Editor to make it easy for INN’s editorial team to settle on the right metadata. We also made sure that the tone was adjusted to the editorial voice of INN’s brand. The tools are exposed to INN’s editorial team in a way that they can easily use them to ensure editorial efficiency is maintained.
    
    
  • We ran scripts and used AI to optimize meta descriptions and page titles at scale. We made sure the scripts were executed only on content where the editorial team hadn't already added them. We used the same principles that we have across our AI tools in Entry Editor.
    
• Authority: INN is focused on providing high-quality, trustworthy, and independent news. This is clearly stated in their editorial mission statement. By providing clarity on who writes the content and why that content is expertly written is the key to clearly communicate to end users that the content is trustworthy. INN continuously strives to make this as transparent as possible by making it easy to:
  
• Access their important pages, such as their:
  • About Us page where they explain their values and mission.
  • Authors page.
  • Contact Us page.
  • Privacy Policy page.
    
• On their article pages, where most of their end users spend their time, you can easily find who wrote the content, how to reach them, and what their experience is.

2025 — Here We Go!

We’re incredibly excited to see what this year will bring, and we already have a healthy backlog of next steps. Both teams believe that following best practices with the goal of satisfying what end users need is the path to growth and retaining those users.

Working together to best prioritize tasks and make optimal decisions based on data is the most valuable element of healthy growth. The industry will continue to change and it’s important to stay agile and be prepared for all of the shifts that will inevitably happen.