If the press regularly mentions your company or website, it’s nice to share that information with your website visitors so they stay updated on what’s going on with your company. Doing this manually is too time-consuming, though, which is why you might look for a way to automatically display news about your company on WordPress.
In this post, I’ll share a simple, and free, way to display a list of the latest news about your company. Then, I’ll also recommend a method that gives you more control over exactly which news articles get shared and how they look.
What you need to automatically display news about your company on WordPress
To automatically display news about your company on WordPress, you’re going to need two things:
- An RSS feed of your company’s news – I’ll show you how to easily create this using Google News. Not sure what RSS is? This post has a good explanation of RSS.
- Feedzy RSS Feeds Lite – this free plugin lets you automatically import that RSS feed into your WordPress site as a list of news items.
👉 Here’s the whole process:
- Step 1: Create Google News RSS feed for your company or website
- Step 2: Install and activate Feedzy RSS Feeds Lite
- Step 3: Generate and insert Feedzy RSS Feeds shortcode
Step 1: Create Google News RSS feed for your company or website
To get started, you need a way to automatically source the latest news about your company or website.
While you can use any RSS feed, the easiest way to do this is via Google News because Google has already done the hard work of aggregating different news sources into one easily accessible area.
Essentially, you can create an RSS feed for a specific keyword so that if any of the sources in Google News mention that word, you can pick it up.
To get started, go to Google News and search for your company (I’ll use “Amazon” for this example):
⚠️ Note – you can use Google search operators, like “+” or “-“, in your search, which is helpful for gaining more control over which news articles appear in your feed. This post has a good explanation of Google search operators.
After searching, you should see a list of results that match that query. Scroll to the bottom of the page and find the small RSS link:
After clicking the link, you should see an RSS feed of content for that specific search query. Save the URL because you’re going to need it in the next step:
Step 2: Install and activate Feedzy RSS Feeds Lite
Now that you have your news feed, all you need is a way to display it in WordPress. That’s where Feedzy RSS Feeds Lite comes in.
To get started, install and activate the plugin (read this if you’re not sure how to install WordPress plugins).
Step 3: Generate and insert Feedzy RSS Feeds shortcode
Once you’ve installed and activated the plugin, you can either:
- Create a new page to display your news on
- Edit an existing page where you want to display news
When you’re creating or editing a page, you should see a new Feedzy Lite button in the WordPress Editor:
When you click that button, it will open a popup where you can configure your RSS feed.
Enter the URL for your Google News RSS Feed in the The feed(s)… box:
Then, you can configure the rest of the settings according to your preferences.
When you finish, click the Insert Shortcode button.
When you Publish or Update the page, you should see a feed of the latest news about your company:
And that’s all you need to do to automatically display news about your company on WordPress.
The two potential drawbacks of this method
While the above method is a good simple way to automatically display news about your company on WordPress, there are a couple of potential drawbacks to using this method:
- Beyond Google search operators, you have no moderation power over the news that displays in your feed. Unless your company only ever receives 100% positive press, this might pose an issue because you don’t want to display anything negative on your own website.
- You’re only collecting links, which means that Google won’t be able to index any of the news about your company on your own website.
If you want to fix those issues, the Pro version of Feedzy RSS Feeds lets you import RSS feed items as actual WordPress posts.
👉 The benefits of this approach are the opposite of above – you’ll be able to moderate news items before they go live and you can also publish excerpts of news posts so that:
- Google can index them.
- Visitors can find them even at a later date.
Additionally, the Pro version includes an option to filter RSS feeds by keywords, which gives you even more control over moderation.
If you’re interested in how to automatically display news about your company on WordPress in this way, this post includes a detailed tutorial.
Wrapping things up 🎯
If you just want a simple way to display news about your company on WordPress, the free combination of a Google News RSS feed plus Feedzy RSS Feeds Lite should be all that you need.
Just remember that, beyond Google search operators, you won’t have much control over what specific news items will appear on your website. This opens the door for any and all news about your company to leak through – including potentially negative press.
To change that, you can use Feedzy RSS Feeds Pro to import news items as actual WordPress posts. You’ll have more control this way about which news stories you wish to share with your audience.
Have any other questions about displaying company news on your WordPress site? Let us know in the comments and we’ll try to help out!
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