3 Key Elements of SEO for News

3 key elements of SEO for news publishers with Barry Adams. In Search SEO podcast is brought to you by Rank Ranger, the all-in-one SEO platform that helps scale your business through data and analytics. Hey, it's David. What makes SEO different for news publishers? And how much organic traffic might you be able to drive as a news publisher? That's what we're going to be covering today with a Springbok-supporting Dutchman living in Northern Ireland. He's a specialist in SEO for news publishers at newsseo.io. And he's SEO consultant at Polemic Digital. A warm welcome to the In Search SEO podcast, Barry Adams.

Thanks. Thanks very much for having me, David. I probably should have worn my Springbok polo for this one, actually, come to think of it.

Yeah, especially for the audio listeners. That would have been a good one.

Yeah.

But there's video listeners as well, or video viewers. Yeah. I'll just say you can find Barry over at polemicdigital.com. I used to have challenges with pronouncing polemic, but I think I got it right this time, Barry.

You got it right. You got it right. You're not the only one. I thought it was a fairly common English word. It turns out most people pronounce it polemic rather than polemic. I don't know why people do that, but it is Polemic Digital. Polemic as in a strongly worded argument. It suits my online persona quite well, I think.

Gets people talking about your brand as well. It's not a bad thing. So anyway, of course, today we're talking about SEO for news. So why is SEO for news publishers different?

Yeah, it's a very interesting space to be in when it comes to news. I mean, when you talk about classic SEO first, we talk about long-term activities to build up quality signals and trust signals, to build links to a website, to improve content, and therefore improve rankings, which then results in more traffic. And a lot of that still applies to news publishers. They still have to build up those quality signals over time. They have to build up authority. The key difference that news publishers have versus any other website in Google's ecosystem is the speed with which news moves. When you publish a news article, it will either rank or not rank in Google within a few minutes. And that is generally in the top stories box that we see as part of regular search results. You know, about 1 in 10 search results on Google will have a top stories, news box of some description, some bigger than others depending on how popular the news stories around that particular topic are. This is very different from, you know, say, an e-commerce website or another content-driven website that is not news. When you publish a new piece of content, you don't expect it to rank within a few minutes. That would be quite rare. But in news, that's it. That's your golden opportunity for traffic from Google. The first few hours after you've published the article, that's when most of the traffic From Google to that article will, will come. And the shelf life of an article in Google's news ecosystem, which is that top stories box, the news.google.com vertical, as well as the news tab on regular results, the shelf life there is about 48 hours. And after that, the article will drop off because it's not news anymore, and then new articles will take its place. And that's what makes SEO for news so very much different. Basically just get one shot at ranking in Google's news ecosystem. And if you don't manage that, going back later and tweaking the article and tweaking the content, which is just something we tend to do in classic SEO, is almost pointless because the news has already moved on and the article is probably not relevant anymore. So that gives news publishers some very unique challenges when it comes to doing SEO and optimizing for that initial So you talk about Google's news ecosystem.

How do you actually become a part of that ecosystem as a publisher? How do you qualify as a news publisher?

Yeah, that's the tough nut to crack. It used to be relatively straightforward. As a news publisher, of course, you had to be a proper news website. And up to the end of 2019, there was a manual form you had to submit. And then there was some people in Mountain View, California, who'd take a look at your website and then manually approve you for inclusion in that news ecosystem as a news publisher. Nowadays, however, it's an algorithmic process, which means Google will automatically detect whether or not you're a news publisher and whether or not you deserve to rank in those news-specific ranking elements that Google has across a wide variety of its surfaces, as we call them, like the news app, the Google app in general, of course, search results, both mobile and desktop, Google News as a vertical, etc., etc., as well as the Discover feed on Android phones and in the Google app on iPhones. That algorithmic inclusion process is very opaque. We don't really know what Google is looking for besides some very generic recommendations and guidelines that they've put out there, like, hey, be a proper news publisher. Well, yeah, duh. So it's become very hard for websites to consistently achieve that visibility in Google, and only in the last year or so have I seen websites that were not manually approved in the old process starting to get traction in Google News. So it's taken them about 2 years of consistent effort for Google to recognize them as a valid news publisher, as a valid news source whose articles should rank in those news elements across Google's ecosystem. So that's made it a lot harder and created a bit of an unfair playing field where websites that were approved in the old manual process continue to appear in top stories and Google News with no real effort. And new publishers are really struggling to get traction in Google News. And it's, it's an interesting dynamic we have at the moment there where the old publishers are basically getting a free ride. And the newer publishers from the last 2 years are really struggling to get traction and don't really have a lot of recourse because there's not a lot of documentation. And there's not a lot of clarity about what that algorithmic process is actually looking for.

I'll tell you what really annoys me by clicking on news stories in Google News at the moment, and that the majority of links tend to have a pay-to-play situation going on. So you click through, you can only read about 2 lines of the story, and then you have to actually pay. So it's not, it's not a lovely user experience. Is Google going to do something about that as well, do you think?

Probably not, if I'm honest. Google specifically doesn't penalize paywalled websites in its news ecosystem because it doesn't want to be seen to steal even more money away from publishers. Google is already being accused on multiple levels from robbing publishers' incomes. And if they were to say, well, okay, subscription-based websites are not going to rank as high in our top stories and in Google News, then Google would get even more heat from them. Google is trying to find ways around this with like the Google News Showcase, where publishers that have a paywall can sign up to a model where Google will show content for free to their users of the Google News app. And in return, Google just gives them a share of the revenue. And there's also other mechanisms in place and doing similar things. But yeah, in general search, it is an annoying user experience if you click on an article and you don't know that it's a paywalled article. There's no visual clue there that it's a paywalled article. And then you get hit by the paywall. And then, you know, most users will click the back button. But Google's— I think Google very deliberately doesn't visually indicate that it's a paywalled article because they don't want to be seen to be favoring free news websites versus subscription model websites in case they get accused of, you know, all kinds of nefarious shenanigans. And the news industry and Google have had a pretty, you know, eventful relationship anyway, over the last decade or so. Yeah.

So today you're sharing 3 key elements of SEO for news publishers. So starting off with number 1, it's all about top stories boxes on SERPs.

Yes, this is always a fun one. When a publisher says we want traffic from Google News, they don't actually mean Google News as in the news.google.com vertical. Because that vertical alone, that separate website, usually accounts for, you know, low single-digit percentage numbers of traffic to a publisher, like 4 or 5% at most. They also don't mean the news tab on regular search results. That also is about 4 or 5% of traffic to most publishers. Those top stories boxes on regular search results, that's where the magic happens. That's where most news publishers will get their Google organic traffic from. For a lot of publishers, This can be as high as 40, 50, 60% of the total traffic coming from those top stories boxes. This is in addition to, you know, the social traffic that they get, direct traffic, bookmarks, external links. So Google has a huge influence over the amount of traffic the publishers can get based on whether or not they're visible in those top stories boxes. So for publishers, it is absolutely key that they optimize their articles for visibility in those top stories boxes so that they can appear there. They have a good chance of appearing there when someone types in a given search. And the reason those top stories boxes are so incredibly powerful is, like I mentioned before, about 1 in 10 Google searches will have a top stories box of some description that shows some news articles. Can be as little as 1 article, can be as many as 15 articles in a top stories box. So 1 in 10 Google searches will have a top stories box, and Google handles trillions of searches a year, trillions of searches. So we're talking about hundreds of billions of searches that happen on Google that have a news element to them. And that's why they're such a huge source of traffic for publishers. There's an enormous amount of news being shared as part of Google's regular search results. And if you can get visibility there as a publisher, the traffic potential is enormous.

And I guess you'll be covering in a way, a few different ways to appear in those boxes in your next couple of points, because Point number 2 is speed matters. Articles have a 48-hour window to rank in top stories.

Yes, absolutely. This is one of the interesting areas, though, where publishers can sort of exploit Google's weakness in news a little bit. Like I said before, 48-hour lifespan of a typical news article in Google's news ecosystem, including the top stories box. It's usually less than that, 24 to 36 hours. Is more or less the maximum you can expect for an article to show up in those top stories boxes, less if it's a very popular news story where a lot of publishers are writing content about. Google does have a preference for newer articles in top stories, which is a bit, you know, it's an interesting dynamic where some publishers break a story, they're the first one to report a story, but they often very quickly lose rankings to publishers who cover the story that they broke because those publishers are later and therefore their stories are more recent and Google has a preference for recency in top stories boxes. Now Google has tried to mitigate this to a certain extent by trying to highlight original publishers as much as they can detect them. But it's very hard for Google to do that because the speed aspect here plays such a big role as well in multiple facets. It's not just, you know, you as a publisher having to publish content. It's also Google having to very quickly index and rank news articles. Again, I'll compare this to classic SEO, where Google basically can take its time when it crawls a website, it indexes new content, it often renders the content in a headless browser to get a complete picture of the user experience. It does all kinds of deduplication and canonicalization and then says to its index, yeah, you can rank this article on this URL. For news articles, Google does not have the time to do all of that. It doesn't have the luxury of leisurely processing all those different processes of its indexing system. So Google takes shortcuts. Google never explicitly says this, but if you read the documentation when it comes to news publishers, there's a lot of subtle and not so subtle hints that Google has to take shortcuts when it comes to indexing news articles. They specifically say article content should be in the pure HTML source, so it should not rely on client-side rendering, which indicates Google probably doesn't render as part of news indexing. They also say that articles should be original content, and if it's a syndicated article from another source, basically duplicate content from another source, You should have a canonical tag or prevent Google from indexing it. Again, that's probably because Google doesn't have the time to do its own deduplication as part of indexing because it very quickly has to start ranking articles in its search results. And there's a lot of little hints like this as well that shows that Google basically indexes news articles very, very quickly and doesn't have time to do all these other extra processes that it does as part of its normal indexing of content. So that allows publishers to basically exploit Google systems because that lack of thoroughness when it comes to indexing news also means there's windows of opportunity there for publishers. Give you a very basic example. When it comes to news stories, Google looks at the URL of an article, URL of a web page, as the unique identifier. Not the headline, not the title tag, not the page content. just the URL. The URL is the unique identifier, which means if you change the URL of an article and that is the only thing you change, everything else is the same— headline, content, image, you name it— just change the URL, Google will see it as a new article and will index it and rank it as a fresh article. That is a weakness, and a weakness that only exists in the news ecosystem on Google. It doesn't exist in any other part of Google's ecosystem. And publishers can exploit that a little bit if they want to give the story a bit of a boost in top stories. For example, they wrote a good story, it loses rankings because competitors are writing their own news stories on that same development. You can just change the URL of your article and maybe also change the last updated date or the publish date just to be a bit more thorough about it. And Google will generally pick it up as a new article and rank it as a new article in top stories. So that's where that speed element comes into play. You as a publisher have to be fast. And Google has to be fast. And that's a very interesting dynamic that makes SEO for news publishers quite a different game for SEO for classical websites.

And your point number 3 is that the headline is the key optimization. So what is an ideally optimized headline? What does it look like?

Yeah, this is always a fun one. You know, again, in classic SEO, we look at title tags as a primary on-page SEO element. And in news, the title tag is almost irrelevant. Google looks at the headline, the page headline, the article headline, specifically the headline that is part of the article structured data in the source code. Again, this is because Google has to take shortcuts when it indexes news articles. So it just looks for the H1 tag if it has one, and it looks for the headline attribute of the article or news article structured data snippet that exists in the HTML source code, which is required. You need to have article or news article structured data in the source code. Otherwise, Google will not see you as an article. And that headline attribute is the most important ranking factor that determines whether or not you show up in top stories, combined with, you know, the long-term quality and relevancy signals that your domain has built up over time based on what you write and the kind of links that you get, etc., etc. But for an individual article, it is the headline, and the headline is, is so valuable And you have to pay a lot of attention to how you craft it because Google is still a machine. And again, here's where the speed aspect comes into play. Google doesn't have a lot of time to properly process your headline and look at all the context of the headline. It basically just looks at the keywords in your headline. It's a fairly old-school approach to SEO.

Is there any place that you can go to to identify the keywords that have been popular in the last 6 hours, for example?

Yes, there is actually. Google Trends has a real-time trends option for most countries in the world where you basically see what is trending at any given time in the last few hours in any country. So you can keep an eye on that in real-time trends in Google Trends to see what's happening and whether or not it's something that you want to write about as a publisher. And then when it comes to crafting the headline, you need to be fairly explicit. You need to specifically state the keyword in the headline so that Google understands that that article can be ranked for that keyword. You don't want to be too subtle about it. You don't want to be funny about it. You don't want to put any word puns or clever jokes in headlines. They might work in the context of a print newspaper, They really don't work in Google. You have to be very explicit in what your article is about, specifically mention people and places and names of events and countries, etc., etc. You have to be fairly clear with the headline what the article is going to be about so that Google knows when it can rank that article and when the article is not relevant.

Let's finish off with the Pareto pickle. So Pareto says that you can get 80% of your results from 20% of your efforts. What's one SEO activity that you would recommend that provides incredible results for modest levels of effort?

Modest levels of effort, that's always the tough one. We always want the silver bullet approach, don't we? What I find actually works really well in my own context is I've sort of stopped worrying about things like links. And to a certain extent, I've always— when it comes to smaller websites, I also stopped worrying about what technology stack I build it on. I'll give you an example. I launched a newsletter, seoforgooglenews.com. It runs on Substack, which is pretty decent as a platform, and it has certain capabilities but also certain limitations. But it does all that I need it to do for SEO purposes. It ticks the boxes, it gets ranked and indexed and crawled by Google fairly well. So I don't have to worry too much about optimizing the technical SEO. And the effort I put into that is entirely about the content. I just focus on writing the best possible content that I can on that particular topic. In this case, optimizing web news websites for Google News. And that has actually resulted in that domain getting really good rankings from Google in about a year and a half since I started that newsletter, off the back of maybe 12, 13 newsletters that I wrote. So I haven't written an awful lot of them, you know, less than one a month really. But because the content is good enough, And in often cases, it's, you know, sorry to toot my own horn here a little bit, the best content on that topic that anybody's ever written. Because that's not because I'm so good, it's just because Google News as a niche is fairly underserviced. There's not a lot of content on optimizing for Google News out there. So any content, as far as Google is concerned, is good content. So for me, there was, you know, 80% of the results for 20% of the effort, just writing good content with some regularity and publishing it and occasionally promoting it. And the links have come of their own accord. The crawling and indexing is already sorted by the Substack platform. So I just focus on the stuff that I want to do, which is really write good content. And I think if more websites do that, if they just focus on providing the best possible content that they can, the rest tends to just fall into place, you know. And once you get to a certain level of maturity and competitiveness, then the small little competitive improvements here and there can make a really, really big difference. You know, if you do travel or finance or something like that, where it's very, very competitive, just having the best content alone is not enough. When you need to get the 1% improvement here and there to really squeeze out the maximum. But if you're just starting out as a business, or even if you've been around for a few years, but you're trying to find that next level that really puts you apart from your competitors, just focus on the kind of content that you're providing to your users. And the rest can sort of, you know, wait for a bit until you get to that top level where you really feel you can't squeeze anything more out of your content. And I think that's an underappreciated aspect of SEO. People are still looking for that silver bullet, that magic unicorn dust they can sprinkle over the website and voilà, they go to the top of Google. They don't realize that they have to put in the effort first to create something that is worth ranking in the first place.

Absolutely. Great advice. I've been your host, David Bain. You can find Barry over at polemicdigital.com. Barry, thanks so much for being on the In Search SEO podcast.

Thanks very much for having me, David.

And thank you for listening. Check out all the previous episodes and sign up for a free trial of the Rank Ranger platform Over at rankranger.com.