The Role of Structured Data and Schema Markup in News SEO

The tactics for news SEO are a little bit different than classic SEO, as I call it. Google is not very good at actually understanding content, but it's very good at understanding the signals around content.

Hello and welcome to SE Ranking's DoFollow podcast. Here we hold regular talks with SEO and digital marketing experts to discuss hot SEO topics and share actionable insights with the SEO community. So subscribe to stay on top of everything going on in SEO. Today, we're going to be talking about the role of structured data and schema markup in news SEO. To help us solve this riddle, we are joined by Barry Adams, an award-winning SEO consultant specializing in technical and editorial SEO for news publishers across the globe. Barry is also the co-founder of the News and Editorial SEO Summit and is the specialized SEO consultant at Polemic Digital. Welcome, Barry. Pleasure to have you with us.

Thank you very much, Lander. Thank you for having me.

Awesome. If you don't mind, I just want to jump right into it and ask you to tell us a bit more about your background, how you got into SEO, and what led you to specialize in, among other things, news SEO.

Well, I've been working in IT for a very long time. I started out as an IT support guy back in the late 1990s. And I put on my resume that I knew HTML. This is the very early days of the internet. So I got drafted in various webmaster jobs. At the time because there were so few people who knew anything about the internet. So, uh, I stood out a little bit by knowing HTML and having built my own website. But initially I was, I was a webmaster for intranet websites, so internal, uh, websites. Uh, and then later I graduated to internet, uh, websites, uh, front-facing websites. And then I became also responsible for generating traffic to those websites. And of course, search was still in the early days back in those days, but still part of it. Um, and of course I'd built my own websites, uh, in the early days of the web and realized nobody was visiting those websites. So I started to find out ways of getting traffic to those websites and search was always a very big part of that. So I had a bit of basic SEO knowledge and, and like a lot of people who know a little bit about a particular topic, you think you know everything about that topic. So I thought I knew everything there was to know about SEO. And then I was working for a company in, in 2007 who, uh, who was, uh, who they made industrial-grade barcode scanners and I was their international webmaster, which is still the coolest job title I've ever had. And, um, they sent me to a conference in New York, Search Engine Strategies, uh, to learn more about SEO. Uh, and I thought, ah, I know a lot about it already. I might pick up a few new things. After that conference, I realized I knew nothing. I, I was, I was a tiny little insect on the grand surface of SEO, but I caught the bug. Up to that moment, I did a little bit of everything. I did paid ads, I did SEO, I did newsletters. Uh, email marketing, even fledgling social media, which was very early days back in those days. And after that conference, I realized that SEO was something I really wanted to specialize in. So that's when I started to really dig into SEO, learn a lot more about it. I, I joined SEO communities. Um, I asked questions to people who had way more experience than I did and played around with my own hobby websites as well as working for, for various different employers. And then in 2010, when I moved to Northern Ireland, I got a job at the Belfast Telegraph, which was the big local newspaper here, still is, as their internal SEO person, their internal search person. And that was my first exposure to SEO for news publishers. And then when I went freelance in 2014, after bouncing around jobs and agencies for a while, I decided to maybe develop a bit of a specialty in news SEO. And I was already, you know, building a bit of a profile, speaking at conferences and writing blog posts. But initially I didn't really get much traction. I just had to get all kinds of work, whatever came my way, because when you're a freelancer, you sort of have to take on all the jobs that come your way. And I was really lucky actually that I got a really good project with The Sun newspaper in 2016 when they approached me to help them relaunch their website to be their external SEO consultant for that project. And fortunately, that was a very successful project. I don't think I could take a lot of credit for that. I was part of a big team with really smart, motivated highly skilled people. But because that project was so successful and The Sun skyrocketed up the Google rankings when they relaunched the website, that opened a lot of doors for me as somebody who knows about news SEO. And I also realized that there's not a lot of people out there who have that specialty, SEO for news publishers. So I decided to really start to develop it even more. I started my newsletter. I got a few more big-name projects under my belt because of the success I had with The Sun. And they were also Fortunately, very good projects. And then the ball just kept rolling. And now, yeah, it's been a fantastic part of my career. And I'm very glad I took that gamble and ended up where we am today.

Yeah, very excited to hear your thoughts on you as a CEO. And the journey just seems so logical. And you had no idea when you started out that you were going to get here. But it just sounds like such a logical evolution of your journey. You got to work a lot of things and just moved into it. So I'm really excited that you are here specifically to talk about news SEO with us and just to sort of get people on board fully with this. Could you maybe tell us a bit of what does news SEO entail and what it is for you just to get that definition out there?

Yeah, it's SEO specifically for news publishers who focus on the news elements in Google's ecosystem. And the news elements are the top stories box on regular search results. That is probably the most important news element. You also have the news tab as part of Google Search. You have Google News, the vertical, that's news.google.com or, or different country versions of it, and the Discover feed on, on Android devices or in the, the Google app on, on iPhone. Those are basically the 4 news elements in Google's ecosystem where news articles are very prominently shown and where most publishers try to optimize for, most news publishers. The tactics for news SEO are a little bit different than the classic SEO, as I call it. The classic SEO, you have the ability to go back to content, update it, improve it, and maximize visibility over a long period of time. Whereas with news SEO, you basically just get one shot at it with some exceptions. But generally speaking, when you publish an article, you have to make sure it's already optimized because if you then go back after the article's been published and change it and improve it, chances are Google is not going to see those changes until several hours or several days later, at which stage it's not a news article anymore. It's old news. So you've basically lost your opportunity to show up in that news ecosystem because it's very fast moving. Google wants to show the latest news on any given topic. And that means, you know, it's constantly trying to find new articles and the latest content on that topic. So if you're a few hours behind the facts, you've, you've lost your opportunity. So news SEO is focused on very rapid crawling and indexing of new content and giving that content the best possible chance of ranking in that news ecosystem the moment it's published.

Great. I would love to come back to the Google News, Google Discover a bit later on, but I want to right now focus on the things that will help you sort of maybe get the news published at this very moment, what you need to optimize right now so that the content, well, is visible for the right users at the right time. So could you tell us a bit more about maybe structured data and schema markup and what is their role in helping you get published like really quickly? With news publications.

Yeah, it's important to note that structured data isn't a requirement, but it's highly recommended. It's very rare to see news articles show up in Google's news ecosystem that don't have, you know, recommended structured data implemented. Some websites get away with it, like the BBC, for example. Their sports section doesn't use any structured data, but they rank for nearly everything. But that's because they're the BBC, and you're probably not the BBC. So you're going to have to work for it. And structured data is a really good way to allow Google to very quickly understand what your article is about and extract the ranking elements that they need to show that article in their news ecosystem. So for a news article, you would have article structured data. And interestingly enough, Google accepts multiple forms of article structured data. They even accept blog posting structured data as markup for a news article. So it can be blog posting, it can be article, or it can be a subtype of article, like news article, and even a sub-subtype, like a reportage news article or analysis news article. And Google will accept all of those as structured data in the article format. And that basically allows Google to extract the components that it needs to show that article, which are the headline, obviously, the featured image that go with it, when it's been published, when it's been updated, and any other content around it, like the description. And Google also likes to know a little bit more about the author of the article, if it's a proper journalist or something from a newswire, for example. But that's really all you need to provide. It doesn't need to be a very long and detailed snippet. And that's probably one of the best implementations of structured data for news websites. If you don't have it, it makes it a bit more challenging for Google to extract the right information. And it needs to basically index the entire article, look at the headline, look at the featured image, try to find other signals there. Whereas if you have that in a structured data snippet in the HTML source code, Google can instantly extract all those elements and use that to show the article in, in top stories and Google News and Google Discover. So that, that's sort of the baseline of structured data, the article structured data for, for news articles.

Got it. Uh, what about the key benefits? So what if I, if I don't use it, what am I missing out on? So just, just to sort of zero in on the benefits, just to convince our listeners that they need to implement this, uh, structured approach to, to data on their News articles?

Yeah, yeah, like I said, Google says it's not a requirement, but in my experience, unless you're a really big news brand, you really do need article structured data. Otherwise, Google will struggle to identify which pages on your websites are article pages versus like topic pages and tag pages and things like that. So I think it's, it's very beneficial and it really increases your chances of showing up in the news ecosystem if you have properly implemented article structured data.

Well, how does this play into Google ranking and understanding that this is, like you said, you have 3 types of structured data markups that you can use to let Google know that this is a news article. But what exactly goes into the process of helping Google pull that into the news feed, for example, on the top stories or in Google News?

Well, the article structured data, like I said, contains all the elements that Google needs for the article. If you look at how Google shows news, it's always a headline and a visual component and a date. Those are the 3 elements that Google will show for every news article in top stories, in Google Discover, in Google News, the News tab, Which is different from what we see in regular search results, where you just see a headline, a little snippet text, sometimes a date, not always, and maybe some other enrichments. But for news, it's the headline, the featured image, and the date. And with structured data, you basically provide that to Google in one very easily machine-readable snippet of code that they can parse and index, and therefore have all the elements directly there that they need to show that article in top stories. It doesn't necessarily improve your rankings. It just gives you a better chance of showing up in the first place. And then other signals like topic authority and quality signals come into play to decide where you rank in the top stories in the news ecosystem. Uh, but with article structured data, it increases your chances of showing up in the first place.

That is what I want to ask you a bit more about. As we just talked about how Google understands you, but obviously you don't exist in a vacuum. You have the other competitors that want to who put stories out there every second, basically. You as an expert, how do you make sure that your article gets that top spot given that there's so much, so much noise happening online?

Yeah, that's something that, that when news SEO overlaps in large part with classic SEO, because it's about building up those quality and authority signals that Google is looking for. The main differences with news SEO is that Google is much more focused on topic authority. So basically it needs to understand what your specialty is as a news publisher, what kind of topics you write about regularly. Uh, what kind of coverage you have. And also if your journalists, your writers are experts on the topic that they're covering, authorship plays a fairly strong part in the news SEO ranking system. So it's about making sure you send those correct signals to Google. And a lot of that also revolves around original quality journalism. Now, as we've come to understand over the last probably 2 years, Google is not very good at actually understanding content, but it's very good at understanding the signals around content, how users engage with content and how other websites refer to other content. Uh, which is why quality original journalism is such an important part of, of the news ecosystem. Because if you are the first one to write a story on, on a breaking news topic, other news websites generally use you as a reference and link to you and cite you as a source. And those are the signals that Google pays a lot of attention to. Whereas if you are a news website that doesn't do any original reporting and you're just reporting what others are also reporting, you don't really accumulate those signals. Google doesn't necessarily understand that you're a news publisher, or at least not a quality news publisher. And I have seen many news websites lose a lot of traffic, especially as part of algorithm updates, because they're not original news creators. They're just reporters of the news that other people are creating. And I think that's really a key facet of success in the current news ecosystem on Google, that you have to do original journalism. You have to provide original content and make sure that you are seen as a leader in the field, whatever the field is that you're reporting, be that sport or video games or celebrity news or whatever it is. You have to create original journalistic content and create citations and mentions across other websites so that Google sees those signals and trusts you as a reputable publisher and a creator of original journalism.

Yeah, definitely doing just desk research is not going to get you any results. And I wanted to sort of take a step back, go 10 years back and ask you specifically when you started working with news publishers, what were like eye-opening moments or what was the process like back then that you sort of showed you like that you can get results done. Like if I do this to that website, I just wanted to understand what the process was for building up the right presence for the Belfast Telegraph and then for The Sun. I don't want to go too deep into 2024 right now. I just want to say, understand what the process was like back then. So yeah, could you please tell us a bit more about your experience at those publications?

The early days of Google News, it was a very different ecosystem. There was a separate index Google News and they had their own crawler. And this was because in those early days, uh, Google wasn't very quick at crawling and indexing new content. And we had a lag when you publish a piece of content and when Google would show the search results, could be a week, could be 2 weeks. And that of course doesn't work for news. News, you have to immediately show content. So Google built a different crawler and a different index for Google News. Also, you could manually apply to be included in that index. You could submit your website. To Google News, and then somebody at Google or some outsourced company would review your website and either approve you as a news publisher or deny you. And then you maybe have to revamp your website and then try again. It's a very different ecosystem. Um, and once you were in Google News, you basically got free traffic because once you're in Google News index and Google News crawler would crawl and index your website and, and try and find content as fast as possible because of the speed with which it had to move. It didn't do a lot of due diligence. It was very basic indexing of content, just extracting the headline and article content, and then doing basic keyword matching on that headline to whatever search term somebody was typing in. So you could basically rank for anything as a news publisher. If you wrote an article about Beyoncé, even though you're a politics news website, you were sure up for Beyoncé in Google News and in top stories in universal search. Simple as that. And what I also learned, which is something that Google still has as a weakness, sort of, but it's by necessity, I suppose, is that the only Deduplication that Google really does in the news ecosystem are based on the URL and the headline. So if, for example, you have an article in Google News, and this is true 10 years ago and it's still true today, and you drop out of top stories, but you want to get the article back in because, you know, you think it's the best article, even though Google might see it as old, basically all you need to do is change the URL of the article, ideally also change the headline a little bit so it doesn't catch the deduplication filter in the headline. And then Google will just index it as a new article and will show it in top stories as a new article. And that is a weakness, I would say, but also a weakness by necessity because deduplication is hard. It takes a lot of resources. Google has to do a lot of comparisons and therefore Google doesn't really do it even in regular search. And it definitely doesn't do it in news SEO. But at the same time, if you do that too often and you abuse those weaknesses too often, Google does notice. They're not stupid. You know, they do know what their own weaknesses are. So they, you have to be cautious with those sorts of tactics and really only employ them when you need to. Because I have seen websites get on the wrong side of an algorithm update if they abuse those sorts of weaknesses too often. So yeah, 10 years ago, a very different ecosystem. We also had a separate report back in Webmaster Tools that it was called back then. If you were an approved news publisher that showed any problems with crawling and indexing specifically to news content on your website, Which is very informative because it basically told us a lot about how Google indexes content, uh, and what could go wrong with indexing content. For example, Google would tell you in that Webmaster Tools report for, for a news website, if it couldn't parse your HTML for your article, or if it couldn't find the headline, or if it thought the article was empty, or if the article was interrupted with HTML blocks, and therefore Google didn't really know where the article content sits in your HTML source code. So those were the very useful and very informative report that told us a lot about how Google parses and indexes HTML. And what could go wrong with that? And that's again, one of the areas of news SEO that make it unique versus regular SEO, that you actually have to pay a little bit of attention to how clean your HTML source code is. Because now, even though Google renders webpages as part of indexing, that rendering process sometimes has a bit of a delay. Generally, Google renders webpages very quickly within a few seconds or minutes of indexing, but not all the time. Sometimes there can be a delay of several hours between initial indexing and the rendering phase. And that means that you need to make sure that your HTML source code is pretty clean and contains all the article content, because chances are that if Google has a delay with rendering of that webpage, any content that you inject with JavaScript, or if your HTML isn't particularly clean and can't be easily parsed, Google might struggle to index the content of your article. So you need to make sure your HTML source is pretty clean. You have a very clear H1 headline. You use semantic HTML. And you don't throw any obstacles in Google's way there to slow down indexing of your content.

Like you said, 10 years ago when, uh, when Google was analyzing your website and, and it tagged you as a news publisher, was that a one-time process? Is it still an on or a one-time process?

Well, they, they retired their annual process back in December 2019, uh, and they killed off the form. And since then, Google says, oh, we will algorithmically determine whether or not you're a news publisher. And that actually has created a bit of a 2-tier index in Google News, because if you were manually approved before December 2019, you're still in the Google News index. You're still an approved news publisher. You show up in top stories, you show up in Google News. Whereas if you launch your news websites after December 2019, you have to work very, very hard to get in that Google News index to be an approved news source. Now, I have to also say it's not a separate index anymore, and it's not a separate crawler anymore. Google has merged those systems because the regular crawler and indexer became fast enough. So they didn't need to have a separate crawler and indexer anymore. And I think that changed back in 2018 or maybe even sooner than that. So Google doesn't maintain a separate index for news anymore, but it does have a certain flag associated with your website, whether or not you're an approved news publisher and can show up in Google News and in top stories search results. But now you have to earn it and it's an algorithmic process. And in my experience, that algorithmic process for a newly launched website that focuses on pure news on whatever topic it is, it takes at least 2 years. That's 2 years of very hard work to accumulate the quality and trust signals that, that Google needs to see you as a reliable source of news information. And, and websites that were manually approved before December 2019, they didn't have to go through that process. They just could launch their website, put a few articles up, make sure they looked news and newsworthy enough, submit, uh, that form, and voilà, they were in the news index. Uh, so it's a bit of a, of a 2-tier system now because, you know, 2019 is now 5, nearly 5 years ago. It started to equalize a little bit and it's become less of an issue. But in the first few years after Google retired the manual submission process, there was a bit of a, of a, an interim period where I felt it wasn't entirely fair for newly launched publishers who had to work really, really hard versus manually approved publishers who could just basically coast along without really earning their presence in the news ecosystem.

So if I understand you correctly, you have to have a lot of money in order to just to work for 2 years without having any results. And then if you do everything correctly, you will start getting ranking. I mean, obviously, media is a big control mechanism in the world. So I'm guessing people are appearing every, every now and then. Have you built up news websites since post-2019?

Most of my clients are established news websites and haven't gone through that process. I sometimes get asked to consult for a news and media startup. And I have to be very honest with them and say, right, do you have a 2-year-plus timeline for this? And usually the answer is no. And then I have to give them the bad news, like, yeah, you need to have enough funding to keep you going for 2+ years without much Google traffic. You might get some traffic from Discover. You might get some traffic from regular search, but the news ecosystem, which is where most news publishers get the vast majority of their Google traffic from, that's out of reach for at least 2 years. And if you're not prepared for that, if you don't have the funding for that, you don't have the long-term vision for that, you shouldn't even start that particular And that's a bit of a bucket of cold water on a lot of these news and media startups who think that within 6 months they can surpass their competitors because they're better and do things in a drastically different way. And then I have to tell them, yeah, that's probably not true, but good luck. But generally what I see, it is 2+ years, 2.5 years sometimes even. The fastest I've seen was an 18-month inclusion, but that was also because the new website was a merger of 2 existing news websites. So I think some of those signals translated across to the new domain. But you know, it's, it's a tough process and yes, it does make it hard for media startups to get traction and survive in the online ecosystem. But on the other hand, I understand why Google is doing it as well, because they don't want some fly-by-night propaganda outfit to suddenly show up in the news ecosystem and start polluting the news landscape with fake news and propaganda content. So they want you to earn it. They want you to put the effort in and really show that you are a trustworthy, reliable news publisher before you get entrance into that news-specific ecosystem.

Is there a certain type of ranking locally and ranking globally for news articles? Is that a thing that you focus on when optimizing content for news publishers?

Yeah, Google has a metric called topic authority, and topic authority, it was actually originally intended to differentiate local websites from global websites. If there's a news event in a specific state in the US, Google realizes that a local news publisher who has journalists present in that state is probably a better source of information than a global or nationwide news brand like the New York Times. So Google would give preferential treatment to websites that have a local focus if it is a local news event. And, but if it's a national nationwide news event, Google would give preference to nationwide news publishers. Uh, but topic authority is not just a local thing now. I think it also focuses on the types of content and the types of topics that you cover. Like if you're a celebrity news publisher or a gaming publisher or technology publisher, but yeah, local news is still a very, very focused thing and users prefer local news as well, uh, if they want to learn about what's happening in their direct, uh, environment. And you will see that readers will consume a combination of nationwide news publishers and local news publishers. And Google is really trying to, to find the best way of showing news and a good combination of local publishers and nationwide news publishers for any, uh, specific story. Um, so if you're a local news publisher, my advice generally is don't try to chase after the nationwide news stories. Sure, you can report them if you want, but that's not really where your expertise lies. I think as a local news publisher, you have to make sure Google understands you are a local news publisher and you cover local stories really, really well. And that does tend to get rewarded by Google for stories that have that local element to them. It's very hard for a news publisher to be 2 things at once, to be both a local and a global news publisher. You know, originally, funnily enough, New York Times started out as a New York-focused newspaper, but nowadays it's a global news brand and Google will interpret them as a global news brand and stories about New York and New York City. New York Times doesn't have an advantage there anymore because there are other local publishers in the New York area who are much better at covering local news. And the New York Times is much better at covering nationwide and global news. Uh, the same with, with the London-based newspapers, like, like the Times there and the Telegraph, they're seen as nationwide newspapers, not necessarily as London-based newspapers versus like City AM would be a very London-based newspaper and therefore tends to rank well for London focused news stories. So it's really about what Google perceives you as, as a publisher, and whether or not you have that local focus or whether or not you have that nationwide or global focus.

Is there some like mistake and error or wrong approach to doing news SEO that can take down a whole website? Would I just— in other words, what is the biggest mistake I can make as a news publisher in terms of like maybe technical setup or content creation? Is there something that you've seen in your career that can really have a negative impact?

There's quite a few things that can go wrong. Um, one of the biggest things you can do, for example, is use client-side JavaScript to load article content. Um, like I said, you, the rendering phase is, is often delayed and it's not as, as fast as based, uh, HTML-based indexing for Google. So you need to make sure your article content is in the HTML source completely from opening headline down to the very last paragraph without any reliance on client-side JavaScript. Bad navigation. You know, some websites just have news as a navigation button and that's meaningless. You need to make sure Google understands what your main topics and main categories of news are. So you need to have good navigation with categories and subcategories, and your news needs to be classified as such. And no matter how narrow your focus is as a news website, there are always topics and subtopics you can identify to put into your navigation. And Google needs to see that navigation as well, because they're basically signposts for Google and, and for end users that tell them what your focus is, what your specialty is as a news website, and, and what you, you you write about. And then there's so many other things that can go wrong with pagination, for example, that's not properly implemented. News articles, structured data, like I said as well, or your website can't be crawled fast enough. You have a very slow responding website, or you have a lot of duplicate content, like an article that can have 4 or 5 different URLs on your website, if it's filed under different categories, which creates all kinds of really interesting problems for Google. So it really depends on how good your technology stack is and then how well developed your editorial practice is.

What about in terms of measuring the successfulness of your efforts? So is traffic the ultimate goal of all news websites? What KPIs do you look out for? What do you measure? The people who you work for, what do they ask you to sort of bring up a certain metric? Is it always traffic?

Generally, it's always traffic, but it can also be about qualified traffic, not necessarily volume. For a publisher whose primary revenue source is advertising, they just want traffic. They don't really care about else. They just want the clicks. Whereas if you have some sort of, for example, paywall or a freemium model or some sort of subscription mechanism, it's not necessarily about the volume of traffic. It's about the quality of the traffic. Does that traffic lead to conversions? And some of those publishers are perfectly happy with less traffic if it has a much higher conversion rate than, you know, trying to appeal to all the users and get as much traffic as possible. But yeah, traffic from Google is generally the main metric because these publishers live and die by the click. If they don't get the traffic, then they don't get the ability to monetize that particular reader. And then, you know, know, they can't make money, they can't survive as a business. Uh, so, you know, generally it's about traffic and then if depending if there's a subscription or a freemium model as well, it can be about conversion rates and the quality of the traffic.

With the rollout of, uh, Google's AI overviews, is the approach to doing news changing? Because like, after all, not everybody's gonna be necessarily clicking to get the actual news. They're just gonna get a summary. How are you preparing or are you already prepared? What is the game plan? for such situations? Is it going to just transform the total, like, zero-click approach to, yeah, it's just to do a search, do a Google. So what are your thoughts on this?

When AI overviews were first launched, um, there were some media commentators who predicted the death of publishing and that news on the web was going to disappear and it was all going to be utterly catastrophic. I don't know about you, Andrew. I've been in SEO long enough that that sounded very familiar to me. I've heard the same stories about featured snippets. were introduced. I saw the same when Google started showing images in search results and when local maps suddenly became a thing in Google and everybody was panicking. Oh, search is dead. It's all going to change. So when that whole panic started, I was like, yeah, no, probably not. And guess what? That's exactly what happened. Nothing happened. News seems to be exempt from AI overviews. It's very hard to get an AI overview when you have a news box, like a top stories box. It seems that Google just doesn't want to show AI overviews when there is a news-focused element to that particular query. And even then, it, from what I've seen from all across all my clients, traffic hasn't been impacted at all by AI overviews. The traffic is still more or less the same. Uh, AI overviews is not a threat to, to news publishers. Uh, algorithm updates have a much bigger impact than AI overviews. So it's just, it's a total storm in a teacup. I don't see AI overviews as a, as a huge threat. I think it's just another search feature. And yes, every single new search feature that Google's introduced Has chipped away at total traffic that Google sends the publisher. But that's that's nothing new. It happened with featured snippets. It happened with image search. It happened with all the other elements that Google is showing. Google is is increasingly trying to make sure Google spent users spent more time on Google and and more time clicking ads rather than going to publishers. An AI overview is just another nail in that particular coffin, but it hasn't dramatically changed the landscape at all. It's just a gradual evolution of Google search as. As Google has always kept evolving. So it's not a profound existential threat for publishing on the web. Um, you just, you know, you have to fight your way in the new ecosystem, and, and it's another Google element to optimize for and try to maximize. And like I said, for news content, it doesn't seem to appear very much or at all. Uh, so if you're a news-focused publisher, you're probably not going to notice any impact from AI Overview.

Do you think that there's a chance that this whole people just start trusting whatever Google is putting out in its snippet and not doing the research, not clicking through because it's a matter of habit. And I can already see in my nephew who's like 17 years old, he just already like, it takes him like 2, 3 seconds to get an answer to something. He doesn't click through to understand like the truth.

This is a very interesting topic and probably beyond the scope of pure SEO, to be entirely honest. Reuters, the news organization, they partner with academics and they publish an annual report called the Reuters Digital News Report, which basically shows how people consume news and how they engage with news, where they get their news from, et cetera, et cetera. It's a very good report. I highly recommend anybody interested in news on the web to find it and read it. And what they show in the 2024 report is that there's actually a slight increase in people going to Google for news. And I think it's also because people have started to realize that news that they consume via recommendation engines and social channels like TikTok is not always reliable and not always the actual story. And they can realize that they're very easily influenced into believing things that aren't true by consuming news in that snippet-based format. And even young people catch on to that fact. And then those people go to Google to search for the actual, what might or might not be the truth of the story. So I think the risks of news consumption due to algorithmic channels like TikTok and other social media feeds is, is probably overhyped a bit. There was a bit of a, of an indication in the early 2020s, especially during COVID era, people would rely on, on those sorts of social channels for news. But you see a slight reversal of that trend now because those same kids have started to realize that, hey, wait a minute, these, these videos that I'm seeing on TikTok reporting on whatever news story, that's not actually what happened. That's not actually true. I might need to actually go and find out what the real story is, and then they end up in Google. So I'm not particularly worried about that. I see the same trend across my clients. Google is still by far the largest driver of traffic. And for most of my clients, it's a growing source of traffic. We do see more competition, uh, for like, uh, major, huge international news brands losing traffic, but it's not because, uh, Google is punishing them. It's just because they get surpassed in SEO efforts by other publishers who are doing things maybe a little bit better, doing things maybe a little bit differently. Because if you're a big global news brand, it's very easy to get complacent. And just believe, oh, we'll always get this Google traffic and maybe not work quite as hard for it as a small lean media startup might, might work for it. But on the whole, I'm not particularly worried about changing behavior in news consumption. Um, it's always very important to keep an eye on that and always try and follow your audience and see how they consume the news. And as a news publisher, you need to be able to fire on multiple channels and not just put all your eggs in one basket. You don't want to be fully reliant on Google for your traffic, but at the same time, you don't want to be fully reliant on a social channel like TikTok or Facebook either, because they're all algorithmically controlled ecosystems where you as a single publisher have no control over whatsoever. You need to make sure you have a very diverse source of traffic for your news content and you follow where your audience behavior tells you to go. For now, most people still consume news online either by directly going to a news website that they trust. Which is great, or by Googling the news. And that, I don't see that changing anytime soon. In fact, I probably see that growing more because of the increasing distrust about like algorithmic interference from social media platforms, especially platforms like TikTok, which have ownership based in China. And people might not necessarily trust entirely what they're, what they're doing, which I think is perfectly fair. And the same with social channels like Twitter. Which are now under the control of a particularly 14-year-old billionaire who's really 53 but behaves like a 14-year-old. So people are like, yeah, maybe I'm not going to trust what, what I see on Twitter anymore. I might just go directly to the news sources, uh, myself. So yeah, it, like I said, it's important to keep an eye on and that to not be biased to how people are changing their news consumption. But from all the data that we see, the, the change in news consumption isn't particularly dramatic, and Google is still the cornerstone of how people consume the news.

Well, fingers crossed because for the past, well, starting 9 years ago, I started hearing fake news and it's just sort of, well, we're not going to get into the political stuff, but we want to talk, focus on the technical, but still it is a very important part of the existence of news publishers. Like you said, you mentioned social media, like that just taps into the new generation. It's in a format that they can understand. So even if it's an established newspaper, like a 100-year-old publication, then They can seem modern and hip on these social media. But yeah, definitely still looking to see good newsworthy websites having and holding onto their name and just power through the storm that is happening right now. So it's a whole discussion that we can have on another topic. And I wanted to sort of close in on the podcast and ask you, it's very difficult to summarize because we touched on so many things and I just wanted to maybe ask you, Uh, what your words of advice would be to news publishers. But then I thought like news publishers, it's a very difficult barrier to cross right now, given all the requirements and the financial and like the team that you have to build up with authority. So my, uh, rephrased question is, what are your words of advice for any SEO professionals working with news publications?

I think it's important to understand that news is a very different ecosystem and, and business environment than like an e-commerce website. You know, the, the biggest challenges that the classic SEO have, like e-commerce and virtual sites, is generally content and links. Those are the 2 things that are hardest to get as, as a classic SEO professional, where those are the 2 things that as a news SEO, you don't struggle with. The content, that's the result of, of what the daily output of that company is. They produce journalistic content, so you don't have to worry about the volume of content. You have to worry about the quality of the content, but not the volume of the content. And the links, again, generally not a problem if the quality of the journalistic content is good enough. Like I said, original quality reporting. The links tend to materialize on their own. Your content will be used as citations and sources for other people reporting the same stories. It's more about all the things around it to, to maximize those signals and to make sure that, uh, SEO is not seen as, as an external addition to what the website is doing, but as an integral part of it. Because like I said earlier, you get one chance in the news ecosystem with every article that you publish, which means it's much more process-oriented, much more focused on making sure SEO is part of the editorial process, but at the same time, not making it the champion of the editorial process. You don't want to start writing purely to chase after Google clicks, because that might work in the short term, but in the long term, it's gonna hurt the website more than anything else. So you need to make sure that you appreciate the fact that the purpose of the website is to produce journalism, and you as an SEO professional should not undermine that principle in, in the least, but you should support it. You should make sure that every piece of journalism that is produced gets the best possible chance of showing up in that news ecosystem. And that news ecosystem is very fast moving. That article has a shelf life of 12, 24, 48 hours maybe. On Google Discover, it's a bit longer. You can have articles showing up for much longer than that. But the news-specific ecosystem, especially top stories in Google News, if an article gets traffic for 12 to 24 hours, that's it. That, that's your window of opportunity. So you have to make sure you maximize that opportunity as much as you can. And you build up those signals with every article that you publish. For Google to understand your website as a quality journalistic outlet and that you deserve to be in those rankings. So like I said, much more process-oriented. And then the technical side probably is a bit more important as well. With like an e-commerce website, you can afford to have a bit of a delay between publishing content and Google crawling and indexing it. It's not mission-critical to have that indexed within an hour. Whereas in a news website, if an article is only indexed an hour after it's been published, that's Too late. You have to make sure the article is indexed straight away. And that again is a technical SEO challenge. So it's, it's a very great combination of what I call near real-time editorial SEO, because news SEO is as close to real-time SEO as you can get, and having really good technical foundations that enable that real-time SEO to take place.

I actually just noticed that I lost track of time and we've been talking for way longer than I expected. Hoping that is okay with you, but I actually just wanted to sort of thank you. for taking the time to be here with us to discuss this topic that I haven't actually discussed at this podcast earlier before. And my question to you is, how can our listeners find you, reach out to you for, I don't know, consultation, or just follow you to just see what you're, what you're thinking about?

Yeah, I have a newsletter. I very regularly write it, unfortunately. So if you subscribe, you're not going to be bombarded. You might get one newsletter a month, one newsletter every 2 months. It's on a seoforgooglenews.com, and that's my main outlet. I'm not really active on social media anymore. I deleted my Twitter account. I'm not on Facebook, not on Instagram. I'm on LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn. Uh, but again, I very irregularly post there. And I have a website, polemicdigital.com. You can find my email address on there or the contact form if you want to ask me any questions. I have an open email policy for anybody who wants to ask me about news SEO. Uh, so never hesitate if you have a specific question about a news SEO problem. Get in touch with me. I'll always do my best to be helpful because that's how I learned as well. I learned by asking questions from other people and they very generously shared their expertise with me. So I try to pass that forward as well. And fortunately, the news SEO community in general tends to be very supportive of each other. We have a lot of really fascinating people, really smart people working in this industry who are very happy to share their knowledge and expertise. And there's too many to name, but I want to give a shout out to Shelby Blackley and Jesse Wills, who have seojournalism.com, also a newsletter, and they're fantastic in what they do and they're very generous with their knowledge as well. So I highly recommend following them as well if you get a chance.

Yeah, thank you for sharing that and also all the information that we've covered during this episode of our podcast. So I'm going to end it here and I want to say today Barry Adams shared with us his vast experience on how to properly do SEO for news websites and publishers. Hope our listeners are already thinking of ways to put these insights to good use. Once again, I want to thank Barry for taking the time to be here with us. And to our listeners, thank you for tuning in. Be sure to subscribe and enjoy the next episode of the DoFollow Podcast.