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If youre a publisher, you already know that news SEO is absolutely crucial.

You might have also learned that optimizing stories for Google News and Google universal search results is fairly difficult to do on the fly.

However, if youre an SEO or PR professional, then you may not even realize just how useful press release SEO can be for your company or clients.

Well, Ive just spent the last two weeks testing a news SEO tool called NewzDash that can help thousands of publishers especially the ones that are covering a rapidly evolving news story like the Coronavirus pandemic.

NewzDash can also help hundreds of SEOs as well as scores of PR agencies and departments if they can learn how to collaborate more closely at a time when most marketing professionals are trying to increase their social distance or work remotely.

So, first Ill show you what NewzDash can do for 25,000 publishers in 15 countries to:

Then, Ill explain how SEO and PR professionals can use a news SEO tool, too.

As I mentioned, publishers understand why optimizing stories for Google and Google News is crucial.

In September 2018, Megan Radogna wrote The ultimate referral guide to your audience, which reported that Google and Google News were sending 51.5% of the external referral traffic publishers in Parse.lys network, while Facebook was sending just 29%.

Also in 2018, a Searchmetrics whitepaper on universal search revealed that Top Stories (the News Carousel formerly known as the News box) were blended into Googles SERPs for 11% of keywords on desktops and 9% of keywords on mobile devices.

And, according to a study of the impact of search features conducted by Perficient Digital and AuthorityLabs Data Services, which was updated on March 3, 2020, News Carousels have a 20% click-through rate.

In other words, organic search traffic has become as essential to online publishers today as single-copy sales by newsies were to Joseph Pulitzer back in 1899.

This is why news SEO is as crucial to journalism in the early 21st century as banner headlines were in the late 19th century.

Now, during the early days of news search SEO, the only tool available to help publishers and SEO professionals to track their rankings in Google News was called Newsknife.

It was a project of Industry Standard Computing Ltd (ISC), a software development organization based in New Zealand.

And, back in December 2010, I wrote in a post in Search Engine Watch entitled, Newsknife Ranks Top News Sites and Journalists of Google News for 2010, which reported that Newsknife had analyzed more than 161,000 listings by 5,859 news sites in the U.S. edition of Google News and created a list of Top News Sites for 2010. They were:

Although Newsknife disappeared from the market a few years later, its worth comparing their list of the Top News Sites in the U.S. a decade ago with one compiled by NewzDash last week.

NewzDash was created by John Shehata, who is now the vice president of audience development and SEO at Cond Nast, home to some of the worlds most iconic brands, including Vogue, The New Yorker, GQ, Vanity Fair, and Wired.

I met him in 2009, when he was Director of SEO & Social Media at Advance Internet, which included 13 local online news sites like NJ.com.

We were both speakers at a session on News Search SEO at Search Engine Strategies (SES) New York.

Later, Shehata became the Executive Director of Search and Social Media at Walt Disney Television, which included ABC News, ABC Entertainment, and Oscars.

Thats around the time that I met other panelists at similar sessions at SES London, SES Chicago, and SES San Francisco. This included:

Thats how I know that their news organizations have been optimizing their stories for Google News for at least a decade.

Today, there are more than 50,000 publishers in 127 countries with local editions of Google News and NewzDash is working to collect data on 25,000 of these publishers in 15 key countries.

However, for my two-week test, the data that I was able to analyze was limited to the top publishers in the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Belgium, France and Germany going back to October 1, 2019.

The complete data set is available for subscribers and not available to trial accounts, which is what I used.

Nevertheless, here are the top news publishers in the U.S. edition of Google News from October 1, 2019, to March 6, 2020:

As you can see, CNN, The New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today, are still in the top 10 just as they were a decade ago.

But, missing from the old top 10 list are the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and the Associated Press, ABC News, and BBC News U.K.

Things have shifted significantly since I last looked at a similar list of top news publishers in Google News a decade ago.

What happened to some of the news publishers that were optimizing their stories a decade ago?

Well, NewzDash provides a partial answer in its list of the top video news publishers in the U.S. edition of Google News from October 1, 2019, to March 6, 2020:

As you can see, ABC News is #1, followed by CBS News at #2, Fox News at #3, and CNN at #4.

So, ABC News seems to have mastered video news SEO on YouTube.

In fact, YouTube would be the #1 domain in Google News by far, but NewzDash chooses not to show YouTube as a publisher, opting to show individual YouTube channels for a long list of publishers instead.

And NewzDash provides another part of the answer to my rhetorical question about the BBC News U.K. in its list of the top news publishers in the U.K. version of Google News from October 1, 2019, to March 6, 2020:

And, as you can see, BBC News is #2, behind The Guardian, which has also been optimizing its stories for more than a decade. And the other familiar name on this list is The Telegraph, which ranks #9.

And NewzDash provides the final part of the answer to my rhetorical question in its list of the top video publishers in Google News UK from October 1, 2019, to March 6, 2020:

Check out the list above. The Telegraph ranks #1, Guardian News ranks #3, and BBC News ranks #6.

British national newspapers on the other side of the pond have not only mastered news SEO but have also become proficient at video news optimization for YouTube.

Thats a success story that their American cousins on this side of the pond should examine.

NewsDash also lets you drill down to see the top publishers in Google News sections, including:

For example, heres the list of the top publishers in the Sports section of the U.S. edition of Google News from October 1, 2019, to March 9, 2020:

NewzDash not only reports that ESPN ranks #1 in the Sports section, but that it had a 9.6% share of voice in that category over that period of time.

And heres the list of the top publishers in the Technology section of the U.S. edition of Google News from October 1, 2019, to March 9, 2020:

The Verge not only ranked #1 in the Technology section, it also had a 5.4% share of voice in that category.

In the trial account, NewzDash provides examples of local news reports for Michigan, New Jersey, New York City, and Los Angeles.

More locations are added on-demand per client requests.

For example, heres the list of the top publishers for New Jersey in the U.S. edition of Google News from October 1, 2019, to March 9, 2020:

And heres the list of the top publishers for Michigan in the U.S. edition of Google News from October 1, 2019, to March 6, 2020:

And you can imagine how useful this will be to local news sites in other locations.

Cities and other states can be added in a matter of minutes to customer reports.

There are also NewzDash reports that track news site stats for a single publisher as well as competitive weaknesses and strengths of a group of publishers.

These are all crucial because you cant manage what you cant measure, as Peter Drucker is often quoted as saying.

And the old Newsknife tool didnt enable publishers to track their market share by Google News section, location, or direct competitors.

Now, back before the internet was invented, I was the news editor at an evening newspaper who had to compete for newsstand readers with another evening daily in the same region.

And before that, I was a radio reporter who had to update breaking news stories every hour.

I understand why todays online news editors will want to use the next couple of NewzDash reports every 15 minutes to win todays round-the-clock battle for Google News traffic.

Optimizing breaking news stories is difficult because the rapid flow of new developments quickly makes almost any SEO strategy outdated.

But, NewzDash enables publishers to track keyword rankings every 15, 30, or 60 minutes in Google News SERPs as well as Top Stories the News Carousel, formerly known as the In The News box in Google universal search results.

This enables news publishers to track competitors headlines and see which stories are getting better rankings.

For example, NewzDash did a study on Black Friday and Cyber Monday for 25 days, from Nov. 15 to Dec. 10, 2019. They tracked 25 keywords, including:

And you can see above, Forbes ranked #1 and USA Today ranked #2.

But look at the middle of the image above and you will note that Forbes published 243 unique stories over that 25-day period, and USA Today published 194.

Both publishers flooded the zone on these topics.

However, the top stories on Black Friday and Cyber Monday during this period were:

So, different publishers can have different strategies for covering planned event like these ones or other tent-pole events like the Super Bowl, the Oscars, back to school, Halloween, or Christmas.

What NewzDash enables publishers to do is see which competitors and stories dominated these events.

It also lets publishers understand the tactics that competitors are using like updating the same content every day and switching their URLs, which explains why they won.

So, this is why tracking keywords in near real-time is so crucial.

But, I also wanted to see how NewzDash could be used for a rapidly evolving news story like Coronavirus, which is also known as COVID-19.

It was first reported in Wuhan, China, on December 31, 2019, and the World Health Organization announced last week that the pandemic had swept into at least 114 countries and killed more than 4,000 people.

According to Google Trends, it has prompted a number of questions, including:

As the breakout has spread, there has been a surge in searches in the U.S. for:

So, I used NewzDash to track coronavirus and COVID-19 every 60 minutes from March 3-5.

My test revealed that the top ranking sites are The New York Times, Washington Post, NBC News, USA Today, and CNBC.

In addition, the top stories during that timeframe were:

A quick analysis of this limited sample shows:

Now, if youre an online news editor, then you might use more than a couple of keywords and check rankings more frequently than every 60 minutes for longer than a few days as I did a week ago.

That would enable you to keep up with this rapidly evolving news story in near real-time.

Now, Ive been mucking around in this field since the beta version of Google News was released in September 2002.

And I pioneered what Tad Clarke, the Editorial Director of MarketingSherpa, once called the tactic known as SEO PR to generate measurable results for a wide variety of organizations, including newspaper and magazine publishers.

For example, early press release SEO efforts produced:

But, interest in this tactic dropped like a hot brick in 2013 when Google updated its examples of link schemes to explicitly include:Links with optimized anchor text in articles or press releases distributed on other sites.

Shortly thereafter, conferences like Search Engine Strategies (SES) stopped having sessions on News Search SEO. Training organizations like Market Motive stopped offering courses on Online PR.

And articles like Google News Optimization: How to Boost Your Sites Visibility & Traffic suddenly became as rare as black swans.

But, if you go back and review the list of early results above, then youll see that only one of them involved building backlinks.

The other eight involve boosting brand awareness, driving website traffic, generating leads, increasing sales, or producing a return on marketing investment.

So, maybe its time to take a second look at news SEO, news optimization, or whatever you want to call it these days.

And its worth noting that NewzDash tracks:

So, your biggest challenge wont be finding a press release distribution service thats in Google News or a news SEO tool to track your results.

Based on my experience training SEOs as well as PR agencies and departments since 2002, your biggest challenge will be getting SEO and PR professionals out of their organizational silos and using the best practices from both marketing disciplines.

Now, you may not want to sit around the same table during the coronavirus pandemic. But, you can use a video-conference service to begin tackling this opportunity.

More Resources:

Image Credits

All screenshots taken by author, March 2020

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Why News SEO Is Crucial to Publishers Covering the Coronavirus Pandemic - Search Engine Journal