A Very Real "Need for Speed" And How Sky News Beat The Market

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The past few weeks have been nothing short of eventful. From breaking news to major sports announcements, the world goes through a rollercoaster of emotions as events keep happening, and the race for publishers is on from the moment the story breaks.

A Very Real “Need for Speed” To Break The News With Precision

When the news of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump broke, Sky News was quick to respond with a live blog, thanks to the swift actions of their team. The gripping interview by Journalism UK with Jimmy Rice, live blog editor at Sky News describes the moment he was alerted to the news, which saw him setting up a live blog from his living room within minutes. The integration with their CMS and the support of the online overnight and abroad teams allowed them to beat most other news outlets to the punch.

The blog’s immediate publication and rapid SEO optimization resulted in an impressive surge of traffic, highlighting the importance of speed and efficiency in live news coverage. When the Trump story broke, “Sky News was first with the push, including all the US network. That speed had a big impact on SEO. Within minutes of the push I could see more than 120,000 concurrent visits to the live blog from Google alone, and 100,000 of those were classified as new users – most from the US” shares Jimmy Rice in the interview.

“For speed I set up a blog from my living room in Enfield. Our live blog partner Norkon is super smooth and integrated into our CMS so it was just a case of writing a hello post outlining the story, filling in three boxes (teaser headline, SEO headline, standfirst), putting on a photo, and pressing publish. Less than five minutes and it was up”.

Making SEO Right

In a previous blog post, we covered best SEO practices for news publishers, specifically focusing on how Google crawls, indexes, and ranks news articles. Live blogs, with their unique format, require publishers to take specific steps to ensure they rank well. One essential step is using structured data markup for every update, which helps Google recognize the content as a series of updates. Google identifies live blog articles and will recrawl them more frequently than standard news articles to find the latest updates.

Beyond the rapid actions taken by the Sky News team and their effectiveness in publishing a live blog within minutes of the occurrence, this event demonstrates how Sky News has mastered and fully optimized their content for SEO, including server-side rendering, to ensure the search visibility and high ranking of their live blog.

When Data Speaks:

The effectiveness of live content is backed by compelling data from within the publishing industry. Marfeel reports live content achieves 42% increase in RFV (Recency, Frequency and Value), 29% increase in reader time, and 43% longer scroll depth than regular articles. Across 35 US publishers, live blogs were found to generate on average 70% longer engaged time than articles, according to Chartbeat. This data underscores the growing importance of live content in engaging audiences more deeply and for longer periods.

Format & structure preferred by Gen Z and Millenials:

The dynamic nature of news delivery is evolving rapidly, driven by the need for speed and supported by data on audience engagement. Gain traction on time-sensitive stories that inform and engage your audience, make headlines and establish your newsbrand as a trusted source. If you’re looking to improve your live strategy, reach out – our expert team is here to help!