SEO Live Blog Tips for News Publishers
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Optimize news articles and live blog ranking
In today’s digital-first landscape, newspapers must leverage SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to maintain visibility, outreach, and digital success. With recent changes in Facebook’s algorithms leading to a decline in referral traffic from social media to news sites, optimizing for search engines has never been more critical.
While debates continue on whether AI-generated content, such as the more recent Google AI Overview, will divert traffic from news websites or not, SEO at its core remains essential for ranking high in search prompts and remaining visible in the evolving media consumption habits.
Yet SEO is very broad and can involve striking differences in optimization strategies. SEO optimizations for an e-commerce site look very different than best practices for news publishers sites, and distinctions such as aiming for a B2B or B2C audience make a significant difference.
As a result, and due to high demand from our customers, we crafted a practical SEO guide together with Barry Adams, an SEO expert from the media industry at Polemic Digital, to provide comprehensive insights and practical steps to improve news article ranking, understand the required fine-tuning for a better live blog ranking, and boost publishers’ website domain authority.
The Basics of SEO for Publishers
Let’s start with taking a look at some general SEO rules and understand Google’s crawling and signalisation. Despite the fact that this is applicable to all search engines, we will mostly refer to these as Google as that is the dominating search engine platform in the western part of the world.
Generally, SEO for news publishers is about three things: crawling, indexing, and ranking, explains Barry Adams.
Let’s take a closer look at this:
- Crawling
News homepages are visited by Google every 5-10 seconds to discover new articles. The crawler’s main job is to find links to new articles, follow those links, and send the content to the index. For news sites, the URL is a crucial factor for Google to determine whether to crawl an article. If Google detects a new URL, even if it’s only different by one character, it considers it a new article and will attempt to crawl it almost immediately, typically within two minutes of publication. - Indexing
The indexing system receives content from Google’s crawler and indexes it as quickly as possible. Google has multiple layers of indexing, one of which involves rendering, where Google executes client-side JavaScript. However, due to the rapid pace of news, this rendering process is often too slow and is not initially used for news articles. Instead, Google primarily indexes news articles based on the HTML source code. This means that the content Google sees in the raw, unrendered HTML source is what gets indexed initially. - Ranking
Ranking is the final part of the SEO process, where the editorial quality of your content really shines. Google evaluates the topical specialty of your website: what topics you cover regularly, the quality of your reporting, and the frequency of original reporting versus reiterated news. Establishing your website as a specialist in specific areas is crucial for ranking well.
The “Top Stories” or “Top Articles” boxes in Google search results are significant sources of traffic for news publishers. Most Google traffic doesn’t come from Google News but from these article boxes on regular Google search results. Additionally, your articles can also appear in the Discover feed on Android phones and the Google app on iPhones, which is another hugely popular traffic source.
Key Ranking Factors
To rank well, focus on these critical aspects:
- Topic Authority: Become a go-to source for specific topics.
- Original Content: Prioritize new, original reporting over rehashed news.
- Optimized Headlines: Create clear, engaging, and SEO-friendly headlines.
- Subheadings: Use subheadings to structure content and enhance readability.
- High-Quality Content: Ensure articles are well-researched and well-written.
- Featured Images: Use high-resolution, relevant images, especially for Google’s Discover feed.
- Internal Linking: Link to related articles to build topic authority over time.
Enhancing the SEO of Your Live Blogs
Live blogs have a unique format compared to standard articles, requiring publishers to take specific steps to ensure these rank well in search engines. This is particularly important to ensure your live blogs of breaking news, or other time-sensitive events, are immediately visible to your audience. These steps include:
- Structured Data Markup: Use structured data markup for every update to help Google recognize the content as a series of updates.
- Headlines and Subheadings: Always use H1 tags for headlines and H2/H3 for subheadings.
- Initial Content: Start with a substantial introduction or summary to set the context.
- Frequent Updates: Regularly update the live blog to keep it relevant.
- Visible Updates: Ensure all updates are visible on the page for proper indexing.
–>Check out our full guide for more detailed step-by-step instructions and best practices
Continuous Updates and Re-Indexing
Google recognizes live blogging articles and will recrawl a live article more often than a standard news article to find the latest updates. While standard articles get recrawled hours after the initial crawl, a live blog could be recrawled several times within an hour
Engagement and Link Strategies
Linking back to internal articles encourages higher engagement and sends positive signals to Google regarding your site structure.
At the same time, referencing original information sources is crucial for credibility and plays in your favor if you place links to well- reputed external sources.
While embedding tweets or social media posts is beneficial, you should have a backup in place in case the tweet or post is deleted. Taking a screenshot and providing a link to ensure the context remains intact is one way to prove what the initial post said.
Engagement Elements
Audience engagement elements such as polls, scoreboards, and infographics aren’t directly indexed by Google. However, they contribute to engagement signals, which Google picks up – if these help readers stay longer on the site or click more often, then it’s a positive signal.
Technical Insights: JavaScript and HTML
It can get daunting when technical terms surface, however, understanding the impact of JavaScript and HTML on SEO is crucial. Here is what publishers need to be doing and what Google is already doing.
- Client-Side Rendering
By default, the Client-Side Rendering is where most live blog JavaScript rendering happens. This step is important as it is where real-time updates will show up, instead of having the entire live blog displayed since its creation.
Now, Google performs client-side rendering with a delay – sometimes up to several hours! This delay happens because rendering is resource-intensive, and Google prioritizes quick crawling and indexing, leaving this type of rendering to when its data centers have spare capacity.
A work-around is for publishers to implement server-side rendering (SSR) or pre-rendering is recommended to ensure your content is immediately available for indexing. - Server-Side Rendering (SSR)
Implementing SSR ensures pre-rendered content is delivered as fully-rendered HTML, crucial for SEO. Best practice is to implement SSR using a JavaScript library to improve SEO visibility and crawl speed. This enables Google to pick up your live blog right away.
If you’re prioritizing SEO in your strategy, then SSR is highly recommended. Our live-blogging platform Live Center is uniquely optimized for SSR rendering. Learn more about it here in our technical documentation.
Our live-blogging platform, Live Center, supports SSR with a ready-made library that publishers can easily implement. Learn more about it here.
Best SEO Live Blog for News Publishers
By embracing these SEO practices, news publishers can enhance their digital presence, attract a broader audience with breaking news blogs, and stay competitive in an ever-evolving online space.
Most common issues and SEO mistakes that media and publishers encounter have been addressed in this blog post. For a deeper dive into SEO optimization of live blogs, download our guide where we also cover:
- Staying Relevant in Google’s News Ecosystem: How does live blog ranking work for “evergreen” live blogs versus daily updates?
- Tips and tricks on how to prolong your live articles on Google’s shelf live
- How to Set Up Google Schema and the issue about the red “LIVE” Label
