The Top Google News SEO Tactics To Boost Content Visibility

When you have landed on this page, it means you are keen to know about Google News SEO. First, let’s clarify one thing: Do not get confused by the name ‘Google News SEO;’ it is not only meant for news websites. Any website content can earn benefits by optimizing for Google News SEO.

And that’s what we are going to discuss today. This article will discuss Google News’s working principle, its crucial ranking factors, and top Google News SEO tactics to rank your news content higher. 

But before diving into that,

What Is Google News?

Google News was created in September 2002 by Krishna Bharat, an eminent research scientist at Google.

Google News is Google’s news aggregation service. After compiling and organizing articles from various news sources, Google News provides them to users as personal feeds based on their previous searches and preferred topics.

As per the last Google News analysis data shared by Google in June 2020, Google News sent searchers to newsworthy websites 24 billion times every month, which equates to approximately 9000 clicks per second.

Where Does Google News Appear?

Google News appears in the following essential areas.

1. Google News primarily appears on the homepage of the Google News website and app.
2. Google News also appears in the ‘News’ tab or ‘Top Stories’ section of the Google search engine results pages.
3. Google Discover also hosts news stories.
4. Google News stories also appear under the trending search terms of Google Trends’ landing page.
5. It can also appear in YouTube’s ‘Breaking News’ and ‘Top News’ sections.
6. Google’s Virtual Assistant also offers news stories in audio format.

How Does Google News Work?

Google News selects stories for readers primarily based on Google News SEO algorithms. However, Google News publishers and human team members also play a significant role in suggesting the most relevant news stories. All of them suggest news stories from authoritative sources only.

The predominance of the Google News SEO algorithm results in Google News showing the same ‘Top Stories’ to the searchers using the same language and belonging to the same region. However, the tool allows users to customize their settings depending on the types of topics they want to view in their feeds. To do so, you only need to scroll down to ‘Your topics’ and click ‘Customize.’

The Google News SEO algorithm also suggests personal feeds depending on the users’ past searches on Google search engines and YouTube.

What Are The Ranking Factors Of Google News Algorithms?

The Google News SEO algorithm considers the following seven ranking factors to ensure that users receive the most relevant and valuable news content from authoritative sources.

Relevance: News stories that match the search intent of the users’ past Google search queries. 

Location: Location-based local news stories relevant to the users from that particular location.

Prominence: Prominent news events and stories that are getting widespread exposure.

Authoritativeness: News stories and articles that come from authoritative sources only.

Freshness: Highlights the most recent news stories on a particular subject. 

Usability: Assesses the ease of viewing a site’s news story.

Interests: Feeding personalized content as per user’s interests based on their previous search queries.

However, Google SEO for news sites also confirms the following three factors, though they are not considered ranking factors.

1. Google News SEO algorithm does not consider an author’s political or ideological opinion while ranking news stories.
2. The Google News SEO algorithm ensures that Google’s partners and advertisers do not get additional benefits during the ranking process.
3. Google News SEO does not consider the author’s sensitive characteristics like age, gender, and religious beliefs while ranking news stories. 

Google News SEO Tactics To Rank Higher

Not only can news sites benefit from Google News SEO, but any website that publishes top-notch, original, timely content can also benefit from this. If your news article can make a place in Google News SEO rankings, organic traffic to your website can be boosted drastically.

You must be thinking by now, ‘How do I get on Google News?’ In this section of the article, we will discuss Google News SEO best practices that will help your news story rank higher on Google News.

Share Content Directly Using Google Publisher Center

Adding your site to Google Publish Center is not mandatory for ranking your news story in Google News SEO. However, setting up your Google Publisher Center account can help you manage your site’s appearance on Google News and provide you with the following benefits:

1. It allows you to gain control over the design and branding of your news content on Google News.
2. The ‘Subscribe with Google’ feature lets you monetize your news content using paywalls.
3. Google Publisher Center makes your news story eligible to appear in the Google News app’s Newsstand section.
4. Your site can earn approval from Google after a manual review process.
5. It allows you to create specific Google News sitemap and robots.txt files.

If you want to submit your site for manual review to get approved, enter your site’s URL in Google Publish Center and click the ‘Add’ button.

Next, select your publication’s name and location and verify your website in the Google Search Console.

Once your application gets approved after the manual review, you can directly share website URLs, RSS feeds, and videos to Google News.

Resolve Technical SEO Issues

Identifying and resolving your site’s technical SEO issues helps search engines crawl and rank your content. Google News SEO algorithm is no exception. The following technical SEO practices can help your site’s newsworthy content rank on Google News SEO listing,

1. Fulfill the requirements of site structure, languages, encoding, and individual article pages as mentioned in Google’s technical guidelines.
2. Add news-specific Schema markup data.
3. Avoid duplicate content. 
4. Improve site speed by compressing images.
5. Ensure offering a mobile-friendly website.
6. Ensure user security and data privacy by HTTPS certification.

Once you have optimized your site’s technical SEO by ensuring all the above factors, you need to ensure that your newsworthy web page content offers a top-notch user experience by confirming the following:

1. A quick page loading speed.
2. Proper display on mobile devices.
3. Excessive ads are not spoiling the reading or viewing experience.
4. The web page content is easy to navigate.
5. The web page is optimized for Google’s Core Web Vitals.

However, before optimizing your website for technical SEO, you need to know the current technical SEO issues of your website.

To do so, you must select a reliable site auditor tool like RankWatch.

The tool shows an overall site score after crawling all your web pages.

It also categorizes the SEO issues found in your website after crawling, depending on their criticality.

You must resolve the issues with high criticality without further delay to enhance your Google News SEO.

Identify Trending Topics

Your site must create news stories on topics users are interested in and frequently searching for. The best way to identify trending topics is to create a perfect combination of utilizing Google Trends and keyword research. If you open the Google Trends landing page, it will show you the trending topics. You can choose one among them that suits the niche of your site.

For example, Taiwan was struck with the strongest earthquake in the last 25 years of 7.2 magnitude. If yours is a news site or you run a disaster management blog, it can be an exciting topic for you to create a news story or a YouTube video.

Another way to find trending topics is to perform a keyword search using a reliable free keyword research tool like RankWatch.

For example, if you type the main keyword ‘disaster management’ in our keyword research tool and hit enter, the tool will suggest a list of organic and long-tail keywords related to your primary keyword in the blink of an eye.

The tool also provides search volume, cost-per-click, keyword difficulty (competition), and keyword trend for each keyword.

Create Top-Notch And Original People-First Content

You must ensure that you write top-notch and original content that adds value to your readers to get ranked in Google News. However, exceptionally well-written content must adhere to the following Google SEO news tactics to expand the probability of appearing on Google News.

Create Compelling Headlines

It would help if you designed an eye-catching headline for your news story that can immediately hook your readers. Your headline can be sharp and to the point, which creates a buzz or instigates an argument.

Following are a few tips for designing Google News SEO-friendly headlines for your readers,

1. The headline must clearly and concisely describe the news topic.
2. The reader should find your headline meaningful.
3. The headline must be in the present tense and use active verbs.
4. You should avoid using common ‘PR’ words while designing your headline.
5. You must write your headline in an active voice.

Ensure Creating EEAT Compliant Content

You must ensure the body content of your news story complies with the EEAT principle of Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines. EEAT is the acronym for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

Experience: It demonstrates how much first-hand experience the creator has on the topic.

Expertise: It shows how much knowledge, skills, and expertise the creator has on the subject.

Authoritativeness: It measures how reputed the author or the website is.

Trustworthiness: It demonstrates how accurate, authentic, and safe the content is.

Though EEAT is not a direct ranking factor, it is essential to Google’s latest Search Quality Rater Guidelines. Search quality raters, who are real people, use these guidelines to identify changes in search trends and give that feedback to Google. EEAT helps Google to measure the effectiveness of changes in its ranking system. Though EEAT does not directly affect your ranking, optimizing your news story for Google News SEO as per EEAT is essential.

Ensure Writing Newsworthy Content

The most obvious thing that your Google News story must have is newsworthy content. You can ensure that by the following practices:

1. You can create your news story by original reporting. If your story offers an opinion, it must come from a trusted source.
2. Your story must offer timely information to your readers.
3. Your news story must hook readers by offering exciting, trending headlines. However, you must avoid using clickbait titles.
4. Your news story must stick to the trending topic it covers and should not suddenly divert to another topic.
5. The target audience must get satisfactory answers to specific questions from your news story.
6. Your news story must ensure that it only offers accurate data after checking the facts and uses high-quality, high-resolution images.

Your news story must also adhere to the following Google News policies.

Violating any of the above policies can result in a Google penalty. This penalty can lower your site’s SERP rankings, or Google may even remove it from its search results.

Ensure Updating Content Regularly

As mentioned earlier, the ‘Freshness’ of news stories is one of the Google News ranking factors.

Google also confirmed that Google News SEO prioritizes news stories that are less than 90 days old. Hence, you must regularly update your site with a series of new stories and refresh old stories that are still performing well.

Following are the best practices to refresh your old valuable content:

1. Researching and adding new information on the topic.
2. Adding new facts and figures related to the topic.
3. Add valuable information to your thin content.
4. Try to explain the topic from a different perspective or point of view.
5. Add experts’ opinions to the content.
6. Include famous and valuable quotes from trusted sources in your content.

You must implement the above-mentioned tips meaningfully while refreshing your content. Moreover, you must avoid artificially refreshing your stories to trick the Google News SEO algorithm, which adds no additional value for your readers.

Build Topical Authority And Boost Social Media Presence

Like its search engine, Google News prioritizes news from authoritative and trustworthy sources. If you wish your site to earn that credibility, you must regularly share your news stories on various social media platforms. 

Your site’s presence on multiple platforms helps you earn readers’ trust and shows search engines that your site is a legitimate source of information. Having a lump sum of social media followers also lets your news stories get featured on personalized feeds. With a good social media presence, chances are that your news story may appear on Google Discover.

If your site regularly posts on ‘X,’ you may also appear in the ‘From Twitter’ section.

The Google search also offers a ‘Perspective’ carousel now, which includes X posts.

In addition to having a chance of getting featured on the above news searches, a solid social media presence also provides your site with the following benefits,

1. It helps your news stories to reach a wider audience.
2. Readers get familiar with your brand.
3. It builds trust in your website, boosts your brand’s credibility, and provides new link acquisition opportunities.

Ensure Fixing Small Crucial Details

You must meticulously resolve every small but crucial issue on your site and news story pages to meet Google News ranking factors.

For example, your site must have an ‘About us’ page that provides readers with your company’s contact information. It provides transparency to your readers, which helps your site to build trust and establishes authoritativeness.

The data on the ‘About us’ page of RankWatch shows that they are a trustworthy source in the SEO and digital marketing industry.

Adding an author bio at the end of your web page article reflects expertise and authoritativeness. You must clearly mention the publishing date under the web page title to ensure the freshness of your content to your readers.

It also ensures the Google News SEO algorithm that your content is less than 90 days old.

Final Thoughts

Making a place for your web page content in the organic search results of Google SERP is becoming more competitive day by day. Google News provides a platform where you can appear for newsworthy content, provided you have designed top-notch and original people-first news content. Moreover, you must ensure that your news stories are well-optimized for all the seven Google News ranking factors to ensure a higher ranking.