Chelsey Heath is the news SEO strategist for the Trisolute News Dashboard, a Google visibility tool built especially for news publishers. She has a background...Read more
As COVID-19 continues to be top of mind for global news publishers, we reveal the most visible news websites on Google across x countries for the keyword “coronavirus.”
This analysis uses data from the Trisolute News Dashboard, the best-in-class visibility tool for news publishers to see where their articles appear in the news-related Google rankings.
In most countries, publishers who are not based in that country saw their visibility for the keyword “coronavirus” decline precipitously in mid-March. This change was true on both mobile and desktop SERPs (search engine results pages).
In March, Google released “Ways to stay informed on coronavirus news,” which explains: “Local news plays a critical role in informing people about the virus’ impact in their communities. The COVID-19 feature in Google News puts local news front and center with a dedicated section highlighting the latest authoritative information about the virus from local publishers in your area. This feature is available today in more than 10 countries and will expand to additional countries in the coming weeks.”
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Here are the most visible publishers per country for the keyword “coronavirus” over the last 6 months, in the mobile SERP (search engine results page) ranking types – News Box, Publisher Carousel, Video Carousel and Live Blog:
The United States of America
United Kingdom
Australia
India
New features in the News Dashboard: Competitor Clusters, drill-down reports
You can now create Competitor Clusters in the KPI Dashboard reports, to keep track of different publishers in your vertical, region, or even for a certain series or story. You can add any publisher that’s indexed in Google News. Click on the checkmark to save your changes. Your Competitor Clusters flow through to all of the KPI Dashboard ranking reports.
In the KPI Dashboard>SERP reports (Mobile Visibility Overall, Mobile News Box, Mobile News Carousels, Mobile AMP Carousels, Publisher Carousels, Desktop Visibility Overall, Desktop News Box) in the KPI Dashboard, we’ve completely redesigned the second drill-down report. You can now see, at a glance, how long an article ranked for a keyword over the chosen time period; how much of your rankings for that particular keyword belonged to a particular article; and the previously displayed information such as article headline, URL, ranking type, ranking position, etc. This makes it even easier to see what article changes (e.g. headline) have when been acknowledged by Google and how they have affected your visibility (and correspondingly traffic).
We now track the red “Live” flag (small red box with white LIVE text in the upper right corner of a ranking in the News Box). This makes it easier for you to track live and heavily fluctuating topics and how your changes are played out on Google and how it affects your visibility.
