Publisher growth tactics for election season | WEBINAR
Publisher growth tactics for election season | WEBINAR
After going through this module, you should have a clearer understanding of what Google’s Top Stories is, its importance to news publishers and how to optimize content so it has a better chance of appearing in the Top Stories section.
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Top Stories is a section within the universal search results page that displays the trending news stories related to that topic. Google also displays a Top Stories section at the top of search queries that it feels are news-oriented.
For instance, typing the query “FIFA World Cup 2022” into Google Search on desktop brings up a Top Stories panel that ranks above the official FIFA website.
Google anticipates that users searching for this particular query might be more interested in reading about the latest news updates than in viewing FIFA’s site. In other words, Google considers the sites it shows in the Top Stories panel to be the best and latest sources of information for this topic.
When viewing these results on a mobile device, they appear in the form of individual news panes that occupy most of the screen, and which need to be swiped horizontally to move from one to the next. This is why on mobile it’s called the Top Stories carousel.
It’s important to reiterate that Google displays Top Stories only for queries that it deems need news-related results. Googling a recipe or how to guide will almost never bring up a Top Story panel or carousel.
Content that features in Top Stories receives prime visibility on Google, resulting in increased traffic.
Top Stories appear at several places on Google when users search for news.
The search engine results pages (SERPs) is one place. When entering the keyword “soccer”, the Top Stories section appears ahead of both search ads and organic results. Even though these are news stories, they show up under the “All” tab.
Another place where Top Stories appear is within the News tab. Here again, the Top Stories label helps the content in this section to stand apart, driving more traffic.
In addition to these, users may also encounter the latest news the Google News app and on news.google.com.
Despite the obvious benefits of featuring in Top Stories, many publishers fail to optimize their content for it. Let’s explore why this might be the case.
With its page experience update in 2021, Google removed the restriction that meant that only accelerated mobile pages (AMP) content was eligible to appear in Top Stories. Google now allows all content to feature in Top Stories as long as it meets the Google News guidelines.
This opened up the floodgates for more news publishers to jump on the Top Stories bandwagon.Just a month after the changes were rolled out, 12% of Top Stories in the carousel were from non-AMP sites, according to NewzDash founder John Shehata.
In March 2022, Google announced plans to further filter the results within the Top Stories panel by adding a Highly Cited label to news stories quoted by other portals. This move is another step by Google in its quest to promote original reporting.
Publishers who don’t have the resources to invest in creating original or investigative news reporting stand to lose out in featuring in the Top Stories panel.
Using structured data/schema to direct web crawlers to better understand and rank a page’s content is key to appearing in Top Stories.
Since many publishers don’t understand structured data, or may feel intimidated by the technical requirements involved, they may be reluctant to invest the time and resources into its implementation.
The action items listed in this section are of the highest priority for publishers seeking to feature their content in the Top Stories section.
Google’s intent with the Top Stories section is to show the most relevant news articles to its users. This means news news providers need to be able to follow search interest trends and cover the related topics comprehensively.
Google Trends is a great tool for publishers looking to keep abreast of search interest, helping them publish timely stories that can rank for Top Stories.
Scrolling down the Google Trends homepage leads to the “Recently trending” search that gives a surface-level view of topics with the most search traction.
Clicking on “More Trending Searches” presents the user with either “Daily Search Trends” or “Realtime Search Trends”, with the option to filter by geographical location.
The Realtime search trends section covers the preceding 24 hours of Google searches and provides an option to filter by category, which includes the “Top stories” option.
While these options are great for gaining an overview of search interest by segment, the tool also allows publishers to drill down into a particular subject to understand what Google users are searching for over the past hour, as well as the trajectory of interest in related topics and queries.
Publishers can use Google Trends to drive interest in their evergreen content, which can lead to story syndication. The aim here is to secure organic backlinks, which will improve the content’s ranking in the long run.
Google Trends is free, relatively straightforward to use and provides powerful insights into reader interest. Understanding what users want to know, as well as where the next interest spike might pop up, will give editorial teams a better chance of tailoring their coverage to compete for a carousel spot.
For more on Google Trends and how to use it to drive traffic, see our detailed Google Trends module.
Publishers need to cover a topic comprehensively and from different aspects to see best results. This means using long-tail keywords, creating content clusters and covering related topics.
Continuing with our soccer World Cup example, a comprehensive content strategy would include using a combination of keyword research tools — such as Ahrefs — in conjunction with Google Trends to create a list of keywords and potential search queries.
We can see that users are searching for a lot of information about the World Cup, including information about dates, venues draws and the latest lowdown on players and officials.
We recommend using the pillar and cluster approach when trying to cover a topic. This approach involves creating a broad pillar article that provides a general overview of a topic, before linking to several more specific articles that cover the topic from every aspect — this forms a cluster around a central pillar.
The more ground a publisher covers relating to a topic, the better their chances of featuring in, and remaining in, the Top Stories section.
For more on content clusters, see our detailed module here. If you’re interested in understanding how to research keywords and topics for a good content strategy, we also have a detailed tutorial on the process.
Publishers that want to appear within the Top Stories also need to publish content quickly, without sacrificing their quality standards.
Content velocity is an SEO practice that is designed to build authority with search engines around specific subjects. Publishers that don’t just cover a story comprehensively but also publish these stories at a high volume and pace will be viewed by the search algorithms more favorably.
We have an entire module dedicated to content velocity and its importance to SEO, however, we will touch briefly on some of the essential points here to give you a snapshot of how the strategy can improve your chances of appearing in Google’s Top Stories.
Understanding the publishing schedule of those that outrank you in the SERPs will help you determine how much content you need to publish on a daily and weekly basis to compete.
Adopting a scattergun approach to scaling up content creation will quickly place a burden on your resources, so it’s essential that you get the biggest return from the content you commission.
Publishing speed is undeniably a factor in appearing in the Top Stories section, but that doesn’t mean content creation becomes an ad hoc process.
Always have a plan for how you can support breaking stories in the short to mid term. Focus on publishing all the immediately relevant information as quickly as possible, with the team moving on to updating the relevant article with the latest developments and additional context if needed.
At the same time, create supporting pages with more in-depth information to provide background information on the story and then interlink the pieces to create a new content cluster. This approach will send important signals to Google about the original article’s topical authority and will help keep it in Top Stories for longer.
Repurposing content is easier and cheaper than creating something from scratch, but can have just as big an impact on your SEO. You should be looking to squeeze as much value from your content by disseminating it across as many platforms as is reasonable.
This strategy also works with older articles that may only need small updates before they offer some value to your audience once more.
With the changes to ranking factors for Top Stories changing last year, out went AMP requirements and in came Page Experience. This rollout started for mobile devices in August 2021 and became a ranking factor on desktops from February 2022.
Page Experience is, as Google describes it, a set of signals that measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with a page beyond its information value.
A number of signals are used for this ranking metric, including:
CWVs ensure the page delivers a good user experience (UX) based on loading, interactivity and visual stability. There are three main CWV signals:
Several first and third-party tools can be used to monitor and assess CWVs for ongoing improvement.
In addition to CWVs, other aspects of page experience include:
It may seem simple, but ensuring a site is served over HTTPS is a vital element of page experience. (On a side note, Google has also been using HTTPS as a ranking factor since 2014).
Whether a site is an AMP version or not, it must be mobile-friendly. Developers can check if their site is mobile-friendly via this mobile-friendly test.
The content on the news site must be easily accessible to users and follows Google’s guidelines around interstitial ad placement.
For more on Page Experience and how to optimize it for Google News, see our detailed module here.
Google will use an article image for the thumbnails in Top Stories. The search giant checks the “image” attribute in the page’s structured data to see if it can be used as a featured image. Here’s where things get a little tricky, however.
Google has said images in an AMP article must meet certain requirements in order to appear in the carousel, while those in non-AMP articles are not bound by the same rules. But after Google threw out the AMP requirement to appear in the carousel, what does that mean for image optimization requirements?
While AMP and non-AMP articles must adhere to a largely similar list of conditions — such as the need to contain a URL to a representative image — they do have different size requirements.
Non-AMP articles are required to contain an image at least 696 pixels wide, while an AMP article image should be at least 1,200 pixels wide.
For best results, provide multiple high-resolution images (minimum of 50K pixels when multiplying width and height) with the following aspect ratios: 16×9, 4×3, and 1×1.
Google also has several guidelines that publishers need to follow when formatting their logos. For example, images must use either the .jpg, .png, or gif formats, must be a rectangle and must be 160×50 pixels or 600×60 pixels in size.
For more on image optimization and its importance for SEO, see our detailed image optimization module here.
Google has stated that all publishers need to do to appear in Top Stories via search results is to “produce high-quality content and comply with Google News content policies”.
This means that technically any site that is not in contravention of Google News policy can appear in Top Stories. However, in reality, it is a rare feat for most sites to appear in this section.
The Google algorithm takes several factors into account when ranking new sites. These include:
However, beyond this, another important factor for news publishers to consider is E-E-A-T, which Google defines as “experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness” of its main content, its creator as well as the website.
While E-A-T is not technically a ranking factor, it is mentioned 135 times in the Google Search Quality Guidelines, (PDF download) emphasizing the importance of high-quality, trustworthy news content. Google not only wants to show content that most closely matches a user’s search query, it also wants to ensure that this content is trustuworthy and authoritative. This is why publishers need to focus on E-E-A-T.
Ensuring news publishers build authority on specific topics, and their content adheres to E-E-A-T, not only gives site owners the best shot at gaining a coveted spot in the Top Stories carousel, but it also allows them to grow their brand trust, brand safety and maximize their advertising revenue.
For authors looking to self-assess the quality of their content before publication, Google suggests they ask themselves the following questions:
For more on E-E-A-T, refer to our detailed course module here.
To be considered for the Top Stories section, articles should not include any content that is deemed to be:
Further to this, there are more detailed criteria regarding sponsored content, misleading content and transparency.
Google has published its news’ policies to give publishers a deeper understanding of the parameters they should follow.
Structured data is markup that is added to the HTML code of a page to help web crawlers better understand a page’s content. Adding structured data can result in more efficient crawling and indexing of a page, and allow Google to more accurately map the content of a page to a search query.
Although using structured data or schema markup does not guarantee improvements to your site’s rankings, it does help search engines gain a better understanding of your content.
For news articles, Google further advises adding one or more of the four article subtype article schemas — NewsArticle, BlogPosting and its subtype LiveBlogPosting, DiscussionForumPosting and VideoObject.
This is an example of how NewsArticle structured data is applied to inform web crawlers that the content is a news article which needs to be crawled, indexed and displayed accordingly, which is to say, in a time-sensitive manner.
For more on structured data and how to use it to improve SEO, see our detailed module on schema.
In addition to the essentials mentioned in the previous section, the suggestions in this section can go a long way towards helping publishers rank in Top Stories.
Web Stories are visually rich content formats that cover the entire screen when viewed on mobiles, with users being able to navigate through pages by swiping across the screen.
Web Stories appear on several Google surfaces including:
Clicking on a Web Story opens up a slide of rich images.
As users swipe on their screens, new images and text are displayed. The entire content unfolds like a visual story, screen-by-screen.
Google has begun to show more Web Stories in the Top Stories results.
To get a toehold within Top Stories, we recommend earmarking some resources for creating and developing content in the Web Story format.
Publishing content on a single topic more frequently signals to Google that your site is a topical authority on the subject. This has the potential to improve search rankings.
For more on content velocity and how it matters for SEO, see our detailed module on Content Velocity here.
Headlines are usually the first thing that visitors see when they open a page. Titles are also important because they appear in SERP results, and accompany the image thumbnail in the Top Stories section.
Publishers should focus on optimizing their headlines — both H1 and H2. Publishers also need to focus on URLs that exactly target user searches.
For more on titles and headlines, how they impact SEO and how to best optimize for them, see our detailed module here.
Besides the list of to-dos discussed so far, publishers also need to take care to avoid the pitfalls listed below.
Site issues deriving from a lack of website upkeep — such as updating internal links to maintain server performance — can ultimately slow down or impede search engines’ ability to crawl and index an article.
Focus on adhering to the Google News technical guidelines through regularly scheduled site hygiene checks with SEO specialists and/or internal development teams.
Publishers should also consider a topic’s competitiveness. A perfect example of this would be the likelihood of ranking for a “bitcoin” story when direct crypto and mainstream media outlets are also providing coverage.
.The image below highlights a more flexible approach to the coverage of Shiba Inu’s price increase by one of SODP’s clients. Instead of focusing on the cryptocurrency’s background (the route many mainstream media outlets opted to follow), the SODP team worked to develop alternative story angles to match evolving reader interest.
One such story was “Will Shiba Inu Coin Reach $1”, which was inspired by a surge in users trying to find price predictions.
One of the factors that new publishers commonly underestimate is a site’s backlink profile. This doesn’t mean traditional link building needs to be conducted, but publishers should look at syndicating their content or encouraging similar websites to reference their content as a news source.
Hyperlinks are the currency of the world wide web. Following one link to another is how web crawlers crawl the internet, and having trustworthy websites link to another website helps establish trust in it.
In 2016, Google stated that backlinks influence SERPs. As it has not updated this position since, there is no reason to believe that the importance of backlinks has changed.
For more on backlinks, their importance for SEO, and how to optimize for backlinks, refer to our detailed module on backlink profile.
Gizmostory is a small publisher in the movies, entertainment and gaming niche. Gizmostory approached SODP for help in increasing organic traffic.
SODP devised a content pillar and cluster strategy to help boost our client’s traffic. Part of our content strategy was to focus on movie genre ranking lists, as these capitalize on weekend user search trends. We also focused on documenting monthly new releases, thereby tapping into interest from binge-watchers.
A more long-tail oriented strategy allowed Gizmo Story to compete against larger media sites. Long-tail keywords are more specific, query-oriented keywords, such as “which is the best martial arts movie”, instead of a shorter, generic keyword such as “martial arts movie”
The long-term objective was to both increase the organic traffic search baseline while also becoming more discoverable in SERP features such as “People Also Ask”.
The end result was that Gizmostory’s content was picked up by Top Stories, it entered the top 10 rankings in less than a week and received mentions from leading Hollywood directors William Friedkin and John Fusco. Traffic to the website increased from 7,000 monthly visits to 50,000 in a four-week period from December 1st to December 30th, 2021.
The traffic to Gizmostory has been increasing steadily, with the site receiving more than 500,000 visitors in October 2022. More than 90% of that number found the site through organic search.
Ghanaweb is a medium-sized publisher that publishes news content targeting the Ghanaian diaspora worldwide. When we Google FIFA World Cup 2022, we see a story by Ghanaweb appearing in the Top Stories panel along with much bigger publishers such as CNN, Yahoo! News and USSoccer.com, the official website of the US Soccer Federation.
The first thing we notice when we open the Ghanaweb site is that it loads quickly and does not contain too many ads, save for a banner ad.
The content on the site is neatly classified into categories making navigation easy, despite not have the best URL structure.
The site also uses https.
This means that the site has paid attention to its Page Experience.
Next, when we open the story from this page and right click on View Source in Chrome, we can see the following about its code.
We can see that the page has used structured data to highlight that it is a news article about sports. We also see that the datePublished and dateModified attributes have been accurately updated, an important requirement for time-sensitive content.
What is interesting to see is the comprehensiveness of their schema markup to provide transparency across all their different policies, which has been a significant differentiator from the competitor set.
Thus, this combination of good page experience, and the timely yet unique content angle helped it visibly rank from its competitor set.
You should now have a thorough understanding of what Top Stories is, where and how it appears on the desktop and mobile platforms and why it is an important source of traffic.
You should also be able to plan and strategize on how to feature in the Top Stories section.
The most important action items are publishing comprehensively and frequently on hig-trending topics. To do this, publishers must use tools like Google Trends and Ahrefs to discover trends and publish as soon as stories break out.
Using long-tail keywords to cover all aspects of a topic and to ramp-up publishing frequency is also essential. Investing in improving page experience is also vital.
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