SEO and News: How to Optimise Your Site for News Searches

Understanding news search intent

The search engine treats a query such as “kings of France and a query like “France 2024 legislative results differently. The first relates to a classic informational intent, relatively fixed in nature. The second triggers news filters: Google detects an immediate, potentially urgent need, and offers a “Top Stories carousel, sometimes a “Live Blog, and more rarely a live video module. Decoding this logic is the first step. When researchers at the University of Washington analysed 200,000 SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) in 2023, they showed that the probability of the news carousel appearing rose from 6 % on “cold queries (historical statistics, scientific concept) to 64 % on “hot queries (strikes, natural disasters, sports results). The site’s responsiveness, but also the freshness of the page, then become decisive ranking factors. Understanding this intent makes it possible to calibrate the publishing cadence, choose real-time-oriented headlines and integrate elements such as the update date or the timer “7 minutes ago, visually highlighted by Google.

The specifics of Google News and the Top Stories carousel

A persistent myth is to believe that all news results come from Google News. In reality, since 2014, two feeds have coexisted: the “General Web index and the “News index. The source’s reputation (E-E-A-T), technical compliance (NewsArticle markup, dates), but also behavioural signals (quick clicks, social shares) influence visibility in the carousel. When Le Monde covered Liz Truss’s resignation in 2022, its articles appeared simultaneously in Google News (dedicated tab) and in the Top Stories carousel of the generic SERP “Liz Truss resignation. The Chartbeat observatory then showed a peak of 480k sessions in 30 minutes solely via Top Stories, proving the value of this dual channel. To appear in both, it is no longer enough to be indexed: you must be crawled in both to the nearest millisecond. This implies an automatic sitemap pinged every ten minutes, servers capable of responding in 200 ms, and a stable URL policy.

Technical structure of a news site: markup, performance and AMP

“NewsArticle markup and metadata

Schema.org offers several clusters of markups, but the type remains the most robust for publishers. Integrate headline, datePublished, dateModified, author, image and mainEntityOfPage is basic, but precision matters. In 2021, The Guardian saw the visibility of its climate articles drop by 12 % after having systematically omitted the attribute image in 5000 pages; Google explained that the absence of an image prevented the “large format” display in Discover and in the carousel. Fixing this micro-typo pushed the CTR (Click-Through Rate) back up from 4.3 % to 7.9 %.

Loading speed and Core Web Vitals

With news, latency kills more than ever. An internal test by The Washington Post in 2020 showed that an LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) going from 3 s to 1.5 s multiplied the average session time by 1.4 and reduced the bounce rate by 22 %. Since the Page Experience update, Google promotes fast pages, and direct competition between titles is sometimes fought over 300 ms. Thus, when L’Équipe covers the decisive goal of a match, its article ends up facing articles from sports blogs, Reuters agencies or even the club’s official Twitter account, indexed as a “Moment”. Speed therefore becomes a survival factor.

AMP: still useful?

Accelerated Mobile Pages is no longer mandatory to appear in Top Stories, but tests still show a slight advantage in low-bandwidth markets. The Nigerian newspaper Punch noted in 2023 an 18 % increase in rural mobile traffic thanks to retaining AMP, while its competitors had abandoned it. The challenge now is to combine AMP and SSR (Server Side Rendering) to avoid duplication and optimise the overall UX experience.

Optimising hot content: the life cycle of a news article

SEO editors focused on evergreen sometimes struggle to grasp the notion of “hot content”. Between the first AFP dispatch and the long-form article, the same URL can undergo ten rewrites. The newsroom mindset is to publish quickly, then enrich. Since 2019, Google recommends avoiding the creation of multiple URLs (“slug-1”, “slug-2”) for the same event, at the risk of cannibalising relevance. CNN applies the strategy of the one-shot slug : a stable URL, updated through incremental additions. To avoid confusion, the publisher specifies at the top of the page “Updated at 14:32 GMT”. SEO best practice also consists of listing the key points (“Key Takeaways”) in bullet points from the very first version, because Google readily extracts these lists in the SERPs in “preview” format.

Update strategy and making news evergreen

Some hot information ends up becoming a cold reference. Example: the COVID-19 pandemic. At the start of 2020, articles on “number of cases” were refreshed every hour. By the end of 2022, these same pages serve as archives, still generating 50k monthly visits on Le Figaro via queries like “covid france statistics 2021”. Turning a live blog into a pillar page is done via three levers: (1) rewriting the title to remove the date, (2) cleaning up repetitions, (3) adding an anchored table of contents. The BBC applied this method to its Brexit timelines, achieving a gain of 38 % on general queries (“Brexit timeline”) three years after the referendum.

Internal linking and real-time thematic clusters

The internal linking of a news site resembles a dynamic directed graph. Each new page must link to a “topic hub” page. Politico, with its “topic” tag system (immigration, energy, fintech), showed that an article mentioned in at least three hubs received 27 % more Google traffic. The idea is to pool internal authority and help Google recognise that a site has comprehensive coverage of a subject, and is therefore worthy of appearing consistently in Top Stories when new occurrences arise. The cluster is updated automatically via internal RSS feeds and Python scripts that add a contextual link in the first 200 words of each new article.

Enriched structured data: FAQ and HowTo in the news angle

Guides on “How to vote by proxy” proliferate during elections. Integrating the markup FAQPage into the news article helps capture “actionable” intent. In 2022, the service-public.fr site found itself ahead of Le Parisien for the query “presidential proxy” thanks to its FAQ snippet — quite something for a pure news player. Private publishers can replicate this success by inserting, beneath the news article, updated FAQ blocks. Beware, however: Google penalises recycling the same FAQ markup across multiple URLs (duplication). A good tip is to inject the date into the question: “How to vote by proxy in 2024?” rather than a generic wording.

Concrete case: coverage of the 2022 French presidential election

Between 10 April and 24 April 2022, 42 % of the organic traffic to the francetvinfo.fr site came from “Presidential” queries combined with “results”. The newsroom published more than 800 articles, but only a small group of URLs (the main liveblog, results by department, the profile of the two finalist candidates) captured 70 % of visits. The SEO optimisation rested on three pillars: (1) a unified slug /presidentielle-2022/resultats reused for each update, (2) navigation anchors “See the full results , (3) interactive charts compressed into SVG (average weight 34 KB). By contrast, local media multiplied pages like “Presidential results Var 2022”, “Presidential 2022 Toulon live”, leading to a dilution of authority and a loss of positions. The case clearly illustrates the tension between ultra-localisation and SEO consolidation.

Concrete case: the COVID-19 crisis and the search for real-time data

Johns Hopkins University dominated Google for “COVID dashboard”. Its strengths? A .edu domain (authority), a dynamic table updated every 15 minutes, unprecedented “DataSet” markup in late 2019, and exceptional loading speed (Cloudflare CDN + JSON cache). Media outlets that reused the Johns Hopkins iframe benefited from a slight boost because Google recognised the attribute data-source. Sites that tried to rewrite the content without any added value were demoted by the May 2020 “core update” algorithm, which penalised massive duplication. The lesson: offering exclusive data or enhancing the primary source in enriched form is the foundation of a sustainable News SEO strategy.

Internationalisation and multilingualism for news

Global publishers have to juggle with the markup hreflang. The New York Times has versions in English, Spanish and more recently Korean. Upon the death of Elizabeth II, the Times published a main article translated into five languages, but kept a single identifier story_id. Thanks to this “multilingual hub”, Google was able to consolidate popularity signals, preventing the English and Spanish versions from cannibalising each other. For smaller players, a partial approach (translating only the meta description and the title) may suffice, but the crucial element remains date alignment: a datePublished different from one language to another can create confusion in Google News.

Social media synergy – news SEO

Twitter (now X) sometimes serves as an SEO springboard. When BuzzFeed News tweeted exclusively the video of the missile strike on Kyiv in 2022, the tweet generated 120k retweets in an hour. Google indexed the video in the SERP, but above all detected the notoriety signal and boosted the source article. The CTR of the blue link went from 2 % to 5.8 % after the social wave. Another example: Facebook Instant Articles, long derided, continue to provide sharing signals that, indirectly, improve Top Stories visibility. Even if Google keeps repeating that it does not use social shares as a direct factor, a strong correlation remains, probably via faster indexation and the multiplication of spontaneous backlinks.

E-E-A-T applied to information sources

Since the “Helpful Content” update (August 2022), Google has given major weight to “Experience” in addition to “Expertise”. For news, this translates into valuing on-the-ground reporting. The investigative site Bellingcat, despite a small team, saw its articles on Syrian chemical weapons jump into Top Stories thanks to video evidence and a personal-name byline. Inserting a short author biography (<span itemprop="author">) with external links (academic publications, official Twitter accounts) strengthens authority. Publishers must also highlight their Editorial Guidelines and their “Correction Policy”, now crawled by Google Bot according to Gary Illyes (PubCon 2023 conference).

Monitoring, alerts and crisis SEO

News SEO requires 24/7 monitoring. The Verge’s in-house tool “Storm Watch” triggers a Slack ping when a keyword exceeds a volume threshold on Google Trends in less than 10 minutes. The team then creates a stub page (300 words, photo, full markup) even before the press conference ends. On the Titan submersible explosion in June 2023, this responsiveness enabled The Verge to rank no. 1 for “submarine implosion details” ahead of The New York Times, generating 3.2M visits in 24 h. Crisis management also involves updating headlines to avoid misinformation. Publishers must archive versions via the attribute isBasedOn to prove editorial transparency in the event of a dispute.

Tools, KPIs and dashboard

Key indicators differ from traditional SEO. Beyond Search Console impressions, a news publisher monitors: (1) the average time to appear in Top Stories after publication, (2) the average lifespan of a URL in the carousel, (3) the conversion rate to paid subscription from news entries. The NewzDash tool offers dedicated metrics, while Semrush Sensor provides a volatility radar for news SERPs. On the log analysis side, Screaming Frog Log File Analyser helps measure the frequency of Googlebot-News hits versus Googlebot-Desktop. A 10:1 crawl ratio in favour of Googlebot-News indicates that the site is recognised as a priority news source. For data visualisation, Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio) coupled with the Google Search Console API makes it possible to map sections that are saturated with impressions but lacking clicks — a sign that headlines need reworking.

Conclusion: embedding news within a sustainable SEO strategy

Optimising a site for news searches combines extreme responsiveness, technical rigour, and a long-term vision. Examples from the 2022 presidential election, the COVID-19 crisis or international breaking news prove that a solid SEO foundation maximises the “momentum” effect and extends the value of content beyond the moment. By aligning NewsArticle markup, loading speed, update policy and E-E-A-T, publishers turn volatile traffic into a loyal audience. The challenge goes beyond simple visibility: it is about editorial credibility and economic viability. In an ecosystem where every millisecond counts and where disinformation spreads at high speed, mastering news SEO is no longer a luxury, but a sine qua non condition for existing sustainably in the digital public sphere.