Why News SEO Is Crucial to Publishers Covering the Coronavirus Pandemic

If you’re a publisher, you already know that news SEO is absolutely crucial.

You might have also learned that optimizing stories for Google News and Google universal search results is fairly difficult to do on the fly.

However, if you’re an SEO or PR professional, then you may not even realize just how useful press release SEO can be for your company or clients.

Well, I’ve just spent the last two weeks testing a news SEO tool called NewzDash that can help thousands of publishers – especially the ones that are covering a rapidly evolving news story like the Coronavirus pandemic.

NewzDash can also help hundreds of SEOs as well as scores of PR agencies and departments – if they can learn how to collaborate more closely at a time when most marketing professionals are trying to increase their social distance or work remotely.

So, first I’ll show you what NewzDash can do for 25,000 publishers in 15 countries to:

• Discover the latest news trends.
• Optimize their news stories.
• Track their keyword rankings in near real-time.

Then, I’ll explain how SEO and PR professionals can use a news SEO tool, too.

Just How Crucial Is News Optimization to Publishers?

As I mentioned, publishers understand why optimizing stories for Google and Google News is crucial.

In September 2018, Megan Radogna wrote The ultimate referral guide to your audience, which reported that Google and Google News were sending 51.5% of the external referral traffic publishers in Parse.ly’s network, while Facebook was sending just 29%.

Also in 2018, a Searchmetrics whitepaper on universal search revealed that Top Stories (the News Carousel formerly known as the News box) were blended into Google’s SERPs for 11% of keywords on desktops and 9% of keywords on mobile devices.

And, according to a study of the impact of search features conducted by Perficient Digital and AuthorityLabs Data Services, which was updated on March 3, 2020, News Carousels have a 20% click-through rate.

In other words, organic search traffic has become as essential to online publishers today as single-copy sales by “newsies” were to Joseph Pulitzer back in 1899.

Read more: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/news-seo-coronavirus-pandemic/354652/