In early June of 2020, a sports news publisher that had been around since 2017 approached us asking for help with SEO. Their readership had plateaued prior to the COVID-19 epidemic, and despite a publishing velocity of 150+ sports news articles per month, organic search traffic was now on the decline. The sports news publisher had also been unable to break into the Google News carousel search results, and we identified that as a potentially major contributor to future growth.
Goals
Secure inclusion in the Google News carousel. Improve year-over-year organic search performance in general.
Approach
We conducted comprehensive technical and content audits to ensure that the sports publisher’s website met all of Google’s News and Webmaster guidelines. We also curated their Google News Publisher Center to correct issues with it.
We then worked directly with their web development team to resolve technical impediments to News indexing, and with their editorial team on content impediments to ranking in Google News.
We offered recommendations on how to improve content quality, topical depth, and editorial standards, and conducted SEO training for their editorial team, with regular QA of published content and followups to ensure compliance.
Results
Within 30 days of implementing all of our technical and content recommendations in June 2020, the sports news publisher’s website started appearing in the Google News carousel in both mobile and desktop search results:
In addition to the net organic traffic increases from the site’s content now appearing in Google News, site-wide average position increases were noted across the domain’s 130,000+ news stories. This site-wide shift upward contributed to what is currently a +93.94% YoY increase in organic search traffic.
