Before you click away from this article thinking “not another keyword research guide,” let me tell you something I’ve learned firsthand from working with national news publishers. Keyword research for publishers is completely different.
The skills, processes, checklists and tools currently in use are not as useful in this niche.
Forget submitting your keyword list to editors using the traditional keyword research method. These keywords are already expired!
Also, let me save you hours of time sifting through the thousands, if not millions, of keywords that news sites naturally rank for.
News SEO is different – and so is keyword research.
It’s about winning Top Stories optimization. This will give you the lion’s share of the news site’s daily search traffic.
The goal of this guide is to equip you with a quick keyword research framework to teach your journalists so they can win more of those top story spots.
Why Is Keyword Research For News SEO Different?
Trending Topics
News websites require a different approach to keyword research than other types of websites.
They typically focus on timely, intermittent stories that are often only relevant for a short period of time.
As a result, news sites must quickly identify and rank the keywords they are searching for at any given moment (otherwise known as trending topic optimization).
Optimizing for trending topics requires a completely different approach to keyword research.
Traditional keyword research is generally based on 12 months of aggregated data, while news keyword research is predominantly trending topics (which are topics that have not been searched before).
Data
Most local and national news sites cover multiple topics. If a story is of public interest, you can expect a publisher to cover it.
Around Christmas, for example, most news sites would expect tips on festive cooking or shopper’s guides.
You would also expect these publishers to cover stories of public interest, such as COVID-19.
And like seasonal events like Christmas or global events like a pandemic, these topics enter the mainstream public.
The difference is in the data; When looking at a news site’s query data, you need to consider seasonality and trend factors. These factors can also be the reason why your traffic is increasing or decreasing.
Intent
If the topic is trending or newsworthy, Google prefers news sites for that query. This is known as “query deserves freshness” (QDF);
The purpose of the QDF solution is to determine whether a topic is hot. If news sites or blog posts are actively writing about a topic, the model suggests that users are more likely to want current information about it.
For this reason, news sites can bounce in and out of the search engine results page (SERP) with every query.
A simple example to explain this is to compare two US presidents, one former and one current.
If we take the current President, Joe Biden, and compare him to the 43rd President of the United States, George Bush, we see the QDF in action.
For Joe Biden, both top stories are launched at the top of the SERP, and news site topics are listed below.
Screenshot from Ahrefs, November 2022
However, when tracking Bush’s results, the SERP is mostly informative.
Screenshot from Ahrefs, November 2022
Also note the lower placement of the top tracks.
Entities
Keyword patterns for news sites are based on the five Ws of journalism: who, what, when, where and why.
These are the basic questions every journalist should ask when covering a story.
Answering these questions in a story generally gives a journalist a good foundation.
To help journalists do good on-page SEO with their headlines and subheadings, focus on the W’s and less on keywords, as we know them as SEO professionals.
Forget explaining concepts like keyword difficulty, monthly search volume, cost per click or even impressions. Trust me, you have lost them and they will start ignoring SEO.
Detail
People forget that just because a story is online, it could have been in a newspaper — and journalists have to adapt their work for both audiences.
When printed, you can immediately pick up everything around the title, such as all images and sub-headings. A digital version might just have a general image and title.
Space is the real issue as there is only so much space in a digital layout.
Shorter words with impact are key in print. And sometimes it is also related to the number of lines in the title.
But for SEO, it might hinder the scope of this story.
The main optimization tip you can give journalists is to include one of the five W’s in their headline.
And don’t be afraid to reveal too many details in the title.
Here’s a simple framework to use with a non-SEO journalist to help them understand keyword research.
Who Is The Story About?
People search for the name of a person, place or thing.
Advice. Using the full name of a person, place or thing works better in a search.
Elon Musk has a higher search volume than Musk.
Screenshot from Ahrefs, November 2022
What Is The Story About?
To help search engines find our stories when people are looking for them, we need to tell both readers and search engines the facts of the story.
If it’s about an election, it needs to be in the headline.
Search engines are the first users of your site every time; they don’t see the featured image the way a human does.
In SEO, if the headline doesn’t include a keyword or what the reader was looking for, search engines are less likely to show that story in their search results.
Where?
A tip. If you include the exact location or location of the news story, you can rank your story better.
People may pass by, hear a brief news report on the radio/TV and use a smartphone to find out what happened.
Sometimes they may even Google the location to find out the news. For example, “Ukraine”.
Screenshot from search [Ukraine], November 2022
It’s less about keyword research and more about story elements that people are looking for.
The Why?
When something happens in the news, people have questions—and many people turn to search engines to help answer their questions.
For example, in 2016, Great Britain voted to leave the EU; people were looking for answers about how it affected them. i.e. “Why Britain voted to leave the EU”, “What Brexit means”, “What will be the impact of Brexit on business”, etc.
Explaining the news is very effective for both SEO and generating new subscribers.
Breaking News Keyword Research
Breaking news is a term used by the media industry to describe real-time events or events that have just happened.
Breaking news can be something that has just happened in your area or something that is happening in the world.
In most cases, the subject’s previous search interest may have been low. Therefore, traditional keyword research tools are less useful here.
Keyword research tools generally base their data on 12-month average search volume.
For example, before COVID-19 became a global pandemic and was covered by nearly every media outlet, it was almost never searched for.
Screenshot from Google Trends, November 2022
And prior to February 2020, if you had used standard keyword research tools, searching for COVID-19 would have yielded no data (or indicated zero search volume).
So, how do you do keyword research for news when data isn’t available?
It’s simple: stop thinking about keywords like you normally do. Instead, think about items when researching news keywords.
Focus On The Five Ws
To prove that this methodology works, let’s use Google Trends for the most common keywords for COVID-19 now that we have over a year of keyword data.
The top keyword for COVID-19 is no surprise: Covid 19.
Screenshot from Ahrefs, November 2022
Even the third or fourth keyword, “Covid vaccine” or even “Covid 19 symptoms”, is still answered by the question: “What is this story about?”
A tip. Keywords in headlines are a very strong signal that Google uses to highlight news articles among the top news stories.
And don’t just take my word for it. See what Google’s own documentation says:
“The most basic signal that information is relevant is when an article contains the same keywords as your search,” Google’s News Content Ranking Guide points out.
Perhaps that’s why their SEO teams have directed many news outlets to use what’s known as a kicker in front of their main editorial headline, i.e. {SEO Keyword}: {Editorial Headline}, keywords that are closer to the start of the search. the title carries more weight.
Using this approach can help songs rank high among top stories. But this is not always the case.
Depending on the authority of the publication, including the terms in the title may also work.
When the story breaks, as mentioned many times in this guide, the most important keywords are the five W’s.
The What, Who, And Where Components Of The Story
Unlike social networks, push notifications, and newsletters where people are notified of an update, when searching, people are actively looking for information about a particular topic. This is especially true for breaking news.
People often hear about a story through other media, such as radio, television, or even from a colleague. They are given the bare facts of a story. But people have questions.
Many people turn to search engines for answers when they have questions.
The best place to start researching breaking news keywords is to open Google Trends and use the first word that comes up in the story.
Google Trends
At the time of this writing, the topic “Typhoon Hinnamnor” was breaking news.
Screenshot from Google Trends, November 2022
As you can see, there was relatively no search interest in this topic before it was breaking news.
The first step is to ensure that the keyword is used in the title of the relevant news.
As we can see from the recorded SERP below for “Typhoon Hinnamnor”, all publications use the main keyword in the title.
Screenshot from Google Search, November 2022
A tip. You can use https://web.archive.org/save to properly save your search.
Very useful for capturing top story results, because if the topic is no longer news or publications are no longer covering the topic, the top stories carousel SERP feature will no longer appear.
Let’s split this keyword again using the formula above.
What Is The Story About?
Where Is The Story Taking Place?
Typhoon Hinnamnor in South Korea.
Most of the time, people are looking for coverage of the latest updates to the story, but as you can see above, Google has released a video, which means people are also looking for material.
With the latest news and video footage covered, the next place to look is Google Trends.
Step 1: Type The Main Keyword Into Google Trends
Screenshot from Google Trends, November 2022
You can see that there are topics and queries that are interrupt queries.
According to Google Trends, an intermediate search term means that it grew more than 5,000% during the desired time period.
Related queries give you an idea of what searches might also be searched.
What you want to do here is take related topics and search for their most popular terms.
For example, if we take the term “Typhoon” and filter it by the most common related queries, we see that “What is a typhoon” is one of the most common related queries.
Screenshot from Google Trends, November 2022
Note. Trending queries are popular and top queries are most searched.
Step 2: Use Google’s Related Searches
The next step is to enter a keyword and use Google’s related searches.
Screenshot from search [what is a typhoon], November 2022
This can be a great place to discover related keywords and topics to include in an explanatory news article. They are also known as the “branches” of the story.
The main story is about the news about the Typhoon in Japan, but the branches are what people want to know about even now that they are aware of the news.
Tip: Use an asterisk as a wildcard to indicate a space that can be filled with anything. This gives you even more related questions to target.
For example, “what are the effects of a typhoon” could be a great title suggestion to explain what a typhoon is.
Screenshot from search [what “typhoon”], November 2022
And if you want to do this research on a larger scale, freemium tools like answerthepublic.com and alsoasked.com are here to help.
Adding these branches to the breaking news editorial workflow is that these clarifiers then become evergreen.
Here’s a great example of an evergreen callout created by The New York Times that includes more than 400 keywords related to the differences between typhoons, cyclones, and hurricanes that can be used whenever there’s a breaking news story.
Screenshot from Ahrefs, November 2022
This is the magic formula when working with editorial teams.
This is the secret to getting editors to order more evergreen content.
If the story is trending and newsworthy, give them an evergreen topic to write about, but frame it as “what our search audience is looking for in our news coverage.”
The beauty of this workflow is that it not only serves the daily news agenda audience goal as well as subscriber goals, but it is evergreen and can be updated and re-linked when another hurricane or similar hits. the weather topic is on the news agenda.
Now apply this logic to seasonal events like Christmas, Easter and summer. There are themes that appear every year.
The key is timing and offering evergreen keyword topics when the topic is on the news schedule.
News Event Keyword Research
Google Trends is a great starting point for keyword research for an upcoming news event.
Take Black Friday for example.
Step 1: Input The Target Keyword In Google Trends
Screenshot from Google Trends, November 2022
This gives us information about when the trend of the topic is predicted based on the last five years. Of course, it increases in November when Black Friday happens.
Step 2: Find The Related Keyword And Filter By Top
Screenshot from Google Trends, November 2022
This will give you an overview of the most popular terms that people are searching for.
You need to help your editorial team understand when and what to publish for search—not by looking at what keywords are trending now, but by what was trending historically.
You can use Google Trends to provide this information.
And David Esteve, a news media audience specialist, has put together the best Twitter thread on how to do it for hours. According to David:
“Given that Google positively values the proximity of the time of your news release to the spike in search trends for that information, having ‘predictive’ knowledge of when those searches will start giving a very powerful advantage to a publisher who plans in this way.”
Screenshot from Twitter, November 2022
The key to getting this information for each topic is to change the default URL parameters provided by Google Trends.
For example, if we do this for Black Friday 2021, which was Friday, November 26, we should change the default URL that Google Trends gives us: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q =black %20Friday&geo=USA.
We are interested in Friday, November 26, 2021.
Therefore, the first step is to use a date filter to get a custom date range, i.e. 21st to 27th.
Screenshot from Google Trends, November 2022
Now, when you look at the most popular queries, you get the specific queries that searchers searched for during that time.
Screenshot from Google Trends, November 2022
On Black Friday to decipher when and what to publish using David’s hourly data addition formula ie https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2021-09-26T00%202021-09- 27T20&geo=US& ;q=black%20friday.
We can see that search interest peaked in the morning – this means that on Black Friday it would be important to let your editorial team publish the best offers as early as possible and not wait for them to arrive, as interest may wane as the search progresses throughout the day.
Screenshot from Google Trends, November 2022
With news SEO and keyword research, we want to inform editors about what the audience is searching for, as well as when they are searching for it, to maximize the story’s reach.
As shown above, Google Trends is a really useful tool to help inform editors about what people are searching for and when.
Key Takeaway
News sites traditionally rank for thousands, if not millions, of keywords.
If the topics have not been searched before, there is no point in doing news keyword research using traditional methods.
Instead, focus on the five Ws and teach journalists how to use them in headlines and on the page to maximize SEO for top story carousel news websites.
Featured Image: Tero Vesalainen/Shutterstock
How do I promote my news website on Facebook?
Promote your website
- Go to your page and select Advertise. Go to your page and select Advertise in the left column. …
- Choose a goal. …
- Choose your ad. …
- Build your audience. …
- Set your budget and duration. …
- Track conversions. …
- Confirm your payment information. …
- Submit your ad.
How much does it cost to advertise a website on Facebook? How much does Facebook advertising cost? Research shows that advertisers should pay: $0.94 per click or $12.07 per 1000 impressions. Facebook bills advertisers based on two metrics: cost per click (CPC) and cost per thousand impressions (CPM), also known as cost per 1,000 impressions.
Can I Promote Facebook page for free?
Another way to promote your Facebook business page is through network outreach. You can expand your network on Facebook by liking and interacting with the Facebook pages of other businesses or influencers in your industry/niche. Link other businesses or influencers to your posts to use cross-promotional marketing.
What is the most important quality of a keyword?
Keyword Relevance One of the most important characteristics to look for in any keyword is relevance to your website. In the past, some companies have chosen to “stuff” their content with keywords that were unrelated to their content or the company as a whole.
Why is my keyword’s Quality Score low? Not enough clicks or impressions If keywords don’t have a lot of clicks or impressions, Google Ads uses other factors to generate a Quality Score. Check the number of impressions your keywords received. If the number of impressions is less than 10,000, this may result in a low quality score.
What are the 3 contributing factors to Quality Score?
Quality Score is influenced by many factors. But the big three are relevance, user experience, and expected click-through rate.
What are 2 types of keywords?
When conducting keyword research, it is important to consider two different types of keywords, one of which is high volume keywords and the other is long tail keywords. Knowing each keyword type will help you target the right keywords with your SEO strategy.
How many types of keywords are there? By examining what the user’s intentions are behind performing a search, we can categorize all keywords into four main categories: commercial, transactional, informational, and navigational.
What are the types of keywords?
There are 9 types of keywords: short tail, long tail, short term, long term, product definition, customer definition, geotargeting and intent targeting. Each of these keywords has a special strength that can multiply your SEO efforts when used in different situations.
What are examples of keywords?
Keywords are words and phrases that people enter into search engines to find what they are looking for. For example, if you’re looking to buy a new jacket, you might type “men’s leather jacket” into Google. Although this phrase consists of more than one word, it is still a keyword.
What are good keywords?
A good keyword matches the user’s intent, allowing Google to believe that your site offers relevant information. If there is a connection between intent and your keywords, users will soon realize that your site doesn’t have what they need and will either leave or turn to your competitors.
What are common keywords?
The winner of the most popular keyword is Facebook, with over 1,102,800,000 searches per month. It’s closely followed by YouTube, Amazon, and weather, or “the weather” for short. The winner of the most popular keyword is Facebook, with over 1,102,800,000 searches per month.
What are keywords give four examples?
Examples of keywords are the primitive types int and Boolean ; control flow reports and if ; access modifiers such as public , and special words that represent the declaration and definition of Java classes, packages, and interfaces: class , package , interface .
Can keyword be 2 words?
Strictly speaking, a keyword means a single word. When the first search engines were launched, they had relatively simple algorithms and many users used single words in their searches. However, search engines support large key phrases with two or more keywords.
What are good keywords?
Your target keywords must meet four criteria – significant search volume, high relevance, strong conversion value, and reasonable competition. If any of these are missing, your SEO is likely to stagnate.
What makes a good keyword? A good keyword can be defined in many different ways. They can be very targeted or very broad. A general term may result in a higher search rate than other terms, but a top search engine ranking for a targeted keyword phrase will generally result in a higher conversion rate for your site.
What are the most popular keywords?
The winner of the most popular keyword is Facebook, with over 1,102,800,000 searches per month. It’s closely followed by YouTube, Amazon, and weather, or “the weather” for short.
How do I find my most popular keywords?
Use Google Trends to find the most searched keywords on Google. Go to https://trends.google.com to find the world’s top searches.
What word is googled the most?
| Most searched words on Google | ||
|---|---|---|
| Place | Keyword | Search volume |
| 1 | 2,147,483,647 | |
| 2 | Youtube | 1,680,000,000 |
| 3 | 923,000,000 |
What are examples of keywords?
Keywords are words and phrases that people enter into search engines to find what they are looking for. For example, if you’re looking to buy a new jacket, you might type “men’s leather jacket” into Google. Although this phrase consists of more than one word, it is still a keyword.
What are keywords give four examples?
Examples of keywords are the primitive types int and Boolean ; control flow reports and if ; access modifiers such as public , and special words that represent the declaration and definition of Java classes, packages, and interfaces: class , package , interface .
What are common keywords?
The winner of the most popular keyword is Facebook, with over 1,102,800,000 searches per month. It’s closely followed by YouTube, Amazon, and weather, or “the weather” for short. The winner of the most popular keyword is Facebook, with over 1,102,800,000 searches per month.
What are good keywords?
A good keyword matches the user’s intent, allowing Google to believe that your site offers relevant information. If there is a connection between intent and your keywords, users will soon realize that your site doesn’t have what they need and will either leave or turn to your competitors.
What keywords should I use?
Determining which keywords you should use is all about finding a balance: keywords related to your business, products, and services. The keywords your audience searches for the most online. Keywords with maximum ranking and conversion potential.