Publisher SEO: SEO for Publishers, Newsrooms and Magazines in Google News, Top Stories and Discover

Updated October 2026 · Written and maintained by the Progression Agency strategy team

Publisher SEO is the search work that keeps a newsroom’s stories, explainers and archive in front of readers on Google Search, Google News, Top Stories, Discover and AI answers. SEO for publishers differs from ordinary site SEO because the volume is high, news goes stale within hours, and ads and paywalls shape every page. This page covers how Google finds and ranks news, the story page details Google’s own documentation asks for, SEO for journalists and editors, and what the work costs. We run SEO for newspapers, magazines, trade titles and digital media companies, starting with a free proposal and a written scope.

What is publisher SEO?

Publisher SEO is search optimization for sites whose product is stories: news, features, analysis and the archive behind them. SEO publishing, or publishing SEO as some teams say it, covers the pages, the markup, the sitemaps and the editorial habits that let Google crawl a story, understand it and show it to the right reader. The reporting stays the product. The search work makes sure it can be found.

The publishers this page is for

The work fits any organization that publishes on a schedule and wants readers to arrive from search, news surfaces and recommendation feeds:

• News sites and digital-only newsrooms.
• Daily and weekly newspapers, including city and regional papers.
• Consumer magazines and their websites.
• Trade titles and B2B media companies.
• Nonprofit and member-funded newsrooms.
• Newsletter publishers that also run a website.

Book presses have different needs, so our book marketing page covers them. Review and affiliate sites are a separate model, and our affiliate website design page covers those.

What changes when a site publishes dozens of stories a day

A business site changes a few pages a month. A newsroom changes hundreds, and most of them matter for a day or two. That shifts almost every priority.

• Volume: thousands of near-identical templates mean a small markup mistake repeats on every story.
• Perishable value: a story that is crawled late has often already lost its audience.
• Crawl demand: Google has to find new URLs fast while the archive keeps growing behind them.
• Ads: slots, scripts and consent tools compete with the story for the same page weight.
• Paywalls: a locked story still has to be understood by a crawler.
• Syndication: the same wire copy can appear on many sites at once.

Generic SEO advice built for a 40-page business site rarely survives that pace, which is why publishers need their own checklist.

Search, News, Discover and AI answers as one audience

Readers do not think in surfaces. The same person might search a name in the morning, see a story in Top Stories at noon, scroll Discover at night and ask an AI assistant about the topic the next day. Each surface runs on Google’s own systems, but the inputs are shared: pages Google can crawl, clear dates, honest headlines, named authors and quick loading. Treating the four as one audience lets one fix help all of them.

How Google shows news: Google News, Top Stories, the News tab and Discover

Google runs several places where a story can appear, and each one is selected by automated systems. What most people call news SEO is the work of making a site eligible for all of them at once and easy to understand when it is considered.

Google News on the web and in the app

Google may find a site through its normal web crawl, and Google News shows relevant results in response to searches from eligible content it identifies as news-related. Google’s help pages say ranking in Google News is influenced by relevance, prominence, authoritativeness, freshness, usability, and location and language. Google’s overview of news across its products also notes that eligible content is not guaranteed to rank. The practical reading is that nothing here is a switch to flip; each item is a quality of the pages themselves.

Top Stories and the News tab of Search

Top Stories is a section that may appear in Search when a query looks news-oriented. It features articles related to the search and links to more on the News tab. Content is selected automatically, and publishers are considered as long as they produce high-quality content and comply with the Google News content policies. The News tab filters Search toward news and shows more articles than a regular query.

Discover

Google says content is automatically eligible to appear in Discover if it is indexed and meets Discover’s content policies, and that no special tags or structured data are required. Being eligible is not a guarantee of appearing. For a publisher the levers are the ordinary ones: a large, relevant lead image, a headline that captures the essence of the story and no teasing that withholds what the story is about. See Google’s Discover guidance for the full list.

Preferred sources and the “preferred” badge

When a reader selects a site as a preferred source, that site’s content is more likely to appear in Top Stories, highlighted with a “preferred” badge, and the same badge can show in AI Mode and AI Overviews for readers who chose the site. To be eligible, a site must be included in Search generative AI features in Search Console, and only domain-level and subdomain-level sites qualify, not a subdirectory. Google offers a JavaScript button that lets readers add a site as a preferred source from the page itself. The details are in Google’s preferred sources documentation.

Getting into Google News without a submission form

Google News SEO is mostly about not standing in your own way. Google discovers news by itself, so the job is to keep the site crawlable, compliant and clear about who publishes what.

Eligibility is automatic

Publishers do not need to submit a site to be eligible for Google News surfaces. Google algorithmically discovers news content through Search technologies, and a publisher only has to comply with the content policies. To check that content is being indexed, Google suggests the site: operator, and the URL Inspection tool in Search Console shows how a specific page looks to Google’s crawlers. Google also says it cannot guarantee that every article is published or how it will rank. Read the full text in Google’s page on helping Google News discover web crawled content.

What changed in Publisher Center?

Older advice tells publishers to apply through Publisher Center. That advice is out of date. Since April 25, 2024, publishers can no longer set up new Google News publications there, and Google began rolling out automatically created publication pages in early 2025. Content that follows the content policies is automatically eligible for consideration, and having a publication in Publisher Center does not guarantee that content will appear. If a vendor sells a Publisher Center submission as a ranking step, ask which page of Google’s documentation they are relying on; Google’s own update on publication pages says otherwise.

The content policies that decide eligibility

Google News content policies sit on top of Search’s overall policies and spam policies. The ones a newsroom meets most often are these:

• Transparency: clear dates and bylines, information about the authors, the publication and the publisher, information about the company or network behind the content, and contact information.
• Ads and sponsored content: paid promotion should not exceed the content, sponsored material must not be disguised as editorial, and sponsorship should be clearly disclosed.
• Misleading content: preview text should not promise details that the story does not deliver.
• Manual actions: violations can appear in Search Console under Security and Manual actions.

The complete list is on Google’s Google News policies page. Content that is ineligible for news surfaces can still appear elsewhere in Search if it follows the relevant policies.

What Google says it will not do

Google News does not accept payments to expedite or improve a site’s appearance or ranking, and taking part in an advertising program such as AdSense has no effect on ranking in Google News or any other Google search engine. Google also says it can provide little feedback about ranking. Its page on ranking within Google News is the one to quote when a stakeholder asks whether spending more with Google would move a story.

SEO for news sites: crawling, indexing and the news sitemap

SEO for news sites starts with speed and certainty: Google should find each new story quickly and read it correctly. Our technical SEO work covers the wider crawl and index side; this section covers what is particular to news. Good SEO for news websites also keeps old stories reachable while new ones arrive.

A news sitemap with only the last two days

A Google News sitemap can help Google find content faster and resolve issues, and it is separate from the sitemap you give Search. Google’s guidance has four rules worth putting on a checklist:

• Include only URLs for articles created in the last two days.
• Once an article is older than two days, remove its URL or its news tags from the sitemap.
• Keep to up to 1,000 news tags per sitemap and split into several smaller sitemaps beyond that.
• Update one sitemap as stories publish instead of creating a new sitemap each time.

A news sitemap may be empty for a while on a slow day, which Search Console can flag with a warning. Each entry also needs the article’s publication date. Google’s news sitemap documentation lists the tags.

Googlebot-News and what blocking it removes

Googlebot-News is the robots.txt token for Google News. It has no separate user agent string, since crawling uses the usual Googlebot agents, and rules addressed to it affect the Google News product, including news.google.com and the Google News app. Blocking it keeps content out of Google News without affecting how that content is indexed and ranked in Search. A noindex robots meta tag addressed to Googlebot-News does the same for a single article. Check robots.txt and article templates for leftover Googlebot-News rules, since a stray block can keep a site out of Google News. See Google’s page on blocking access to content and its list of common crawlers.

Section fronts, tag pages and links that refresh

Google’s article-page guidance asks that every page be reachable from at least one static text link, which is why section fronts and topic pages matter: they are how a crawler finds stories the sitemap has already dropped. Keep the link to each story as plain text in the page source rather than something that appears only after a script runs. Prune tag archives that hold one or two stories or none, since they add crawl paths with nothing to show. If redirects are unavoidable, keep chains short, use a 301 for permanent moves and make mobile and desktop behave the same.

Multiple editions and languages

Newsrooms that publish a Spanish edition or a regional site should be careful with redirects: Google’s guidance for sites in multiple languages says not to send visitors automatically to a different language version. Our international SEO page covers hreflang and edition structure in more detail.

Structured data, timestamps and headlines on story pages

Most of the details that decide how a story appears sit on the story page itself. SEO for news articles is mainly a matter of getting five things right on every template, because a template repeats them thousands of times. The checklist below turns Google’s article-page guidance into something a developer and an editor can both read.

NewsArticle properties Google reads

Google lets a news story use Article, NewsArticle or BlogPosting markup, and says there are no required properties: add the ones that apply. Google News may use datePublished, dateModified, headline, image, isAccessibleForFree and author.url. The author.url value should link to a page that uniquely identifies the author, such as a bio page. Keep the markup in step with what the page shows; see Google’s Article structured data documentation for the current property list.

One visible date and time, no false freshening

Google asks for a clear, visible date and time on each article, ideally between the headline and the story text, and for dates in markup that carry the right time zone. Its general guidance on dates adds that the date should be prominent and labeled, with words such as “Published” or “Last updated”. A new date is fair when a story has been substantially changed. It is against the guidelines to freshen a story artificially when nothing significant was added. Both rules appear in Google’s article page guidance and its page on byline dates.

Headlines that match across title, H1 and section links

Google’s crawler works out the headline from the page, so the page should agree with itself:

• Put the headline in a prominent spot above the story, such as an H1.
• Match the title tag to the headline.
• Match the anchor text on section pages to the headline.
• Do not include a date or time in the headline.
• Use at least 10 characters and between 2 and 22 words.
• Keep the headline property to 110 characters or fewer.
• Avoid linking the headline, or part of it, from inside its own story.

Lead images Google can pick

Use an image that belongs to the story rather than a logo or a caption, and point to it with schema.org image markup or an og:image tag. Google also suggests a supported image format, images of at least 60 by 90 pixels, sensible aspect ratios, placement near the headline, a written caption and no robots rule that blocks the image. A lead image chosen on purpose beats whatever the crawler happens to find first.

Bylines, author pages and the transparency readers and Google look for

Google’s news policies ask for clear dates and bylines and for information about the people and the organization behind the content. These pages are cheap to build and easy to neglect. The reputation work around them, such as digital PR, depends on readers being able to see who is publishing.

Author pages that show who reported the story

Each byline should lead somewhere. A good author page names the reporter, says what they cover, lists their recent stories and links out to professional profiles. The same URL is what you pass in author.url. Google’s people-first guidance asks whether pages carry a byline where one is expected and whether bylines lead to further information, and it warns against fabricated creator profiles.

About, ownership, corrections and contact pages

Transparency covers the organization as well as the writer. Publish an About page that says who owns the publication and what it stands for, an editorial standards page, a corrections page and a working way to contact the newsroom. Link all of them from the footer of every page. These are the items the news policies list: the publication, the publisher, the company or network behind the content, and contact information.

Who, How and Why

Google’s guidance on helpful content offers a self-check built on three questions. Who created the content, and is that clear? How was it produced, including any automation? Why does it exist: to help readers, or mainly to attract search visits? A newsroom can answer all three in the open, with bylines, a short note on methods where it matters and an honest purpose. Google presents the questions as a way to stay on course, so treat them as an editing prompt in Google’s helpful content guidance and not as a score.

SEO for journalists and editors

SEO for journalists is mostly three habits applied while writing: a headline that says what happened, a URL and opening paragraph that agree with it, and links that help the reader go further. Journalism SEO done well makes no change to what gets reported. SEO journalism is a craft inside the newsroom, and SEO in journalism works best when editors, reporters and the audience team share a few clear rules.

What does SEO journalism mean?

SEO journalism, or the SEO journalism definition most newsrooms settle on, is writing and packaging accurate reporting so that readers searching for it can find it. The reporting comes first. The search layer is the headline, the URL, the first paragraph, the links and the structured details that help Google understand what the story covers. It does not mean chasing phrases, inflating headlines or writing about topics nobody on the desk is qualified to cover.

Headlines, URLs and first paragraphs written on deadline

On deadline there is time for three decisions, and each is quick if the desk has agreed rules in advance.

• Headline: say what happened and to whom in plain words, and put the most specific term first.
• URL: short, lowercase and readable, with the main subject in the slug and no date or section clutter.
• First paragraph: the who, what and where, in words the reader would use, with the names spelled as readers spell them.
• Standfirst or summary: one more sentence that adds a fact rather than repeating the headline.
• Links: two or three to earlier coverage or primary documents, written as descriptive text.

Put those rules on a one-page card at each desk, and they stop being a debate.

SEO training for journalists

We run SEO training for reporters, editors and producers. Topics worth covering include headline and URL habits, update and correction rules, how to read the Search Console reports a desk already has access to, and how to ask the audience team for help. Training is quoted after a written scope.

Free tools a newsroom already has

Most of what a desk needs is inside Google’s own tools, which cost nothing:

• The Performance report for Google News in Search Console, which covers news.google.com and the Google News apps.
• The Performance report for Search, filtered to the News search type, which covers the News tab.
• The Discover performance report, which shows impressions, clicks and click-through rate for content that has appeared there.
• The URL Inspection tool, which shows how Google’s crawlers see a specific story.

Naming only Google’s tools keeps the training independent of whatever dashboard the newsroom licenses. The reports are described in Search Console’s Google News report help.

Breaking news, live coverage and updated stories

A story that changes by the hour tests every rule in this guide. The question for each change is whether readers and Google should see one page growing or a series of separate pages. Our video SEO page covers the video clips that often sit inside live coverage.

Update one URL or publish a new one?

Google’s article guidance draws a clear line. A substantially changed story can carry a fresh date and time. Freshening a story artificially, when the publisher added nothing significant, is against the guidelines, and so is publishing a very slightly updated copy of an earlier story, deleting the old one and redirecting to the new one.

Live pages for running stories

For an event that unfolds over hours, one live page on a stable URL usually serves readers better than a new article every few minutes. Open with a short summary of where things stand, keep each entry stamped with its own time, and move the newest entry to the top. When the event ends, tidy the page into a clean account with a final summary, so that the URL that collected the links becomes the reference for the story.

Corrections that keep the URL and say what changed

Fix the text on the same URL and add a note near the top or bottom that says what changed and when. Update the modified date in the markup and the visible label to match. Keeping the address means every link, share and bookmark that already points at the story carries the corrected version. A corrections page that lists the notes in one place supports the transparency items covered above.

Evergreen explainers and topic hubs between news cycles

News traffic spikes and fades, while explainers and topic pages keep earning visits for years. A desk that plans for both stops depending on the day’s headlines. Our SEO content writing team can draft and update these pages, and blog post SEO covers single-post tuning.

Topic hubs that collect a running story

A hub is a page that gathers every story on a continuing subject under a short explanation of what is going on: the timeline, the people involved, the open questions and links to the latest coverage. Create one when a story has run for more than a few days or is likely to return. Link every new story to the hub and the hub to every new story, and keep the hub’s introduction current.

Explainers a desk keeps current

Pick the handful of questions readers keep asking about the beat, such as how a local tax works or what a court term means, and give each a page that a named editor owns. Put the date of the last review where readers can see it. A desk that revisits those pages a few times a year keeps their accuracy and their place in search.

Archive pages worth keeping, merging or retiring

Not every old URL deserves protection. Sort the archive by what each page offers today:

• Keep pages that still answer a question, draw links or earn steady visits.
• Merge thin items on the same subject into a single fuller page and redirect the old addresses to it.
• Retire pages that no longer serve anyone, such as expired event listings, by removing them properly or redirecting to the closest match.
• Leave genuinely historical reporting as it was, with its original date visible.

Making these calls once a year is cheaper than letting thousands of weak pages dilute the sections that matter.

Paywalls, metering and subscriptions in search

A paywall asks Google to index content the reader cannot fully see. That is fine, provided the page says what is locked and nothing is hidden from users that is shown to crawlers.

Paywalled content markup

Google’s markup for subscription and paywalled content uses isAccessibleForFree set to false on the article, plus a hasPart element that has isAccessibleForFree set to false and a cssSelector pointing at the locked section of the page. Google says this structured data helps it tell paywalled content from cloaking, which breaks its spam policies, and that the guidance applies to content you want crawled and indexed. The page-level and section-level flags have to match what a reader sees. The syntax is in Google’s paywalled content documentation.

Metered, freemium and hard paywalls from a crawler’s view

Google’s documentation does not rank paywall models, so this is a way to organize your own review rather than a promise about outcomes.

Whatever the model, one rule applies: show Google the same content a subscriber sees, and use the markup to say which part of it sits behind the wall. Apps raise their own questions, which our news app development page covers.

Google News Showcase and licensing

Google News Showcase is a content licensing program in which Google pays participating publishers to curate journalism for an enhanced experience in Google News and Discover. It launched in select countries, with more to follow, and it also offers no-charge access to selected paywalled articles. It is a licensing program, not an SEO tactic, so this page gives no eligibility advice and claims no access to it. The program is described in Google’s Showcase help page.

Ad-heavy story pages that still load fast

Ad revenue pays for the reporting, and slow, jumpy pages cost readers. The fix is engineering discipline, and our website speed optimization team works on that kind of template performance.

Reserving space for ad slots

A slot that arrives late and pushes the story down is the main source of layout jumps on a news page. Reserve the slot’s size in the template, with a fixed box that holds its place whether or not an ad is filled, and put slots below the opening paragraphs rather than before the first line of text. Measure shifts on the story template with real devices and not only a lab test.

Third-party scripts, consent tools and video players

Each tag, consent banner and embedded player adds requests and main-thread work. Audit the list quarterly. Load what is not needed to read the story after the story, defer video players until a reader approaches them, and make the consent tool light enough that it does not become the largest element on the page.

Images sized for Discover

Google recommends Discover images that are at least 1200 pixels wide, have more than 300,000 total pixels and use a 16×9 aspect ratio, and it ties large previews to the max-image-preview robots setting being set to large, or to AMP. Point to the image through schema.org markup or an og:image tag, and avoid generic images such as a logo. The setting is explained in Google’s robots meta tag page.

Sponsored content, commerce desks and Google’s site reputation policy

Newsrooms run advertiser content, shopping guides and syndicated sections alongside reporting. Each has a rule to follow so that it does not harm the rest of the site.

Labeling sponsored stories the way Google News asks

Google News does not allow content that conceals or misrepresents sponsored content as independent, editorial content. Sponsorship, including ownership or affiliate interest, payment or material support, should be clearly disclosed, paid promotion should not exceed the content, and the subject of a sponsored story should not center on the sponsor without that disclosure. Put the label at the top, name the sponsor and use plain words.

Commerce and affiliate content inside a news site

A buying guide or deals desk can sit inside a newsroom if the affiliate relationship is disclosed and the page is useful without the links. Keep commerce content in its own section, mark outbound product links appropriately and keep it clearly separate from reporting. Our affiliate website design page covers how those sites are built and disclosed.

Wire copy, syndication and third-party sections

Google’s spam policies include what it now calls the site reputation policy, which targets third-party content published on a host site mainly because of that host’s established ranking signals. Google lists wire service sites, news publications that have syndicated news content from other news publications, columns and opinion pieces, and advertorial pages made to share content directly with readers among examples not considered inconsistent with the policy. Google has also changed how the policy applies in the European Economic Area. Review any third-party section against the current policy text before launching it.

SEO for magazines, newspapers and digital media companies

SEO for magazines, SEO for newspapers and SEO for media companies share the foundations above and differ in rhythm. Seasonal titles, daily papers and trade media each win in a different part of search. These notes apply SEO for news publishers by type.

City and regional papers

A local paper owns the questions only it can answer: who is on the ballot, what closed, where a road is shut. Build pages for places, schools, councils and recurring events, tag stories to them consistently and keep the street and neighborhood names that readers type. Freshness matters here, so the news sitemap and the update habits carry weight.

Magazines with seasonal topics and long shelf life

A magazine’s best traffic often arrives months after an issue ships. Plan features around the seasons readers search for, publish them well ahead and keep a calendar of the evergreen pieces that need a refresh. Link features to related guides and back issues so that a visitor from search keeps reading.

Trade publications and B2B media

A trade audience searches with job titles, regulations and product names. Match them with explainers on the rules that govern the industry, event coverage and glossary pages, and make the author pages carry real credentials. Subscriber and sponsor pages deserve careful markup because their value comes from the audience being clearly defined.

Nonprofit and member-funded newsrooms

A newsroom funded by donors and members has two audiences: readers and the people who pay for the work. Show who funds the organization and how editorial independence works on the transparency pages, then give donation and membership prompts the same care as subscribe buttons. Our nonprofit SEO page covers the fundraising side.

Newsletter publishers with a website

If the newsletter is the product, the website is the archive and the front door. Give every issue a crawlable page, add a clear sign-up form and make each issue’s headline stand alone in search. Our newsletter marketing page covers the email side.

How AI answers use publisher content

AI answers pull from pages Google already knows, and Google’s guidance for them is short. Our answer engine optimization work covers AI search in more depth.

No extra markup for AI Overviews and AI Mode

Google says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no other special optimizations are necessary. The fundamentals that serve Search serve these features too. Be cautious of any special tag sold for AI answers, since Google says no other optimizations are necessary; see Google’s AI features page.

What makes a story easy to quote

Stories that state facts plainly are easier for any reader, human or machine, to quote correctly. Give the key fact in the first paragraph, name the sources of figures in the sentence, show the date and make the byline clear. Those habits make a story easy to cite and do not guarantee that an assistant will use it.

Preferred sources in AI features

The preferred sources feature reaches beyond Top Stories. In AI Mode and AI Overviews, a site can be highlighted with a “preferred” badge for readers who selected it. A reader-facing prompt to choose your site, using Google’s button, is therefore a small piece of audience work that supports both news and AI surfaces.

Measuring publisher SEO in Search Console and analytics

A newsroom has several traffic sources that look alike in a single dashboard. Separate them, then connect them to outcomes. Our marketing analytics team can build those views if your analytics need rework.

The Google News report is not the News tab

The Performance report for Google News shows data from news.google.com and the Google News apps on Android and iOS. It does not include the News tab in Google Search, which sits in the Performance report for Search filtered to the News search type. Reporting one number for both overstates one and hides the other.

The Discover report

The Discover report shows impressions, clicks and click-through rate for content that appeared in Discover during the last 16 months, as long as the site reaches a minimum impression threshold. Expect gaps at low volume.

Referrers from news.google.com

Google says readers who come from the Google News app and browsers carry the referrers news.google.com or news.url.google.com. Segment those in your own analytics so that you can follow what they do after the click, which Search Console cannot show. Google’s page on measuring the impact of Google News describes the referrers.

Subscriptions, newsletter sign-ups and returning readers by first source

Clicks are the beginning of the story. Tie each surface to the outcomes the newsroom cares about: subscriptions, newsletter sign-ups, membership gifts and returning visits. A source that sends fewer readers who return often can be worth more than one that sends a spike of readers who leave.

Redesigns, CMS moves and archive migrations

A relaunch can erase years of search equity in a week. The build belongs to our news and magazine website design team, and the search side of the move is covered by our website migration service.

Redirect maps for every story URL

Every story URL gets a one-to-one 301 redirect to its new address, tested before launch. Google’s article guidance says to minimize the number of redirects between pages, use a 301 for permanent moves and keep redirects consistent across mobile and desktop. Archive stories with traffic or links deserve the same care as this week’s coverage.

Testing a new design before it reaches readers

Google’s Publisher Center help describes a test section that managers can view before readers do, for publications already set up there. Beyond that, test on a staging copy: crawl it, compare its URLs, titles, headings, markup and robots rules with the live site, and fix the differences before the switch.

How to do SEO for a news website: the first 90 days

Here is an SEO playbook for news publishers that fits a small team. It starts with an SEO audit and does not promise a traffic outcome, because no one controls that.

Days 1 to 30: crawl, sitemaps, markup and policies pages

Crawl the site and read Search Console to find what blocks stories. Fix the news sitemap, robots rules, the article template’s dates, headline and image markup, and publish the About, ownership, corrections and contact pages. Agree who owns each fix.

Days 31 to 60: headline habits, author pages and training

Build an author page for every byline, write the one-page card of headline, URL and first-paragraph rules, and train reporters and editors on it. Start reporting the Google News, News tab, Discover and Search numbers separately.

Days 61 to 90: topic hubs, measurement and the next list

Create hubs for the running stories and the beats that matter most, review the archive for pages to merge or retire, and connect source reports to subscriptions and sign-ups. End the month with a ranked list for the next quarter.

An in-house SEO editor, a consultant or a publisher SEO agency

Newsrooms get search help in three ways. Each fits a different size of organization and a different kind of problem, and many use more than one.

What does a newsroom SEO editor do each day?

An in-house SEO editor keeps the daily habits alive. Typical tasks include reviewing headlines and URLs on deadline, monitoring Google News and Discover reports, updating evergreen pages, coaching reporters and watching for crawl problems after a release. The role is hard to replace for daily rhythm.

When outside help fits

An outside team makes sense when the newsroom has no one with the technical skills, when a migration or relaunch is coming, when a problem needs a specialist read, or when the in-house editor needs cover. An SEO consultant suits direction and review, while an agency suits sustained work across technical fixes, content and measurement.

Questions to ask a publisher SEO agency

Put these to any publisher SEO agency before signing, including us:

What does publisher SEO cost?

Publisher SEO is priced by scope: how many sites and editions, how big the archive is, how much the newsroom does itself and how much training and migration support it wants.

Our prices

Our SEO services start at $1,500 a month. Audits, newsroom training and migration support are quoted after a written scope, so the cost reflects the work.

What the market charges for SEO

Published figures describe what SEO providers charge in general, not a Progression quote and not a publisher-specific rate:

Where should a small newsroom’s budget go first?

When money is tight, spend in this order:

1. Crawling, the news sitemap and robots rules, because nothing else works if stories are not found.
2. The article template: dates, headline, image and author markup, and the policy pages.
3. Headline and URL habits for the people who publish every day.
4. Author pages and topic hubs for the beats that matter most.
5. Reporting that separates each Google surface and links it to sign-ups.

More pages on the services around publishing:

• Technical SEO
• News and magazine website design
• SEO content writing
• Digital PR
• Newsletter marketing
• Answer engine optimization

Frequently asked questions