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Top stories Process

Top stories Process

Top Stories are sometimes seen on Google’s SERP, depending on the keyword.

Google show in top of his regular SERP :

Since this block is often in Top of the SERP, the visibility is huge and appearing on it can bring a lot of traffic.

To target this position, you need to :

  1. check if the keyword is showing Top Stories (or which keywords if you’re building a whole strategy)
  1. publish the right articles at the right time (because top stories are updated every hour or so…)
  1. have a dedicated sitemap for Google News (sitemap with only new and recent articles)
  1. Cross your fingers and pray

1) Check if the keyword is in Top stories :

You can check manually the SERP (be carefull to use a VPN so Google thinks you in the right country) OR you can use the NSN tool for keywords if you have a complete list to check  :

  1. You need to create new KW

https://nsn.n10.xyz/keywords/create(use comma to separate them), you can add them in the “edito” category, with a low priority, and add a comment so you can retrieve them easily next (example : “Julie check the top stories for NBA Playoffs”)

  1. Once created, the NSN tool will check each KW within an hour or so, and if there is a Top Stories block on SERP it will show you the KW on this page https://nsn.n10.xyz/top_stories
  1. Filter by comment to only select your KW and export in CSV the list of these KW => you now have the KW you want to target
  1. Go back to the NSN KW tool and filter by your comment to only show the ones you added… then check the checkbox at the left of the table and click the red “Delete” button.

NB : there is a new Top Stories tool that will be developed soon, so this process will be easier soon…

PS :

Check Mobile SERP

To check the mobile serp, press F12 or click right/inspect when you’re on a serp, make sure the mobile devices icon is clicked and then refresh the page (f5). You will have the mobile version of the serp.

Using ahrefs to find opportunities/potential keywords

An alternative method to find keywords where we appear in top stories, is using ahrefs ⇒

https://app.ahrefs.com/positions-explorer/organic-keywords/v5/subdomains/fr/0-1/all/all/all/all/all/all/1/last_update_desc?target=topmercato.com&filter-features=news&features-filter-option=include

Keep in mind ahrefs database takes time to be updated, it’s far from being “live” results, but allows you to quickly find the type of keyword that you’re website has potential on top stories.

2) Publish the right articles at the right time :

You need to analyze your competitors’ strategy, to have a chance to be as good as them (or even better).

  1. type a few KW on Google and see which websites appears often in Top Stories
  1. Try to find the pattern in their URL (for example Action Network uses : https://www.actionnetwork.com/legal-online-sports-betting/betmgm-bonus-code-offer-nba-playoffs-mlb-monday-may-2 => “/legal-online-sports-betting/” folder then “betmgm-bonus-code” and differents words for each article…
  1. in Google you need to search : “site:https://www.actionnetwork.com/legal-online-sports-betting/betmgm-bonus-code”, and it will show you the articles that starts with this URL pattern… you can filter by last month to see only recent articles…
  1. Download all the articles in the SERP : get in the SERP settings and ask for 100 resultsthen install Chrome extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/seo-minion/giihipjfimkajhlcilipnjeohabimjhi?hl=en and download in CSV the 100 results of the SERP
  1. Run a crawler on this URLs : use Screaming Frog in List Mode (free licence is 500 URL), before lauching the crawl, go to Configuration > Custom > Extraction and add a field with the Xpath : //meta[starts-with(@property, 'article:published_time')]/@content so that it can give you the date of the article (only works if the website is a Wordpress), if it doesn’t work ask Help from your SEO
  1. Export the data and Paste them in a Google sheet like we did for example https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ojSmuwswg-uE7akyspzCFJv0p79WClSbUy10Oa81KTU/edit?usp=sharing and start analyzing : URL, Title of the page, Nb of words, H1…

Note : You can also crawl the competitor website (or at least the folder you see in URL pattern) to discover content that would not be indexed in Google… see with your SEO if needed

  1. Check manually a few articles to see what they look like (images, tables, CTAs…)

3) CONTENT : DO vs DON'Ts

So now you see what kind of articles you need to publish, then try to publish them at the right time depending on your market’s time zone, and what competitors do…

Exemple of a content brief for top stories (ESTNN)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LvlfXNRNt9a9X7t8xKmvB0vcTrGskozTbTLCTiOarrI/edit

4) Have a dedicated sitemap for Google News

Google will come to your website more often if he understands you’re writing news articles. See with your SEO if the news-sitemap.xml is configured correctly.

5) Cross your fingers and pray

Google needs to crawl and index your articles quickly (be careful to write good content to please Google), but it doesn’t assure you that you’ll be appearing on the Top Stories block… try and check manually if you appear on the SERP, for a few weeks, and if not try a different approach to succeed…

NB: a complete Top stories tool will be developed soon, it will help us monitor automatically our articles every hour… but right now it needs to be done manually.

Good Luck !

To go further : https://www.sistrix.com/ask-sistrix/onpage-optimisation/how-do-i-optimise-my-website-for-google-news/

6) How to clean Top stories after…

1 month after the event we can keep Top stories pages which rank well (at least 5 KW... cf “indice SEO” in Top Pages SEO Excel analysis) and check that they have link to our “operator+event” pages, the others will be deleted and redirected in 301 to the “operateur+event” pages and the content can be reused in this page....