News SEO Guide: How to Optimize News Articles for Search

Applying news SEO best practices can lead to more mentions in large language model tools (LLMs), better visibility in traditional search, and more traffic to your articles.

Here’s everything you need to know.

What Is News SEO & Why Does It Matter?

News SEO is optimizing time-sensitive articles and news websites to rank higher in search results like Google News, top stories carousels, Discover feeds, and LLMs (like ChatGPT).

For example, here’s a top stories carousel related to the most recent baseball postseason:

And improving news SEO can improve your visibility and drive website traffic that may have a tangible business impact.

I reviewed five popular news sites for the month of August 2025 to see what percentage of their U.S. traffic came from News and top stories SERP features. Here’s a breakdown of the results:

These news-related SERP features account for anywhere from about 16% to 40% of the news sites’ total traffic. Which means improving your news SEO might give you a boost in website visitors.

And a strong news SEO strategy can give you a better chance at appearing in LLMs, like Google’s AI Overviews. As LLMs often value recently published articles. 

Appearing in LLM outputs is important for news publications, as 23% of people in the U.S. say they get their news from AI bots (up from 8% in 2024). 

And while LLMs might not drive much traffic to your site, they can improve brand awareness. And users may be more likely to click on your articles in search results if they recognize your publication—or even search specifically for your brand.

What’s the Difference Between News SEO & General SEO?

News SEO depends heavily on freshness and the authority of your publication. 

Here’s how news and general SEO differ:

• Speed and freshness: While traditional SEO often centers around evergreen content that ranks for months or years, news SEO focuses on content published within hours or days
• Emphasis on transparency: News SEO requires your site to publish clear bylines and publication dates for each article, along with contact information, author information, and information on your network. This information, while not required for traditional SEO, helps readers and Google trust the content you publish.
• Authority importance: In news SEO, Google prioritizes publishers with established credibility and a track record of reporting on specific topics or regions, like a local outlet consistently covering city politics. In contrast, general SEO places more emphasis on the authority of individual pages, which is built through backlinks, depth of content, and overall expertise within a niche.

How to Do SEO for a News Website or News Content

Follow these steps to do SEO for your news website or content to increase visibility in traditional search, news properties, and LLMs:

Find Trending Topics to Write About

Identifying search queries that are rising in popularity lets you prioritize news topics that are likely to drive traffic.

Use Google Trends to find emerging terms related to your beat or industry. Select your country from the dropdown and click “Trending now.”

Then select your niche from the dropdown. 

Then, look for queries that are actively trending (as noted in the “Started” column).

You should also pay attention to the growth of each query. And can click the query for a closer look at the chart.

Topics that are growing in interest may be relevant for a little longer than topics with declining interest. And seeing how a topic’s popularity is evolving might help you prioritize certain topics.

Write High-Quality, Well-Structured Articles

Write high-quality articles that search engines and AI can easily extract and cite to rank in traditional search results, news results, and LLM answers. 

LLMs like AI Overviews combine insights from multiple sources. To be included, your article needs to deliver clear, authoritative, and well-structured information that AI can easily extract and cite.

Here’s how to optimize your article for both Google News and AI systems:

• Add scannable structure: Format with bullet points, short paragraphs, and numbered lists where possible—this makes it easier for both readers and AI to pull key facts.
• Provide authoritative details: Include direct quotes, statistics, and specific facts that demonstrate expertise and give AI clear citation material.
• Cover the topic comprehensively: Don’t just report the news—add background, context, and implications. The more complete your article, the more useful it is for AI and search.

Include Keywords Early On

Including your target keyword early in the intro within sampled content (when paywalled) can help your article rank even if the full article isn’t viewable.

Google’s flexible sampling guidelines suggest showing the first few sentences. This way, LLMs and search engines can still access important information for each article. Giving you a better chance of earning citations and rankings.

Add Schema Markup

Schema markup can improve how your articles appear in Google search results. Plus, it helps search engines and AI systems better interpret your content accurately to match it to what users are searching.

For news content, NewsArticle schema is essential and key fields to include are:

• headline: Title of the article (should match or nearly match your page title)
• image: Featured image in multiple aspect ratios
• datePublished: Exact publication date and time
• dateModified: Exact date and time when last updated. Only update this when making substantial changes—not for small typos.
• author: Writer name and their profile URL
• publisher: Your organization’s name and logo
• isAccessibleForFree: Indicates if the article is paywalled

Here’s an example of what news schema looks like:

Follow our instructions for adding schema to your website if you aren’t sure how.

Write Accurate & Compelling Headlines

Google requires accurate headlines that won’t mislead audiences, and creating strong, accurate headlines can drive clicks and improve site traffic. 

Here are some additional tips:

• Place primary keyword/prompt near the beginning
• Keep total length under 60 characters
• Include specific details (numbers, locations, names)
• Ensure headline matches article content

Create and Maintain a News Sitemap

News sitemaps (files that show your most recent news content) help search engines quickly discover your latest pieces, so your articles have a chance of showing in search results faster.

Unlike regular XML sitemaps, news sitemaps are only meant to include articles from the past 48 hours. So, your news sitemap needs to be routinely updated to include new articles and remove older content.

Most content management system (CMS) platforms (like WordPress) offer plugins (e.g., Yoast, Rank Math, etc.) that generate and refresh your news sitemap automatically. And custom CMS setups often rely on developer scripts that update the sitemap file every time a new piece is published

Once set up, you should submit the sitemap URL (e.g., yoursite.com/news-sitemap.xml) in Google Search Console so Google knows where to find it. You only need to submit your sitemap when you first create it.

Then, monitor your news sitemap to ensure it updates properly and doesn't include outdated content.

Common News SEO Mistakes to Avoid

Certain SEO mistakes can prevent your articles from appearing in news results, search results, or even LLMs. Here are some common issues and what you can do to avoid them:

• Inconsistent titles: Match the <title>, H1, and schema headline exactly to avoid Google misinterpreting your article title
• Poorly optimized images: Use high-resolution images (1200px+), provide multiple aspect ratios (1:1, 4:3, 16:9), add descriptive alt text (text that describes an image) with keywords, and ensure proper schema markup to prevent broken or missing visuals
• Duplicate content: Use canonical tags (code that identifies the main version of a webpage) for syndicated stories, avoid reusing identical headlines across different articles, apply 301 redirects when consolidating similar pieces, and monitor for duplicate titles within your news section.

Semrush’s Site Audit tool alerts you to issues that may be impacting your search visibility.

After configuring your audit and running the crawl, you’ll see a high-level overview of your site’s health. Including your AI Search Health.

Click the “Issues” tab to see which issues you need to fix. As these will improve your site health scores for both traditional SEO and LLM visibility.

Prioritize fixing errors first, then warnings, and lastly, notices. Click into each error to view the affected areas.

You’ll see a list of pages you need to fix. Along with tips to resolve the specific issue.

Take the Next Step by Tracking News Article Performance

Tracking where your news articles appear helps you determine whether your optimization efforts are paying off.

Semrush’s Visibility Overview tool tracks brand mentions from LLMs. So you can see which relevant prompts mention your brand and which don’t (labeled as “Missed”).

Monitoring performance with Visibility Overview helps you identify articles to improve. Which might include activities like updating the article with fresh data.

Ready to see how your news articles rank in LLMs?

Try Semrush’s AI SEO Toolkit today.