Search engine optimization is a reality for most blogs, businesses and brands wishing to be visible in select search results. However and for most entities, time isn’t necessarily of the essence: given that it can take weeks or even months to make meaningful inward roads with search engine algorithms, most websites have to work hard, optimize and ultimately wait for results.

There is one example of online content that literally cannot wait to achieve desired results: news outlets and websites. While a variety of content offerings are either evergreen or semi-evergreen in nature, news outlets produce content that is late-breaking and generally only relevant to the present day.

What can news outlets and blogs covering late-breaking events do to ensure their content is seen while it’s still relevant? Keep reading to find out more.

Focus on Ease of Use

User experience is a fundamental component of search engine optimization. When users can easily navigate your website, find what they need and find the content in question useful, search engines are inclined to more prominently feature your pages and posts. Ultimately, putting great effort into ensuring that your news website is pinging search engines with indicators of good user experience is critical.

What can news outlets do to maximize the user experience? First and foremost, make sure that all of your content can be accessed from a central location; this is why many news outlets feature infinite scroll that constantly loads relevant and/or older articles without the user needing to click and click.

Making sure that search features are prominently displayed and usable is another crucial component of user experience. Lastly, the inclusion of breadcrumbs is absolutely recommended to further increase ease of use.

Address Technical Concerns

With a ton of likely competition, news outlets must be in tip-top shape digitally if their content is to rank rapidly in search results. This is why the technical components of SEO must be addressed at all costs. There are a number of crucial considerations that will make search engines view your pages and overall website more favorably.

One major component is site speed: if your pages are sluggish or otherwise appearing such to search engines, then the likelihood of ranking prominently is minimized. Optimizing the file sizes of images, reducing the number of unneeded plugins, using premium hosting solutions and embracing AMPs (accelerated mobile pages) are important and easy solutions for improving speed.

Making the site mobile-friendly is another important technical concern. Search engines love to see websites that cater to mobile audiences – and with the majority of people reading news from their phones, you need that audience to have a functional, aesthetically-pleasing interface for best results.

Use Social Media

Last but not least, pinging search engines with content by engaging on social media is a vital component of ensuring news is delivered quickly to your target audience.

While social media activity may not boost your overall search rankings via Google, it can help you rank via those individual posts in relevant SERPs. Additionally, never forget that Bing does factor social signals into their algorithms for rankings (and Bing’s algorithms govern approximately one-third of search queries conducted in the US).

News outlets need quick indexing and visibility via search engines in order for their content to be relevant to these audiences. By following the basics mentioned above, news outlets can ensure optimal performance and potential for growth.