SEO tools: The best for your news publication

This week, a perennial favourite: SEO tools. What to know about Google-owned tools, Ahrefs, SEMRush, Trisolute, Newzdash – and many more!

Jul 25, 2022

Hello, and welcome back. It’s Shelby and Jessie here for a rare duo issue. Shelby is beginning a funemployment stint today after a bittersweet departure from Mashable, while Jessie’s highlight of the week was going to a screening of Cruel Intentions. There are a lot of emotions going on over here.

This week, we are revisiting a perennial favourite: SEO tools. Keen observers will remember some of these tools from an earlier edition of the newsletter. We’ve revisited and refreshed an earlier issue with more thoughts and advice for you to amp up your toolbox.

Help us test out Substack’s new poll tool – and pick next week’s topic. Should we cover:

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Ahh, a clean desktop, the complete opposite of Jessie’s setup (it’s fine!! I swear I have a system. It’s called chaos.). Photo by Niclas Illg on Unsplash

Let’s get it.

In this issue:

Google tools;
Best overall SEO and news SEO-specific tools;
Favourite browser extensions.

Google-owned tools

Google Analytics

Paid or free: Free

Link: Google Analytics

What it does: Google provides a free analytics tool that can be easily integrated onto your site. The Google Analytics integrations provide a breadth of data including page views, time spent on page, exit percentage and your top landing pages from search, social and referral traffic. For a broad understanding of your audience, this is a great place to start.

Caveat: Google launched Google Analytics 4 in 2021, which will become the main analytics property in July 2023. GA4 is focused on the audience funnel rather than acquisition, which changes the reporting process. Be sure to read through the different data models according to Google.

Hack: Set up your goals in Google Analytics so you can directly track your most important conversions, whether that is signing up for a newsletter, purchasing a subscription or spending a certain amount of time on a story.

Google Trends

Paid or free: Free

Link: Google Trends

What it does: This open source tool provides access to a large unfiltered sample of search data. Trends help understand interest in a particular topic, based on either seasonality (when MLB trade news spikes) or relative volume (i.e., compare interest in “Papal visit” or “Pope visit” to see which term is more popular and could be in headlines).
You can also get granular, looking at the topic from a global level or all the way down to your own municipality.
In a previous newsletter, we outlined key things Google Trends can help you do: find real-time and recently trending keywords and topics, see related Topics and queries and compare keywords.

Caveat: Google Trends can give you general search interest, but cannot give you a definitive number of exactly how many searches. We use this tool to tell us a) is this a good keyword; b) when did people search this term; c) what is trending that day.

BUT: there is a Chrome extension that can add more definitive metrics to Google Trends. Read the Extensions section to learn more.

Hack: Set up Google Trends alert emails for key terms when they hit a threshold of searches in a certain period of time. Use this alert to catch keywords you wouldn’t expect to trend and get notified when breaking news is happening.

Google Search Console

Paid or free: Free

Link: Google Search Console

What it does: This is the gold mine of search data. The Search Console is exactly what it sounds like: a console of tools and reports that help you measure your site’s traffic and performance, identify and fix technical issues while understanding how people find your content in search. Literally – GSC provides the exact keywords readers used to end up on your site.
In a previous newsletter, we outlined five key things GSC can do: find priorities for your search strategy; find keyword winners week-over-week; find optimization opportunities (indexed pages bringing in limited clicks); find pages to remove from search and analyze single URLs.

Caveat: This is the best data for on-site components – pages not indexing, schema/structured errors, which keywords drive clicks – but that’s all it is: data on your site currently. GSC data tells you how you performed yesterday or over the last weeks and months. The data is not predictive or forward-looking. This is best complemented with another keyword research tool.

Also, a recent study by Ahrefs showed that up to half of all GSC clicks go to hidden search terms.

Hack: Google launched “search console insights,” an effort to connect Google Analytics data (the third-party metrics we love) with Search Console (the internal data we need). This is their attempt to make it easy for content creators and publishers to understand how their audiences find their stories and what resonates.

Trends newsletter from Google

Paid or free: Free

Link: Google Trends newsletter (scroll to the bottom of the page for the newsletter sign up link)

What it does: A daily email newsletter aggregated from the Google Trends team (Simon Rogers and a group of curators). The daily email provides the top overall Google searches for trending news items, trending questions on a topic and breakout terms.
The newsletter also zooms out to show search interest related to a topic (in their heat wave-specific edition, that included the top-searched heat wave questions globally, as well as attribute searches (“Can heat cause …” or “why…” queries related to heat). This can be useful to inform explanatory reporting.

Hack: The Google Trends team is open to bespoke queries. Send the team (trendsdatateam@google.com) a request and they can help find useful search insights.

Caveat: The newsletter is entirely U.S. data and arrives later in the afternoon (EST). For real-time data or topics with rising interest, refer Google Trends directly. To build up your search instincts and really understand how readers will search on a given topic, read the newsletter regularly, even if the topics don’t align with your editorial goals.

Third-party tools

Ahrefs

Paid or free: Paid (with some free options)

Link: Ahrefs

What it does: Ahrefs is one of the best all-in-one SEO tools on the market. It can be used to analyze your site’s technical health, monitor your backlink profile, track keywords and build up content ideas. The backlink profile alone makes the price point worth the investment.
Ahrefs also provides a comprehensive site audit that can pinpoint site issues, content opportunities and competitive analysis. The competitor analysis identifies the keywords your competitors are ranking for and targeting.

Caveat: Extremely expensive, especially if you’re a small publisher. The tool does offer a few free components, including their keyword explorer. Ahrefs’ API is also a bit slower than SEMRush when updating data around keywords.

SEMRush

Paid or free: Paid (with some free options)

Link: SEMRush

What it does: SEMRush is another incredible all-in-one SEO tool that many editors thoroughly enjoy. SEMRush has a great keyword research tool and recent upgrades, such as adding search intent for each keyword, has made it stand out as one of the best.
The tool can track the position of key posts, generate topic ideas for a keyword and does competitive analysis. Their topic research tool can identify ideas and questions for your next explainer or inform updates to a piece of evergreen content.

Caveat: Expensive, especially for small publishers. There are many keyword research tools that can (for less money) provide similar keyword insights for content creation. But the free 7-day trial is worth it to figure out whether it’s a needed investment.

TechnicalSEO.com

Paid or free: Free

Link: Schema generator

What it does: TechnicalSEO’s free schema tool generates the correct structured data for JSON-LD markups (for Article, Breadcrumb, Event, FAQ, review schema and more). Quickly test the JSON for any errors before manually adding to pages in your CMS/on your website.

Caveat: TechnicalSEO’s schema tool doesn’t include every type of structured data we might use (for example, LiveBlogPosting is not included).

Hack: Ask your development or site team to make schema/structured available on article pages by default in your CMS (this is not a small request for your developers, so use the free tool as it makes sense in the interim).

Screaming Frog

Paid or free: Paid (with a free option)

Link: Screaming Frog

What it does: Screaming Frog is a spider crawler. It will crawl all of the data found under a specific domain and gives you all of the technical information you need: a list of broken links; images that are too big; iframes information; if there are missing, duplicate or multiple title tags, H1s on your site; generate sitemaps; review your robots directives; audit your redirects; check crawl depth; identify broken links; create a site architecture, etc.
It is one of the most comprehensive site crawlers and is a very good tool for making sure all of your pages are compliant.

Caveat: The free version only allows you to crawl the first 500 links that the spider comes in contact with. That’s not a lot of pages, especially on news sites. You may end up missing some, or having to crawl the site more than once. You also can’t configure the crawl in the free version to be specific to what you’re looking for, so you end up with a lot of bloat. The paid version is relatively inexpensive and really expands the spider’s capacity.

Hack: Already have a list of URLs you just want to check over all at once? Screaming Frog has a “list” configuration that will crawl a whole list of links – all you have to do is import the CSV.

SEO news-focused tools

Trisolute News Dashboard and Newzdash

Link: News Dashboard and Newzdash

Paid or free: Paid (with free trials)

What it does: Trisolute and Newzdash are similar tools. Both are effective for monitoring your search visibility in almost real time. Both offer a “missing topics” feature (newsy keywords or topics your competitors rank for, but you’re missing out on), and the ability to monitor your organic and Top Stories rankings almost in real time.
Trisolute is a Google News visibility tool for publishers. The tool can help monitor which stories are ranking in mobile and desktop SERPs for your targeted keywords. Use Trisolute’s data to better optimize your content. Chelsey Heath, their news SEO strategist, is lovely and will walk you through the tool during a trial.
Newzdash is a news dashboard for publishers providing real-time tracking and SEO recommendations founded by John Shehata (the same John who co-founded NESS!). He is also lovely and will walk you through the tool during a trial.

Hack: Trisolute offers a free tool, News Flashboard, that provides a look at your visibility data – if you are just getting beginning to understand search, or are a small team, this is an excellent starting point.

With News Flashboard, you can access a continuously-updating list of stories currently ranking and news keywords you’re missing out on. Newzdash offers free reports: the Trends Radar report and SEO visibility winners and losers. Plus, check out their news SEO guide.

Caveat: Both can be expensive, and still require you and your team to execute on their recommendations (obviously). Both tools also give you a ton of information, so it’d be smart to have their customer service team demo how to parse it based on your site’s needs. Both companies have great customer support, so start the conversation about your goals, then figure out if/how the tool will get you there.

SEO browser extensions

Glimpse

Paid or free: Paid (with a free option)

Link: Chrome extension

What it does: Using Glimpse is like using Google Trends on steroids. The Glimpse extension takes what you get on Google Trends and adds enriched data to help you make informed decisions about your future content opportunities.
Glimpse has a wealth of features that make it a must-have for keyword trend research, such as the search volume directly on the trend graph, whether the keyword is trending up or down, people also search data, new and emerging topics, longtail keyword research and much more.
You can also sort all of your findings by growth, which gives you an indication of what keywords are just beginning to rise in popularity.

Caveat: To go deeper into some of the insights, you will need the paid version. The data is also not entirely in real time, so narrowing your search any closer than 90 days becomes tricky. The team is still working on enhancing the tool, so expect some great things in the future.

Keywords Everywhere

Paid or free: Paid (with a free option)

Link: Chrome extension (download link)

What it does: Keywords Everywhere provides trend data, search volume, related keywords, People Also Ask queries and long-tail keyword opportunities right in Google search results. (Have writers you work with install the extension; seeing Keywords Everywhere data next to their everyday queries can help build search instinct. And, as a bonus, they can start doing keyword research independently.)
Keywords Everywhere provides trendlines for the keywords in your search results as well, so you can determine whether the keywords you’re targeting are of interest at the current moment.
The extension also has its own bulk keyword research tool, so you can gather the trend data and search volume for a large group of keywords right in the browser.

Caveat: The free version of this tool is very useful, however, their best features are unlocked by buying credits (which are fairly inexpensive). For more granular data, 100,000 keyword credits is just US$10 and will provide search volume all of the information you need.

Also worth noting: Keywords Everywhere data is based on geographical location. Make sure your geography is set correctly before looking at keywords to have more accurate data.

Hack: Keywords Everywhere is often accepted by other third-party tools and will give you the information you need even if you’re not directly using the extension. Turn off the extension when you’re not doing keyword research to preserve your credits.

SEO Pro extension

Paid or free: Paid (by donation)

Link: Chrome extension

What it does: The SEO Pro extension by Marketing Syrup (aka, Kristina Azarenko, human form of the 💯 emoji) puts all the primary SEO information about a page in one place – without having to check the page’s meta data or code.
In the Overview and Headings tabs, you can see all on-page elements in one place: the title tag (and its character count); the meta description (and character count); the URL and canonical URL; your Core Web Vitals and the headings (H1-H6, in the order of how they appear in the source code).
In the Links tab, see all the Internal and External links on the page (with the option to export to CSV). In the Schema tab, identify the structured data used on the page. The extension (in the bottom left-hand corner) also provides quick access to sitemaps and robots.txt files.

Caveat: It doesn’t provide any of the in-depth technical components we’ll also need to look at (like broken links, for example). Sometimes the structured data of a page can’t be identified when the site takes extra steps to hide it.

Hack: Use it to see what your competitors are doing (see their internal linking, on-page text or the schema in place on a page). Another outlet is outranking your health and fitness explainer on low-impact exercises? Consult the Headings tab for a quick overview of the topic areas they covered.

Redirect Path

Paid or free: Paid (by donation)

Link: Chrome extension

What it does: This gem makes it extremely easy to identify what type of HTTP Status Code your page is rendering. This means if you have a redirect in place and it is sending your page on a loop, you can quickly identify right on the page. The extension will crawl the type of status code and identify the path that the crawler used to get to the specific page the user is looking at. This makes it easy to know if something needs to be addressed immediately, or to identify the type of redirect that is in place. You can also copy the path and see each step.

Example use case: Show an article page with a redirect, including both URLS.

Caveat: Again, this can identify your issue, but it’s up to you to bring this to your team and make the changes. The changes must be done on-page.

Hack: If a redirect has taken place and you’re stuck on a loop, you can quickly copy a text version of the path to show your team and explain the situation!

The bottom line: Tools make our jobs easier. This list is just a few of our favourites. Be open to trying a new tool and seeing how it fits into your publication’s objectives.

THE JOBS LIST

These are roles across the globe we see that are audience positions in journalism. Want to include a position for promotion? Email us.

The Times and Sunday Times are looking for a freelance SEO journalist for a three-month contract. Send Leonie Roderick a message on Slack for more information.

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