So its a normal day and then suddenly there is a security threat around the corner and Tottenham Court Road is evacuated!!
Being the SEO that I am, I foresaw potential in the face of adversity; and quickly proceeded to upload a post about what I could see. The idea being that with people scrambing for information (#tottenhamcourtroad was quickly established as a trending topic on Twitter), there was potential search volume up for grabs! :)
Disclaimer: Obviously people searching for information regarding a security alert have very little monetary value to me (unless I am sending them here) but that’s not really the point of this experiment
With any news release, being the first to press is incredibly important – its a great way to build early citations and collect traffic before others have made it off the starting line. Google will re-crawl your content and so its a good idea to get something up quickly, even if it is only a couple of paragraphs with a “more coming soon…” subscript. You can read more advise regarding optimising for Google News in this great post by Rob Millard over at distilled who goes into detail about some other best-practices SEO’s / editors should be considering.
Thankfully (for my traffic’s sake) Google’s QDF model had not triggered yet and so I was sitting pretty in my #3 position in Google UK
Ranking just behind the BBC in #3
As expected my traffic figures bumped quite a bit off the back of this…
A somewhat healthy jump
Conclusion:
This should be used as an example of the absolute minimum possible with fresh, quick, targeted news content. This site is not submitted to G.News and so on a site that is – their traffic source would not have been constrained to the conventional SERP listings – as soon as universal results started filtering in (Real Time, News, etc.) there were big wins to be made across all traffic verticals!
This kind of uplift can be seen for any site if they are on the cusp of breaking news. In an increasingly competitive online news space – editors should be looking to make the most of any competitive advantage that they have. One such attribute can be speed.