Choosing the right SEO tools for your newsroom is a key component in building a successful search strategy. There are several important ways in which a Google visibility tool like the Trisolute News Dashboard differs from traditional SEO software and we’ll discuss these in detail to demonstrate how newsrooms can benefit by choosing a dedicated news SEO analytics platform.

First of all, how did the Trisolute News Dashboard come into existence? While working with German news publishers, Trisolute Software founder Tobias Fellner-Jost saw the need for a custom news analytics dashboard that would provide near real-time SERP data with a focus on news-relevant ranking types. Since 2012, the Trisolute News Dashboard has served the unique search data needs of news publishers, growing to provide service in more than a dozen countries.

Let’s take a tour through the features of the Trisolute News Dashboard and how they differ from the features in a traditional SEO tool.

Focus on news-related SERP ranking types

Traditional SEO tools typically focus on organic rankings. The Trisolute News Dashboard instead focuses on the news ranking types on the mobile and desktop SERPs that are most relevant to publishers, including the Top Stories News Box, Live Blogs, Featured Snippets, and Publisher Carousels. In addition, the Trisolute News Dashboard provides data insights into Google News and Google Discover, which are critical to news publishers and search visibility. For publishers who focus on evergreen content, the Trisolute News Dashboard also captures organic visibility ranking data, providing a holistic view of the mobile and desktop SERP.

Visibility as defining metric

Another major difference between the Trisolute News Dashboard and a traditional SEO tool is the focus on Google visibility. For news publishers, understanding where their content is positioned on the Google SERP is just as important and can be more insightful than tracking traditional SEO metrics like page views, impressions, and click-through rate. The relentless breaking news cycle and fierce competition means news publishers have limited time and opportunity to score SERP visibility via a Top Stories News Box ranking. Analyzing visibility data helps news publishers understand how to best optimize their content to gain the greatest SERP visibility on a consistent basis.

The Trisolute News Dashboard tracks a publisher’s visibility on Google News and the Mobile and Desktop SERPs. Publishers can track their near real-time visibility in the Action View report and review historic visibility in the KPI Dashboard reports. In addition, we added SERP visibility insights to the tool’s Discover report so that publishers can review their performance across Google’s search platforms.

If you’re interested in testing out the Trisolute News Dashboard in your newsroom, register for a free demo and trial.

Start page featuring the news SEO metrics publishers care about the most

News publishers need data fast, so the Trisolute News Dashboard start page includes widgets that automatically update with key performance metrics, including News Box visibility, lost rankings, competitor insights, and trending topics. The Index Rate widget allows a user to spot Google indexation problems. A quick review allows SEO teams to get up to speed instantly and make informed decisions on their daily Google optimization strategy. This streamlined data customized for news publishers reduces the noise that often comes with a traditional SEO tool.

Keyword set sources

Traditional SEO tools focus on keywords that are relevant to corporate and e-commerce clients. The Trisolute News Dashboard provides a Keyword Manager that builds its keyword set from Google Trends and Google News, pulling from a wide range of essential categories for news publishers, including Top Stories, Business, and Entertainment. The Trisolute News Dashboard automatically imports keywords from Google News and Google Trends every 30 minutes and crawls Google’s SERPS in 15-minute intervals.

Each keyword in the Trisolute News Dashboard is assigned a relevance score, based on a host of factors such as SERP placement, ranking type, and how many publishers are ranking for a keyword. This unique keyword scoring system allows news publishers to target the keywords with the highest chance of search visibility success.

Near real-time keyword tracking

One of the biggest differences between the Trisolute News Dashboard and a traditional SEO tool is the frequency of keyword rank tracking. Publishers can choose to have manual keywords checked at 5-minute, 15-minute, or 60-minute intervals. For a single keyword checked at 15-minute intervals, that amounts to 96 times per day.

Near real-time tracking is essential when it comes to measuring search visibility during breaking news events. Traditional SEO tools don’t typically track rankings that often, instead they may provide daily updates, or hourly at best. By providing these keyword rank tracking interval options, publishers get access to the recent data they need to make timely optimization decisions without the prohibitive cost of on-demand data.

These crawling intervals are crucial to accommodate a newsroom’s search optimization workflows. During breaking news and live news events, it’s essential to have the ability to track keyword ranking data at 5-minute intervals to quickly capture changes and take action. The 15-minute crawling interval is designed for the bulk of content in the daily news cycle. For evergreen content, the 60-minute crawling interval is sufficient and the most cost-effective.

The tool’s Action View-Data Hub report displays whether a publisher has indexed an article for the active keyword set within the last 24 hours or whether one of the publisher’s articles has achieved a ranking within the last 12 hours. The results in the Action View report automatically update, keeping publishers informed of how their content is performing in search visibility in near real-time.

Action suggestions designed for news publishers

The Trisolute News Dashboard’s Action View-Data Hub report provides action recommendations designed to help news publishers optimize breaking news and live event coverage. The suggestions include publish an article, watch the keyword, optimize the article, check the article, and decide based on the latest ranking. Such tips can help SEO teams optimize content more quickly and effectively.

The Action View-Newsroom Basics feature showcases two key data points from the Action View-Data Hub: Lost Rankings and Missing Article, with the option to view in a split screen on a separate monitor to ensure the SEO team stays on top of trending news developments and can take immediate action.

Historic data

Because news publishers often cover events that happen annually, such as award shows and sport championships, they must have access to historic data to review what worked well in the past, and where there are opportunities for growth in search visibility. The Trisolute News Dashboard offers historic data back to 2012 [in select countries] in its KPI Dashboard reports, where publishers can view their historic performance, along with their competitors’ historic performance in Google News, and the mobile and desktop SERPs.

This historic data is provided at no additional cost, while traditional SEO tools often offer limited historic data which comes with an extra fee.

Share of Voice

Share of Voice is a common marketing metric found in traditional SEO tools. The  Share of Voice report in the Trisolute News Dashboard is designed to be a starting point in analyzing a news publisher’s SERP authority. Data for up to the top 250 news publishers is available in this report, which can be customized by news category and keywords to gain insights into a publisher’s topic authority as well as competitor performance.

Content discovery tailored to news relevance

Traditional SEO tools focus more on brand and e-commerce trends to optimize for transactional queries, whereas the Trisolute News Dashboard surfaces newsworthy topics from Google Trends and Google News, two platforms which are vital to publishers to stay on top of emerging news trends.

The Topic Inspiration feature in the Trisolute News Dashboard provides keyword insights useful for news publishers, such as a live look at the content in the Mobile and Desktop News Box for a specific keyword. The Topic Inspiration feature also includes News Box Header data, which can help publishers understand the specific topic angle that is the focus of the News Box, so publishers can optimize their content to improve chances of inclusion.

Google Discover insights

Understanding Google Discover performance as a news publisher requires a holistic approach. The Trisolute News Dashboard Discover report breaks down performance insights by entity, path, and article level. Publishers can create entity clusters to track Discover performance for a specific event or topic.

The report tracks how many articles have been seen in Discover for a publisher, how long the articles have been on Discover, and the development of clicks and impressions over the selected time period. Publishers can gain quick insights by reviewing the data in the Maximum and Average performance widget in the Entity Analysis and Article Analysis sections. Publishers can click on any entity to reveal a menu with more detailed insights about historic performance and the related keyword’s performance on Google News and the mobile and desktop SERPs.

Targeted alerts

Because of the urgent nature of news, performance alerts need to be designed to provide critical insights that keep a publisher ahead of the competition. The Trisolute News Dashboard offers Microsoft Teams and Slack alerts for lost rankings and missing topics.

API that provides news-specific data points

A robust API is necessary for news SEO analytics, because data-driven newsrooms tend to use a medley of performance tracking tools that they combine into a master dashboard or internal performance monitoring system. The Trisolute News Dashboard’s API provides access to a wide range of key data points.

Pricing plan designed with news publishers in mind

Because of the frequency and 24/7 nature of the news cycle which requires constant tracking of Google’s news-related ranking types, the Trisolute News Dashboard offers a subscription plan which is more cost-effective for newsrooms than a pricing system based on keyword or crawl volume that some traditional SEO tools offer.

In addition, the Trisolute News Dashboard offers customized onboarding from the team’s experienced News SEO Strategists to ensure your team will be able to incorporate the tool seamlessly into existing workflows. The support doesn’t end after onboarding. Unlike many self-serve SEO tools, ongoing support is available for each Trisolute News Dashboard client. This can include monthly or quarterly check-in calls, training sessions for new employees, refresher or new feature training, and custom analysis to provide reliable data insights to help news publishers evolve their news SEO strategy in the face of Google updates and competitor moves.

We hope this overview of the Trisolute News Dashboard has been helpful in understanding the benefits of choosing a news SEO tool for your newsroom versus a traditional SEO tool.

Not yet part of the Trisolute News Dashboard family? Request a FREE DEMO today and find out how your articles rank on Google Discover, Google News, and the SERPs!