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Most visible news websites on Google: Iowa caucus coverage

This year has already been a big year for politics coverage for U.S. publishers – and the general election is still months away.

Now that the Iowa Caucus results are (finally) in, we used the Trisolute News Dashboard to analyze how U.S. news outlets covered the results and which publishers’ stories were the most visible in Google’s news ranking types.

And it looks like the winner of the visibility battle is more clear than that of the caucus. 

The following analysis is for Feb. 2-9, 2020. Our keyword cluster contained: iowa, iowa dnc, iowa caucus, iowa caucuses, iowa 2020, dnc iowa, iowa results. 

The Top 10 most visible publishers on mobile were:

Top 10 most visible publisher on the mobile SERP.

The most visibility can get nytimes.com on febuary 6th on the mobile SERP.

This includes rankings in News Box, Video Carousel, Publisher Carousel, Live Blog and Organic. 

  • cnn.com
  • desmoinesregister.com
  • fivethirtyeight.com
  • foxnews.com
  • msnbc.com 
  • nbcnews.com 
  • nytimes.com 
  • politico.com
  • thehill.com 
  • washingtonpost.com

The Top 10 most visible publishers on desktop were:

Top 10 visible publishers on the Desktop SERP.

Nytimes.com can increase their visibility on the desktop SERP.

This includes News Box, Video Carousel and Organic.

  • cnn.com
  • desmoinesregister.com
  • fivethirtyeight.com
  • foxnews.com
  • msnbc.com 
  • nbcnews.com 
  • nytimes.com 
  • politico.com
  • thehill.com 
  • wikipedia.org

What Will thinks: Publishers with live blogs or results landing pages for results fared better in visibility over time than publishers who didn’t offer some kind of live updates. Yes, turn-of-the-screw stories and evergreen explainers DID perform, but having a smartly optimized live blog or results page in place before or as the caucuses got underway improved visibility in Google. 

Stories or pages with live elements, such as blog rolls or “live” results landing pages, seem to have outsize value in Google visibility during the Iowa Caucuses. Twenty percent of the stories that appeared in the Top 10 publishers’ five most visible articles in mobile news ranking types were either live results pages or landing pages. It also gives us a real-world example of how one page can rank multiple times during the day, especially if that page is updated often.

Those “live” stories accounted for 48 percent of the visibility in the publishers’ five most visible stories. In other words, the visibility returns are great for landing pages and live blogs during breaking-news situations.

You can also check out our tweets on visibility for the New Hampshire primary.

Read more

What U.S. news website had the highest Google News visibility in 2019?

All the News Dashboard’s new features in 2019 – and a sneak peek into 2020

12 months of rankings: Most visible U.S. news publishers in Google News, Top Stories boxes

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