These were the most visible news publishers in Google News for 2017 – and their top keywords
3. January 2018Now that 2018 is here, we used the News Dashboard SEO tool to take a look back at 2017, to find out which publishers made the Top 5 most visible for Google News, the News Boxes in the desktop SERP (search engine results pages), and the mobile News Boxes for the keyword “donald trump” in the mobile SERPs.
The News Dashboard SEO tool looks at Google search visibility. We focused only on imported keywords – Google News Topics and Google News Related – which are made up of the “trending” or top news topics on Google News at any given time during the analysis. Each Google News category – from Top Stories to Entertainment, World, Sports, Technology and more – is considered.
And in case you’re not familiar with the terminology above, here are some examples (and you can check out our SEO terms journalists need to know for more):
Examples of Google News, a desktop Google News Box and Mobile Google News Box.
As publishers are seeing more signs that reaching readers through social media could become more difficult or even impossible, search and especially Google and its news-specific ranking types are an attractive way to help your journalism reach more people.
Google News
We used the News Dashboard to uncover the Top 5 publishers by Google News visibility in 2017.
The Top 5 publishers by Google News visibility in 2017 (measured Jan. 1, 2017, through Dec. 27, 2017) were:
Washington Post (Highest month visibility: 11.35 percent, lowest month visibility: 6.69 percent)
New York Times (6.11 percent, 3.59 percent)
CNN (5.03 percent, 3 percent)
ESPN (3.37 percent, 1.86 percent)
Reuters (3.34 percent, 1.63 percent)
Honorable mention (6th-10th in overall visibility in this ranking type): USA Today, Bloomberg, LA Times, Forbes, BBC News.
2016 Google News visibility
Cnn.com’s ranking drops severely in the last months.
Desktop News Box
Moving over to desktop News Boxes, which are a news-related ranking type in the Google desktop SERPs, the Top 5 publishers by visibility for 2017 are listed below. We also went one step further using the News Dashboard, and looked at each of the publisher’s Top 10 most visible keywords for their month with the highest visibility in this ranking type.
We used the News Dashboard to uncover the Top 5 publishers by desktop News Boxes visibility in 2017.
CNN (3.79 percent, 2.47 percent)
June Top 10 keywords by visibility: donald trump, cnn, russia, presidency of donald trump, james comey, bill cosby, north korea, china, London, syria
New York Times (4.54 percent, 2.16 percent)
April Top 10 keywords by visibility: bill o’reilly, stephen k. bannon, Andrew cuomo, russia, jared kushner, fox news, neil gorsuch, schools, syria, france
ESPN (4.12 percent, 2.46 percent)
December Top 10 keywords by visibility: nfl, nba, pittsburgh steelers, new england patrios, cleveland cavaliers, green bay packers, los angeles lakers, golden state warriors, college basketball, tampa bay buccaneers
The Guardian (2.8 percent, 1.35 percent)
October Top 10 keywords by visibility: brexit, catalonia, theresa may, john oliver, russia, carles puigdemont, spain, conservative party, australia, rohingya people
Washington Post (2.25 percent, 1.31 percent)
October Top 10 keywords by visibility: stephen k. bannon, republican party, washington redskins, students, russia, washington, democratic party, president of the united states, syria, turkey
Honorable mention: Yahoo, USA Today, Fox News, Reuters, The Verge.
There was quite bit of movement in desktop News Boxes compared with 2016. While CNN and NY Times repeated their top showing, ESPN and the Washington Post pushed out USA Today and BBC News, respectively, and the Guardian made its way into 4th place.
2016 desktop News Boxes visibility
Nytimes.com reaching the top as the year passes.
Mobile News Boxes for keyword “donald trump”
We used the News Dashboard to uncover the Top 5 publishers visibility for the keyword “donald trump” in the mobile News Boxes in 2017.
Easily the biggest overall news topic in 2017, there are no big surprises in the Top 5 most visible publishers for this keyword over the course of the year. While the Top 5 are powerhouse national news brands, there’s a bit more of a varied group in honorable mentions, including a couple news-magazine-style publications (with longer, analysis articles), a business-focused website and a politics-only website.
CNN (21.6 percent, 10.18 percent)
NBC News (6.57 percent, 4.23 percent)
Washington Post (6.63 percent, 2.95 percent)
New York Times (9.8 percent, 1.93 percent)
Fox News (6.01 percent, 2.33 percent)
Honorable mentions: Slate, USA Today, The Atlantic, CNBC, The Hill.
Wrap-up
We hope you found this year in review data for 2017 interesting. Stay tuned for more analyses – and a complete tool and website redesign – from the News Dashboard in 2018. And if you want to see Mobile News Box and Publisher Carousel data – including AMP Carousels – sign up for a News Dashboard demo today.