7 Technical SEO Essentials for Local Publishers

This guest post was written by Daniel Petty, the director of audience strategy for ProPublica. He’s also a part of our LION Expert Network.

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Internet search engines — Google, in particular — have long been essential to guide readers to find and access information, from recipes to medical advice to news.

In practice, the basics of writing to rank well in Google search marries quite well with the goals we have as journalists — that we should seek to produce news and information about our communities with experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, a concept known as E-E-A-T.

But you can produce the most authoritative journalism about a community, and still fail to rank well, thanks to deficiencies on the technical side of search engine optimization. Solid technical SEO is table stakes for any publisher. A slow website, a poorly presented sitemap, or chaotically designed pages can make it harder for search engines to find your work, crawl them, and present them to potential readers.

Looming over this, of course, is artificial intelligence, which is likely to significantly disrupt web-based search as we’ve come to know it since the late 1990s. SimilarWeb data suggests that traffic from organic search to Business Insider, for instance, has fallen some 55% from April 2022 to April 2025, but those kinds of steep declines are not universal — at least not yet. People will always seek the answers to questions, and LION members are best positioned to offer information about readers’ communities to those readers.

Below are a handful of considerations LION members should bear in mind to ensure the technical side of their search engine house is in order. In general, most of these recommendations are targeted at Google because it is the dominant search engine in the U.S.

And a final word of encouragement: You don’t need to be a skilled developer to get these basics right. Even implementing a few of these can lead to big payoffs in the months and years ahead.

1. Ensure Your Design is Mobile Friendly

As publishers, we often spend our days in front of a laptop computer, writing stories and publishing photos, videos and event listings. But take a look at your analytics — whether Google Analytics, JetPack or something else — and note the percentage of users who are reaching you on a mobile phone in a typical day. Chances are, it’s a majority of users, and for many of you it may be a large majority. Ask yourself: How does this site actually look on a mobile phone?

In fact, Google conducts what’s called “mobile-first indexing,” using the mobile version of your site’s content over what is presented on a desktop to determine what information is on your pages.

There are multiple ways to deliver a mobile-first experience for your readers. Google recommends using responsive design, which means that the HTML code — the lines of information that determine the structure and content of a page — is the same regardless of the device used, but the page displays the content differently depending on the width of the device’s screen. Because there’s just one URL, it’s easy for Google to understand.

Another option is using dynamic serving or even separate URLs that require sniffing out the user agent of the device accessing the page (for example, Safari’s mobile web browser) before serving the correct page.

2. Avoid Duplicate Content

If you have lots of pages with the same or similar content, work to reduce it. For many digital-native publishers, this isn’t an issue. But if you’re part of a network of sites, or you regularly partner with other news publishers — perhaps in a neighboring city or town to ensure that you offer readers a greater breadth of coverage — there’s a decent chance you might be producing copies of stories or content that appear on multiple sites. If that’s the case, you need to directly tell Google which is the best representative or “canonical” piece of content for duplicate content, even if it’s not the exact same, but very similar.

Generally, avoid deleting pages in an effort to remove duplicate stories. Why? It’s possible another site has linked to an old story, and if readers find it, you want them to come to your site and have a good experience. Bad user experience is generally bad for SEO. Doing these things below ensures they get to the right destination.

There are two primary ways to fix duplicate content issues:

1. Establish a Redirect: A redirect is like having a permanent forwarding address at your local post office. If someone sends mail to your address, the post office forwards it to the new address. A redirect on your site is much the same, and doing so is a strong sign to Google to ignore the old URL (the old address) and consider the new URL the correct one. Use what’s called a 301 redirect — indicating a permanent change to the URL (there may be instances in which you want to use a 302 redirect for temporary changes, usually for testing or maintenance, but this is less common). WordPress plugins such as Safe Redirect Manager and Yoast all have plugin features for handling redirects. Redirects don’t require the user to do anything, and they preserve link equity — all of the outside sites linking to the old URL — to the new one.
   
2. Use “rel=canonical”: If you’re regularly publishing stories from a partner, this is the path that I would recommend. If site X did most of the reporting on the story, and the story is also published on site Y, it’s appropriate for site Y to tell Google that site X’s URL is the canonical URL. You want to credit the original source of the story, and this gives you the tools to do so and ensures Google doesn’t penalize both of you. Google has a lengthy guide here explaining this, and many SEO plugins for various CMS’s have fields for allowing you to point your content to another page for canonical, often tucked under the advanced features. Note that canonicalizing a URL is not a directive to Google, but a “strong hint.” Sometimes, even specifying a canonical URL doesn’t remove the duplicate piece from Google search.

If you change content management systems, be sure to use redirects, especially if the URL structure changes. If you do a site migration, it’s not uncommon to see changes to your content ranking over a few weeks until settling, Google says.

3. Prioritize Site Speed and Performance, Especially On Mobile

More than 60% of global internet traffic in the second quarter of 2025 came from mobile devices. Most LION members’ web users are likely to be browsing your news site on mobile devices, not on desktops or tablets. Because Google cares about user experience, it prioritizes sites in its rankings that load quickly for users — and especially on mobile devices. 

Websites can be slow for lots of reasons: Large, uncompressed image files and videos are a big one. Unnecessary redirects and inefficient code on your site (HTML, CSS and javascript). Poor web hosting and too many ads are another.

Inside Google Search Console, there’s a tab called “Core Web Vitals” — which aggregates real-world data from users over the last 28 days to get a better understanding of how your visitors are experiencing your news site. This data factors heavily into Google’s ranking algorithm, and you can use it to better understand where your shortcomings in site performance may be.

If you don’t yet have enough traffic to get recommendations from Core Web Vitals, use Page Speed Insights and test some of your article pages.

4. Set Up and Use Google Search Console

So your site design is mobile friendly, and it’s fast to load, especially on mobile. But how can you get more information about how your site is appearing in Google search?

Enter Google Search Console.

While having GSC isn’t required to show up in Google, it is helpful for allowing you to monitor your site’s performance in Google search; measure traffic from traditional search, Google News and Google Discover; fix search-performance related issues; and manually submit updates to content for Google search. A good habit is to check this at least monthly — and potentially more if you’re just starting your news operation — to ensure there aren’t issues and learn more about the stories and content that resonate most with your readers.

To get started, you’ll need a Google account, then you’ll need to verify that you actually own your website. If there are major concerns such as Google’s inability to crawl your site, Google will alert you to them without your needing to check.

If you’re just starting, a good first step is just to understand how many impressions your new site’s content is generating and the number of clicks that result. What search queries are people typing in to find your work? How is your traffic divided by traditional search, Google News and Google Discover? Learning these patterns can unlock growth opportunities, particularly as you observe trends over time.

It’s also a good idea to check the page indexing report, which will tell you what pages Google sees and indexes and what pages aren’t indexed. If there are errors preventing pages from being indexed, GSC will give you explanations for how to fix them. Sometimes, pages aren’t indexed, and you can manually request that they be indexed.

5. Ensure You Have A Sitemap Set Up

Sitemaps are like a book’s table of contents for Google’s search crawlers. It helps the search engine understand the hierarchy and structure of your pages, what pages are most important to crawl and how frequently they’re updated. There’s even a news-specific sitemap that can be separate from the main sitemap. A news sitemap should be limited to stories published in the last two days, according to Google’s documentation. And for sites with lots of video, there is a video-specific sitemap.

Content management systems such as WordPress and Wix automatically create sitemaps upon setup, so you’ll have the basics already submitted to Google. Sitemaps are essential for new news websites with very few external links from other sources because Google’s crawler relies on other crawled pages to discover new pages, sites and links.

6. Set Up Crawl Budget and Efficient Indexing

There are many pages on the open web — too many for Google to index. So, Google has to make decisions about what to crawl. Think of it this way: Google has a limited number of “delivery drivers” who come to your site each day to pick up new content and deliver it to readers. For small sites, there aren’t many stops, so the drivers can grab everything quickly. But for very large sites with more than 1 million unique pages, medium sites with 10,000+ unique pages, or sites with a very large share of their articles in Google Search Console as “discovered” but not indexed (see No. 4 for setting up GSC), this applies to you. You want to ensure that Google is spending time on your most important articles and avoiding broken links, archives or duplicate pages that don’t matter as much.

For most LION members with relatively few pages, you don’t need to worry much about this. If you publish a story and it shows up in Google search that same day, you’re fine. When you have a large site, you should be clear about telling Google what to crawl (and not).

Avoid having Google crawl duplicate content (see above), ensure your sitemap is updated, and make your pages efficient to load. Use the robots.txt file to tell Google if there are certain pages you don’t want crawled. More advanced users with sites with more than 1,000 pages can use Google Search Console’s crawl stats report to examine any issues.

7. Monitor the Impact of AI

You don’t need to do anything beyond what I’ve outlined above to have your content appear in various parts of Google’s new AI features — so no new tags or sitemaps. As of June, Google is adding impression and click data from AI Mode into Search Console, though it does not break out those numbers from overall search performance. As a result, you may have started to see impression volumes increase as of this summer. Google says that users who click from AI overviews tend to spend more time than those who come from traditional search.