SEO Guidance: Headlines and Body Text

Solid SEO choices keep you competitive. 

SEO In Headlines

Effective news SEO (search engine optimization) boils down to a single mission — use keywords. Other important facets include speed, authority, story and headline structure and hyperlinks — but success begins with keywords. In new markets, SEO will be your primary audience driver. In established markets, SEO will introduce you to people who have yet to adopt Patch as their primary local news source. We write almost 1,000 headlines every day. In some ways, they are more important than the stories themselves because a good headline means more people will read our stories, and a bad headline, or one that misses the mark, means crickets. 

A digital headline does a lot of heavy lifting. An excellent headline must:

• accurately inform and tell a story in 70 characters or less

• entice readers and make them feel they need to know more

• compel readers to open their email and click

• create the urge to share an article on social media

• rank high in Google search engine results.

Which articles are most deserving of an SEO-focused headline?

Breaking news of all types, weather (storms, blizzards, tornadoes, hurricanes), power outages, shootings and lockdowns. But every story will benefit from the proper use of keywords in the headlines and subheadlines.

Timing: On breaking news, getting to the web first is of utmost importance.

Write a single, lengthy sentence and publish your report as quickly as possible.

Send a breaking news alert, then open your story and begin to build incrementally build your report. Your lede, text and photo cutlines should be ripe with keywords. Think of the terms you would use to search for the story you're writing, use those at the front of your headline.

Use Incognito Browser Mode

Use the search bar to check keywords likely to come up on search. You must use incognito mode because your regular browser "remembers" what you're doing and customizes the search terms to your preferences.

Is it crucial to have a place name in the headline?

Our town names are built into the URLs of every article: https://patch.com/illinois/chicago/see-you-later-alligator-humboldt-park-gator-caught

The URLs are crawled by Google. That means town names aren't absolutely crucial, but they may help if contextually they are included in the headline. For example, "Chicago Cop Fired" is a better headline term for search than "Cop Fired."  

People's names and event names are strong search terms. Place names — the name of a mall, a school (Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, for example), a store or a park — are crucial. 

Why is the headline field limited to 70 characters?

After 70 characters, Google will chop off the end of the headline on search engine results pages (SERPs). If our headlines are cut off, they will rank lower on the results page and get fewer clicks. If we have a lot of headlines rank low on results pages, our site ranking for search will be diminished. Over time, that will hurt our overall presence on Google. Every SEO analysis confirms this, as does Google itself. 

Any advice for how to structure a headline? What to include or omit?

First and foremost, put the most important, eye-catching, relevant terms at the front of the headline. For example:

"California Wildfire Burns 1,000 Acres" is better than "Firefighters Respond To 1,000-Acre California Wildfire"

Use as little punctuation as possible. Periods, commas, semicolons, exclamation points etc., can disrupt Google's attempt to crawl your headline. And use your subheadline to pack in more keywords. These are crawled before your lede.

Avoid extraneous language. Use only essential words. Make a statement. Words like a, an, the, and etc. are ignored by the crawl and waste valuable characters in a search-driven headline.

Answer who, what, where, when, why, how questions when possible for local pieces (and "near me" helps, as well).

The fact some tweet or video has "gone viral" isn't news. Focus on what actually happened for keywords. Saying a video has gone viral wastes valuable characters in your headline.

Do not lead your daily newsletter with the same headline already sent as a news alert. Open rates for newsletters that make this mistake are demonstrably lower.

What about abbreviations for state names?

Google recognizes that NJ and New Jersey are the same place. One isn't favored over the other.

On a breaking news story, how often should we update the headlines?

If a strong search term is dominating results and delivering strong traffic to your article, you want those SEO keywords to anchor your headline. At the same time, you want to update the latest info in the headline as often as possible as the event is unfolding. Don't wait longer than 10 minutes to do so. These updates send a very strong signal to Google that your article is refreshing frequently and carries the most recent information.  

Other General Interest Headline Tips

Headlines built for email are somewhat different than headlines built for SEO. Email headlines must begin with a strong hook. 75 to 90 percent of our readers view our stories on mobile devices. That means their screens are smaller and typically they only see the first 3-4 words of your newsletter or news alert subject line headline.

SEO In Hyperlinks and Cutlines

When you link to other coverage or authoritative websites in your copy, your anchor text is "keyword juice." 

Cutlines: Try to include keywords in your cutlines. All photos (including stock) benefit from cutlines and can help boost SEO. Any image that is included inline within an article should always include a cutline with descriptive text of what that image is. 

Linking to past Patch coverage of a topic or issue increases Google's awareness of your local authority.

SEO In Body Copy 

There are elements inside a story that enhance the article in Google's eyes, and elements that diminish the article or stop the Google search crawl. Unique, original content is critical.

Quotes: Original quotes from people and original reporting are favored in Google's algorithms.

Embeds: Try to avoid using embeds when possible. Any external interactive resource (X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, etc.) is by definition a very slow, heavy part of the page. This practice is highly prejudicial toward attracting SEO traffic to these articles, so please only use them where they are critical to the narrative of the piece you are writing.

More SEO Info

• Key search words often change over time, usually serving to narrow searches. So, the strongest search terms may be “Huge Bridge Collapse” and change, once details become clear, to “I-85 Collapse.”

• Roundup articles like Patch PMs NEED text included in them for Google to find them. Adding a solid block of search-friendly text at the beginning of the article helps a lot.

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