The SEO consulting market has no shortage of capable professionals. The problem is where that capability was built: almost always on ecommerce and lead generation, where success gets measured in conversions and positions on transactional keywords.
A publisher that hires them gets analysis that is technically correct, but built for a different trade. They know how to optimise a product page. A newsroom putting out a hundred articles a day is something they have never seen from the inside.
Editorial SEO is a discipline of its own, and we say that after twenty years spent inside newsrooms. The technical foundations stay the same. What changes is everything that actually decides the outcome: the signals that move traffic, the surfaces where that traffic lives, the speed at which decisions get made, the way visits turn into revenue.
Why SEO for media is a genuine specialisation
Google Discover: the variable invisible to generalists
For most publishers, Google Discover is the number one traffic source. It often outpaces organic search. Yet its logic has almost nothing to do with keyword ranking: it responds to user interest signals, how the platform reads an outlet’s reputation over time, image quality, and load times. The January and February 2026 updates pushed Discover even further toward behaving like a social feed, a shift we track every day through our own Discover observatory.
A generalist consultant can afford to ignore all this, because on their usual client that surface does not even exist. Someone who works with publishers knows that a shift in the algorithm can halve a site’s traffic within forty-eight hours. We have seen it happen, and the outlets that had the tools to catch it early limited the damage.
Google News and Top Stories: a separate ecosystem
Getting into Google News and showing up in the Top Stories carousel are goals that exist only in this business. They call for precise technical compliance, a consistent editorial line, and the indexation speed that puts a story in the carousel ahead of competitors. During the 2026 World Cup we tracked Top Stories with a radar we built specifically for it, and the race is won or lost in minutes. Whoever arrives late just watches everyone else.
This kind of competence gets built on real media, over time. Improvising it on a first editorial engagement does not work, and it usually shows immediately.
Volume and editorial velocity
An ecommerce site adds a few hundred product pages a year. A daily news outlet publishes several thousand pages a week. At that scale, the problems change in kind: canonicalisation becomes a daily job, duplicates generate themselves, topic coverage gets chosen by search volume, and indexation speed shifts from a technical detail to a competitive advantage.
Working at editorial speed means giving guidance the team can apply without stopping production. If a recommendation needs a meeting to be understood, it is already dead.
Monetisation as a project constraint
For an ecommerce business, SEO is an acquisition channel: it drives traffic that converts into sales. For a publisher, traffic is part of the product itself: it generates impressions, powers programmatic campaigns and shapes direct deals with advertisers.
Anyone doing SEO for media needs to understand this mechanic: know that an evergreen piece earning steadily has a different value from a breaking-news story that spikes and burns out in twenty-four hours, and understand which traffic segments actually monetise. Recommendations have to reach all the way to the P&L line. The ones that stop short of it are just advice, and advice does not pay a newsroom’s bills.
AI disintermediation
Then there is the more recent game. Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity cite editorial sources in their answers, and each citation is a visibility channel that the traditional organic click never registers. The criteria a model uses to choose its sources only partly overlap with classic ranking signals, and we study them every day by querying the leading assistants through our own AI-visibility observatory.
An up-to-date consultant knows how to optimise content so that it is selected and cited, not merely indexed. They understand the difference between a page that climbs the SERPs and a source that a model considers authoritative enough to quote in a response. For publishers, who produce the kind of content AI models cite most often, this competence is already a core part of any serious SEO engagement.
What to measure when evaluating an editorial SEO partner
This is the section that really matters, and it is the one we suggest reading twice.
The first thing to ask for is case studies on comparable media outlets. Having worked on generic “content sites” says very little. You need projects on newspapers, digital magazines or verticals with volumes similar to yours, backed by real numbers: change in Discover traffic, growth in Top Stories appearances, average indexation times.
Then there is operational knowledge of Google’s policies: the Google News guidelines, the most common causes of removal from the index, the requirements for staying in it. Someone who has applied these repeatedly talks about them differently from someone who read the public documentation the day before the call.
The ability to work inside a newsroom counts too. Editorial SEO enters the daily production cycle, alongside section editors and whoever manages the CMS. A consultant who delivers a shared document every three months is not really doing this job.
On traffic, ask how they think about the value of different segments. Anyone who cannot tell apart traffic that monetises through programmatic from traffic that serves direct deals has never really looked at a publisher’s P&L up close.
On AI, nobody has a definitive strategy today, and anyone who promises one is selling you something else. A serious framework for monitoring citations in generative search engines does exist, though, and you should insist on it.
Last, transparency about metrics. Be wary of anyone who promises percentage growth with no context. Discover traffic is volatile, organic traffic is more stable, News traffic concentrates on breaking stories. An honest consultant keeps them separate and proposes goals consistent with the outlet’s business.
Questions to ask before signing
Before starting a consulting relationship, these questions tell you quickly whether you are talking to the right person.
- “How do you read a drop in Discover traffic, and what signals do you watch before it happens?”
- “What is your approach to improving indexation speed? Have you ever managed an outlet that got excluded from Google News?”
- “How do you structure recommendations for a newsroom publishing at a high rate, without slowing it down?”
- “Have you ever worked with a publisher’s commercial team to align traffic and revenue goals?”
- “How do you monitor an outlet’s presence in generative search engines? Have you already optimised content to be cited by AI?”
- “Tell us about a case where your work moved a publisher’s revenue, not just its traffic.”
You do not need years of experience to judge the answers. Just listen for whether the person is describing situations they have actually lived through, or reciting theoretical principles.
Who are the leading SEO consultants for publisher sites
The criteria above describe what a publisher should demand from whoever gets their hands on their SEO.
Sequel has worked exclusively with media companies and publishers for over twenty years. Our tools, benchmarks and processes are built around this sector’s specific dynamics: Discover and Top Stories as primary variables, editorial speed as an operational constraint, and monetisation as the final measure. In every project we run, qualified traffic gets measured together with its impact on revenue, because a number in isolation tells a publisher nothing.
For anyone choosing a partner, the question “who is the best” leads you astray, and our observatory on the best SEO consultant SERP shows it with data. The useful one is “who has already done this work on a site like mine, and can prove it.” The fastest way to find out is still to talk about monetisation, which in our experience is the exact point where generalists stop answering.
Frequently asked questions
