The SEO consulting market is well supplied with capable professionals. The issue is that most of them have built their expertise on ecommerce, lead generation and corporate sites: verticals where success is measured in conversions, transactional keyword rankings and average position in Search Console.
A publisher that hires them gets technically correct but incomplete advice. It gets someone who knows how to optimise a product page, not a newsroom publishing a hundred articles a day.
Editorial SEO is a discipline of its own. Not because the foundations are different, but because everything that actually matters, the signals that drive traffic, the surfaces where that traffic lives, the speed at which decisions must be made, and the metrics that turn visits into revenue, is specific to this industry.
Why SEO for media is a genuine specialisation
Google Discover: the variable invisible to generalists
For most editorial sites, Google Discover is the leading traffic source. It often surpasses organic search. Yet the logic of Discover has nothing to do with keyword ranking: it responds to user interest signals, perceived content quality, outlet authority, loading speed and image relevance.
A generalist SEO consultant can afford to ignore Discover entirely: on their typical client, the ecommerce site, this surface simply does not exist. A consultant who specialises in publishing knows, by contrast, that a shift in Discover’s algorithms can halve a site’s traffic within forty-eight hours, and knows how to read the signals before the drop happens.
Google News and Top Stories: a separate ecosystem
Inclusion in the Google News section and appearance in the Top Stories carousel are objectives unique to publishing. They require precise technical compliance, a consistent editorial policy, a track record of accuracy and the indexation speed that puts an outlet in the carousel before its competitors.
This is expertise built by working on media organisations over time: it cannot be improvised on a first editorial engagement.
Volume and editorial velocity
An ecommerce site adds a few hundred product pages a year. A daily news outlet adds several thousand pages a week. The scale is incomparable, and with it every problem changes: managing duplicate content, canonicalisation, topic coverage, choosing which subjects to develop based on search volume, and treating indexation speed as a competitive advantage.
Working at editorial velocity means delivering guidance that a newsroom can act on without breaking its publishing rhythm: simple, integrated into the CMS, verifiable in real time.
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 must understand this mechanic. They need to know that an evergreen article with steady traffic has a different value from a breaking-news piece that peaks within twenty-four hours. They need to reason about which traffic segments are monetisable and which are not. In short, they need to connect their recommendations to the revenue line that matters.
AI disintermediation
The issue is new but already urgent. Generative search engines, Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, cite editorial sources in their answers. Each citation is a visibility and potential traffic channel, distinct from the traditional organic click. The criteria AI models use to select sources, however, are not identical to classic ranking signals.
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 matters. The criteria below are designed to help a publisher distinguish between someone who genuinely knows the sector and someone who is applying a generic framework.
Case studies on comparable media organisations. It is not enough for a consultant to have worked on “content sites”: they need to have managed projects on news outlets, digital magazines or aggregators with a volume similar to yours. Ask for concrete metrics: change in Discover traffic, growth in Top Stories appearances, average indexation time.
Operational knowledge of Google’s editorial policies. A specialist knows Google News guidelines, the most common causes of removal from the index and the technical requirements for maintaining inclusion. They do not look these up in the public documentation the day before the call: they have applied them multiple times.
Ability to work with newsrooms. Editorial SEO does not live in a shared document reviewed every three months: it enters the daily production cycle. The consultant needs to be able to collaborate with editors, section heads and technical managers, calibrate recommendations to the newsroom’s speed and produce outputs that can be acted on immediately.
Approach to traffic monetisation. Ask how the consultant thinks about the value of different traffic segments. If they cannot discuss the difference between programmatically monetisable traffic and traffic that serves direct advertiser deals, they have no real experience with a publisher’s metrics.
Position on AI and generative citations. Do not expect a definitive strategy: the landscape is still evolving. But an up-to-date consultant must have a clear framework for monitoring editorial presence in generative search engines and for steering content toward being selected as a source.
Transparency about success metrics. Be wary of anyone who promises percentage growth in organic traffic without context. An honest consultant distinguishes Discover traffic (more volatile) from organic search traffic (more stable), and News traffic (concentrated on breaking stories) from evergreen traffic. They propose project metrics that align with the outlet’s business objectives.
Questions to ask before signing
Before starting a consulting relationship, these questions help determine whether you are talking to the right person.
On Google Discover: “How do you interpret a drop in Discover traffic? What signals do you typically monitor before it happens?”
On Top Stories: “What is your technical approach to improving indexation speed? Have you managed situations where an outlet was removed from Google News?”
On volume: “How do you structure recommendations for a high-frequency newsroom? How do you integrate them into the CMS without slowing production?”
On monetisation: “Have you ever worked with a publisher’s commercial team to align the traffic strategy with revenue objectives? What did you learn from that experience?”
On AI: “How do you monitor an outlet’s presence in generative search engines? Have you ever optimised content specifically to be cited by AI?”
On the project overall: “Describe a case where your work had a measurable impact on a publisher’s revenue, not just traffic.”
The answers to these questions do not require years of experience to evaluate: simply listen for whether the person is describing situations they have lived through or theoretical principles.
Who are the leading SEO consultants for media
The criteria above are not an abstract profile: they describe what a publisher should reasonably expect from whoever manages their SEO.
Sequel has worked exclusively with media companies and publishers for over twenty years. Our analytical tools, benchmarks and working processes are built around the specific dynamics of this sector: Google Discover and Top Stories as primary variables, editorial velocity as an operational constraint, and monetisation as the ultimate measure of results. In every project we manage, improvements in qualified traffic are measured in relation to their impact on revenue metrics, not as a standalone figure.
For a publisher choosing an SEO partner, the right question is not “who is the best”. It is “who knows how to do this”. The answer requires looking at sector-specific experience, concrete case studies and the ability to speak about monetisation as fluently as about crawl budgets.
Frequently asked questions
