SEO Case Study: How CNN Dominates Searches For The 2024 Election

CNN dominates searches for the ’24 Election, one of the most competitive spaces in SEO right now. Here’s a breakdown of how they do it:

In the middle of an election cycle, publishers are all pushing extremely aggressive strategies in order to maximize their visibility in search engines for queries around the election. This includes searches that are skyrocketing in demand such as “trump”, “harris”, “election 2024” and more.

Here’s a complete breakdown of their strategies for how they do it:

1. Publish New URLs Every Day

CNN knows that they won’t be appear in Google’s Top Stories without publishing a completely new URL. Google really only shows pages that have been posted in the last 24 hours, so CNN needs to publish new URLs every day in order to maintain consistent visibility.

Just as an example, here you can see pages that they’ve published from the past three days:

1. https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/trump-harris-election-10-15-24/index.html
2. https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/trump-harris-election-10-14-24/index.html
3. https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/trump-harris-election-10-13-24/index.html

2. Include Dates In URLs

In order to send even more freshness signals, CNN includes today’s date directly in the URL for all of their pages. This includes adding the month, day and year (10-15-24) in every new page they publish.

3. Utilize LiveBlogPosting schema

When you look at Top Stories, you might notice the red “Live” badge next to the given article:

This is actually result of using a special type of schema called LiveBlogPosting. LiveBlogPosting tells search engines that you’re going to make updates to the content throughout the day.

There’s a lot that goes into this but I’ve actually written a full guide on how to implement LiveBlogPosting schema. Using this schema type is basically mandatory to appear in Top Stories for highly competitive keywords.

4. Regular Content Updates

Throughout the day, CNN regularly makes updates to the content of their page. In fact, they’re probably making 40-50 updates to their hub pieces every single day.

This allows they’re LiveBlogPosting schema to show search engines that they’re making updates in real time.

5. Regular Freshness Updates

Each time they update the content, they’re also refreshing the timestamp. So they’re likely also pushing at least 40-50 timestamp refreshes a day to showcase that they’re content is up to date.

Also each update in their article also has a timestamp associated with it.

6. High-Quality Relevant Image:

This sounds basic but the Top Stories algorithm may be really dependent on either images or CTR for success. As a result, a requirement for doing well is having a high quality image that represents the overall topic. CNN always uses a crystal clear image, generally a headshot of one of the candidates.

7. Links From Home Page

In order to ensure that the page is crawled and indexed immediately, they always incorporate a link from the home page. On the home page, they have a list of trending topics with links to their stories (Election 2024, Walgreens Closures etc).

This ensures that they’re most powerful page is always linking to the key content.

Even if you’re not a publisher, there’s some really great takeaways for how CNN approaches SEO for these exceptionally competitive queries.

About Chris Long

Chris Long is the VP of Marketing at Go Fish Digital. With 10+ years of SEO experience, Chris works unique problems and advanced search situations to help clients improve organic traffic through a deep understanding of Google's algorithm and web technology. Chris has advised on the search strategies for clients such as GEICO, Adobe & The New York Times. He is a contributor for Moz, Search Engine Land, and Search Engine Journal. He is also a speaker at industry conferences such as MozCon, SMX East, BrightonSEO and more.