Winning “Top Stories”: An Article & Blog Schema Strategy
Client: A B2B SaaS company in the “HR tech” space with an active, high-volume blog.
Challenges We Faced
The client’s blog was publishing 3x new articles per week but was failing to get them indexed quickly or ranked in “Top Stories”:
No “Top Stories” Rankings
Competitors were appearing in the “Top Stories” news carousel for timely topics, but our client was not.
No Article & Blog Schema
A Full Schema Markup Audit found they were only using the default, basic schema from their SEO plugin.
Slow Indexing
It took Google 3-4 days to index their new, time-sensitive articles.
Poor Rich Results
Their blog posts looked “plain” in the SERPs.
Missing Internal Links
New articles weren’t linked from existing posts, reducing authority and slowing indexing for time-sensitive content.
Get Your Blog in “Top Stories”
“Is your blog content getting ignored? Our Article & Blog Schema implementation service will help you get indexed faster and win ‘Top Stories’ placements.”
Our Approach – How We Solved These Challenges
Comprehensive Schema Audit
We audited their blog post template and identified all the missing schema properties (like author, datePublished, dateModified).
Article & Blog Schema
This was the key. Our schema markup implementation company wrote custom Article (and NewsArticle for PR) schema in JSON-LD Implementation.
We included author (linking to their bio page) and publisher (linking to their main brand) to build E-A-T.
On-Page Schema Optimization
We dynamically pulled the “date modified” and “date published” into the schema to show Google their content was fresh.
Validation & Testing
We used the Google Rich Results Test to ensure all new articles were eligible for the “Article” rich snippet.
Results
| Metric | Before | After | Growth |
|---|---|---|---|
| “Top Stories” Carousel Appearances | 0 | 12 (in 2 mos) | +1,200% |
| Avg. Time to Index New Article | 3-4 days | 4-6 hours | 90% faster |
| Organic Traffic (to new articles in first 7 days) | ~50/article | ~500/article | +900% |
Free Blog Schema Audit
“Not sure if your blog schema is correct? Request a Free Schema Audit and let our schema markup implementation company find your errors!”
Advice for Marketers & Brand Owners
- Article & Blog Schema is critical for publishers. It’s the key to getting into the “Top Stories” box and getting indexed faster.
- You must include author and publisher properties in your article schema to build E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust).
- Use dateModified to show Google when you’ve updated a post, which signals freshness and relevance.
- Use NewsArticleschema (a more specific type of Article) for your press releases.
Extra Factors That Made It Work
- The Article schema was the key to unlocking “Top Stories” placements.
- Building author schema that linked to their author bio pages was a huge E-A-T win.
- The client was already publishing timely, newsworthy content; our structured data implementation just made it visible.
