Why News Companies Might Struggle With SEO for Your Small Business

At SilverServers, we've been helping small businesses with SEO for years. In that time, we've noticed a pattern: organizations that are great at creating content — like news companies — often assume that makes them great at SEO. Creating unique content is one thing — but ranking with standard pages, like service pages that say the same thing as the next company, is a different challenge. That distinction is important to understand when small business owners receive offers from news outlets for SEO services.

Media outlets — even local ones — are increasingly starting to offer SEO services to small businesses. At a glance, this seems logical. News websites often rank for thousands of keywords, attract large volumes of traffic, and receive backlinks from a wide variety of sources. Their visibility in search results can give the impression that they’ve mastered SEO.

The truth is more nuanced.

News Content vs. Business Content

News organizations excel at producing content that is timely, engaging, and naturally keyword-rich. Their headlines are crafted to draw attention, and their content often earns backlinks simply by covering events or topics that people are already searching for. Their success with search rankings is largely a byproduct of the volume and timeliness of their content. However, that content is often short-lived — most articles lose relevance within days or weeks, and rarely serve a long-term SEO purpose for anyone except historians.

SEO for small businesses, however, is fundamentally different. Business websites typically rely on evergreen content that isn't especially exciting, unique, or newsworthy — service pages, product descriptions, blog posts, and FAQs. These pages don’t go viral. They don’t generally get shared on social media or linked to by other websites just for existing. Yet they are essential for reaching customers and generating leads.

In this context, effective SEO takes more than good writing.

The Real Work of SEO

Ranking a service page about furnace repair in Kelowna or accounting services in Vernon requires deliberate keyword research, proper content structure, technical optimization, internal linking, schema markup, and ongoing monitoring. Once content is published, the work of improving and maintaining its performance continues.

News organizations are masters at creating new content that performs well because of its timing and context. Most of their articles are researched, written, published, and then largely left alone — the typical “set it and forget it” model. They might be revisited for factual updates, but rarely for strategic SEO improvements. In contrast, optimizing existing, static content to rank for specific business-related search terms is a different kind of challenge altogether. It requires an ongoing effort, strategic planning, and specialized knowledge — skills that usually aren’t part of a newsroom’s day-to-day operations.

Experience Matters

At SilverServers, we’ve built our approach around helping long-term content perform better in search. We work with the kinds of pages every business has — pages about the same services, in the same industries, targeting the same audiences — and help them stand out through careful planning, technical improvements, and customized strategies tailored to each client’s goals.

If you’re a small business owner considering SEO services, it’s important to look beyond name recognition. A company’s own visibility in search doesn't necessarily reflect their ability to help others rank — especially when the types of content are so different.

Before signing on with a media company offering SEO, ask whether they have experience making service-based, evergreen content perform — not just news articles. The difference could determine whether your investment brings long-term value or fades quietly into the background, like most news stories eventually do.

See How We Can Help Your Content Rank

For related content, visit the Business Marketing and SEO section of our blog, or check out SEO Tips resources