Yes, an SEO company can help, but it is worth being clear about what that help looks like. There is no application form or paid placement for Google News, and no setting an agency can flip to put your articles in Top Stories. What an agency can do is make sure your site is technically eligible, set up the tools Google provides, and improve the kind of content and signals that influence whether news articles get surfaced. Below is the practical, hands-on side of that work.
Eligibility and Publisher Center setup
Google News no longer requires publishers to apply. Google automatically discovers and considers web content for news surfaces, and it includes content that meets its quality standards and follows its content and spam policies. An agency’s first job is to confirm your site is actually eligible, since policy violations can keep a site off news surfaces or remove it entirely.
Publisher Center is still worth setting up, and an agency can handle it for you. It does not control whether you appear in Google News. Google now generates publication pages automatically, so Publisher Center is no longer where you style your logo and title for news surfaces. What it still does is register your publication, which unlocks Google News traffic data inside Search Console and Analytics, and it is where you configure Google’s reader revenue and monetization tools if you use them. An agency can set this up so you can measure how much traffic news surfaces actually send you.
News-specific content and technical work
This is where most of the practical help happens. Google News is for actual news, meaning timely reporting on recent events. “How to” articles, tips posts, evergreen guides, and product pages are not treated as news, so an agency can help you separate news content from the rest of your site and structure it so it reads as reporting rather than marketing.
On the technical side, an agency can make sure news articles use clean, descriptive URLs, accurate publish and update timestamps, and proper headings. They can confirm articles are crawlable and indexable, fix slow page speed, and check that structured data such as Article markup is correct. They can also make sure each article has a clear, factual headline that matches the content, since misleading headlines work against you.
Timeliness and E-E-A-T
Two factors carry a lot of weight for news visibility. The first is timeliness. Top Stories is selected algorithmically based on relevance, prominence, and the authority of the publisher, and recency matters. An agency can help you build a publishing workflow that gets accurate articles out quickly while a topic is still current.
The second is experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. An agency can strengthen these signals by adding clear author bylines, building real author bio pages, and making sure you have a thorough About page that explains who runs the publication and writes the content. They can also disclose sponsorships and paid content properly, since hidden sponsored content violates Google’s news policies. These signals build over time as a site publishes original, high-quality reporting, so this is ongoing work rather than a one-time fix.
Who this realistically applies to
Google News optimization only makes sense if you genuinely publish news. A site that runs a newsroom, covers an industry, or reports on local or regional events can benefit from this work. A business whose site is mostly service pages and a marketing blog usually cannot, because that content is not news and will not be treated as such no matter how well it is optimized.
If you are unsure which group you fall into, a good agency will tell you honestly. For many businesses, the better focus is regular Google Search visibility rather than Google News. For publishers who do produce real reporting, an agency can handle eligibility, Publisher Center, technical setup, and content structure, and can keep monitoring performance over time. What no one can do is guarantee placement in Top Stories, because that is decided by Google’s algorithms based on the quality and relevance of each article.