Press Release Optimization – Why is it Important?
In the past, Companies would hire a PR firm to create press releases on their behalf, and those releases would be distributed to shareholders, key partners and newsletter subscribers who were interested in keeping up with the company happenings. However, in the age of the search engine, press releases can now serve a dual purpose. Not only can these releases be distributed to the above mentioned key players, they can also be submitted to online news wires such as PRWeb for distribution to the masses. While this strategy is not new to the SEO world by any means, it is something we often see overlooked by many otherwise marketing-savvy companies.
At Apogee, we believe that a well optimized press release can not only provide strong benefits to a company’s organic search rankings, but if optimized properly, it can also inhabit other shelf space within the top results on search terms, effectively knocking your competition lower in the natural rankings. Within Apogee, this is one of many strategies that we encourage all of our clients to take full advantage of.
So, what does it mean to optimize a press release? The key ingredient for optimization is the inclusion of links back to your company website. With online distribution, your reader is already online searching for information, so why not link to your website throughout the release, to help provide more relevant information for the reader? These hyperlinks should utilize anchor text which is a keyword within the page which you are sending the link. This link with anchor text will provide benefit to the site for that search term, and help to improve your rankings within the search engines. Three to four links should be scattered throughout the press release. This will hopefully work out to be one link every paragraph or two. Overuse of links can not only distract a reader, but may come off as spamming and can prevent the release from being picked up by other resources.
Another important factor to keep in mind: Don’t create a press release just for the SEO benefits. If there is no interesting news to justify a release, this can also diminish the chances of this release being picked up for distribution.
As with any SEO strategy, there are some pros and cons to keep in mind. As previously stated, you can benefit your natural search rankings, as well as occupy more shelf space within search results (This is certainly the case when less competitive keywords are in place). A well optimized and relevant press release can be picked up by numerous news wires and distributed across a wide variety of sites, effectively increasing the visibility of your company. While there is no guarantee that the release will see this kind of action, it is worth taking the chance of a single link turning into links from tens or hundreds of different resources.
In regards to the cons, there are a few to keep in mind. First, not all news sites have archived releases, so there is the chance that the release could be in place for a week, and then be replaced with more recent news. However, if the release is archived, you have now gained a valuable link that will be in place and age, increasing the benefits over time. Another drawback to this strategy is that generally, for hyperlinks to your site to be included within the release, there may be some additional costs. Yet, the small fees up front will generally have a strong ROI from the added SEO benefits to your site. If you are already spending money to have them created and distributed, why not put a few extra dollars into the optimization and gain the dual benefits?
So, if you are not utilizing your press releases for optimization, then start. It is an efficient and easy way to gain backlinks to your site and can be valuable to your company on a variety of levels. While the extent of the benefits is difficult to measure, as these are rarely the only strategy involved in a link building landscape, the pros far outweigh the cons.
