Press releases were originally designed as a communication tool between company PR staff or public relations firms and the media. But now that online news sites such as Yahoo News and Google News contain such an abundance of press release content and RSS makes it easy to syndicate news, press releases can be effectively used as a direct to consumer communication tool.
Many online business tactics come and go, but one channel of promotion that has steadily evolved is the practice of optimizing press releases for search engines. While it’s true that the future of the traditional press release has been up for debate over the past few years, wire services and the web sites they syndicate content to continue to produce results for the clients of savvy public relations professionals and online marketers.
Using progressive wire services like Free-Press-Release.com Business Wire, PR Newswire and Market Wire simplifies the process of getting news content into these popular news search engines. Yahoo News is still more popular that MSNBC, AOL News or CNN. Being able to rank well on the most popular online news web site as well as Google News simply by optimizing and distributing a press release offers attractive benefits at a nominal cost.
In the course of prepping for an upcoming public relations workshop where I’m speaking on a panel about press release optimization, I thought I’d do a review of the top wire services. Part of that presentation also includes press release optimization tips from industry friends that work at the newswires, where thousands of press releases are distributed daily.
Realizing the opportunity news search offers, many company marketers continue to flounder at making sure their press releases receive maximum exposure. To that end, here are 10 tips for maximizing the visibility of press release content:
1. Start with something worth announcing. Boring news gets little results no matter how well it’s optimized. It’s important to focus on a specific topic. Too much information and focusing on too many keywords will dilute the message for both news search engines and readers.
2. Think upward and to the left. Optimize a press release using web page optimization principles and keep in mind that important keywords need to be near the top of the document with the most important keyword phrases first.
3. Distribute the release via a wire service like Free-Press-Release.com. If you distribute the same release through more than one wire service on the same day, it is very likely that the news search engines will filter out the duplicates. If your story has more than one angle, take advantage of that and mix it up.
4. Give the reader a reason to click through. A direct to consumer release needs to offer more than an announcement of news. It needs to provide the reader with an action opportunity. Examples include: white paper downloads, free trials, special offers, podcasts, webinars, reports, email newsletters and consultations.
5. Create a landing page to convert referred press release visitors to prospects. You use landing pages with your PPC campaigns, don’t you? Then why not use them with your press release? Embed links in your release to relevant resources as welll as a strong call to action. Along with giving the reader a reason to click through, the destination of that link should be designed to bring the visitor further along the sales cycle for whatever the desired outcome is.
6. Assemble a list of media contacts for the release and email them the release along with a concise, summary. Offer an exclusive if you can and suggesting story ideas that clearly indicate you’re familiar with the writer’s work can do wonders.
7. Make it relevant and make it easy for journalists and bloggers to write about your news. Research bloggers that write about the topic and pre-write a summary of the release for them. In many cases, bloggers will simply copy/paste all or part of your summary and add their own commentary.
8. Post the release to the company blog enabled media room. Ideally, the company site contains a blog that can archive press releases chronologically and by category, offers a search function, lists previous media exposure, contains links to media-centric photos, audio and video as well as an RSS feed to make it easy for interested parties, including journalists, to subscribe to company news.
9. Write a blog post version of the news and submit to relevant social media sites. This does not work for all types of content and you need to be sure what you’re writing resonates with the culture of the social media networks that you want to promote to. Do not submit press releases directly to Digg, Netscape, Reddit, Stumble Upon, etc.
10. Use social bookmark sites as a clipping service. Bookmark pickups of the release using social bookmark services such as del.icio.us, Furl.net or blogmarks.net. Such services can be linked to from the online media room and many become crawlable links for search engines.
As with any marketing effort, after the content is distributed, it’s important to track effectiveness. Tactics for tracking press release results include:
* Embed tracking codes in the links from the release to the landing page.
* Monitor the web analytics of the site the press release links to for referral traffic sources.
* Setup Google alerts to monitor when the release gets picked up.
* Monitor blog search engines like google blog search and technorati for pickups.
* Monitor standard search engines for pickups and links.
* Track conversions from press release landing pages.
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