How Press Releases Can Improve Your SEO Efforts

Press releases are great ways to communicate various events about your company.  These events can include participation with industry trade shows, new product announcements, strategic partnerships, and personnel changes.  Press releases have an added benefit that not every company knows how to use.  The added benefit of press releases is that they can greatly improve your search engine optimization (SEO) rankings.

SEO is highly valuable for online businesses because the higher your ranking with search engines, the more likely your business will be chosen by your target audience when they execute a search for your products.  To boost your SEO rankings, you should take full advantage of every marketing tool available.  This should include optimizing press releases for SEO.

The following are some distinct benefits of leveraging your press releases for SEO:

• Adding Google indexed pages: Every press release that is posted on your website has the potential to generate a new Google indexed page.  An indexed page will help to generate more traffic and reference links to your site.
• Creative content presentation: Whether you call them press releases or news releases, these documents can be used as clever ways to present content without relying on your typical approach.  By adding variety, you can keep your website visitors engaged.  The longer they remain on your website, the more likely they are to buy your products or services.
• Control your own online reputation: You can utilize press releases as part of your online reputation management (ORM) strategy.  Creating positive buzz about your company will help your online reputation and assist in making your web site an authoritative source for information about your products and services.
• Simple execution: Compared to other types of content, press releases are relatively easy to create and publish.  You can generate a press release about a variety of topics in short order.  Try to come up with around one or two press releases a week.  Carefully monitor the results and increase or decrease the number of releases depending on the SEO statistics that are reported.

Use the following steps to generate effective and professional press releases:

• Define: Every press release should have a clearly defined goal.  The intent of the news release could be part of a marketing campaign, with links to additional materials on your web site, or the press release could be to address a specific problem that your product or services could solve.
• Outline: Carefully incorporate the appropriate SEO keywords and phrases into the release, leveraging as many long tail phrases as possible.  For example, a news release about holiday cupcakes could have the keywords “holiday” and “cupcake,” but you should also consider “special event cupcake” or “Christmas party dessert cupcake” depending on the SEO analysis recommendations.
• Focus: Keep focused on your goal and topic for the press release.  Do not stray to other announcements.  Make each release distinct and specific.
• Call to action: If a reader wishes to follow up, make sure there is an easy way to click on a link or send an email to get more information.

As part of your overall business and marketing strategy, make sure you incorporate press releases that are SEO ready to get the most benefit for your company.