Optimising press releases for SEO – a secret nobody will tell you
| January 9, 2012 | Posted by Lance Concannon under PR, Social Media |
So, you want to “optimise your press releases for SEO” because you heard that was an important thing to do, but do you really understand what you’re trying to achieve? There’s a lot of confusion about the role press releases can play in SEO and how to properly optimise a release for search engines, so in this post I’ll try and clarify some of the most important points.
When people say they want to optimise a press release for SEO, they could be talking about two different things:
- They want to optimise the release itself so that it gets more web traffic
- They want the release to help drive traffic to a product or campaign landing page on their company website
In most cases there’s no good reason to drive web traffic to a press release. Consider the following points:
- The PR team should already have pitched the story and sent the release directly to all relevant media in the first place
- Journalists do not search on Google for relevant press releases to write about, that’s just not how it works
- By the time the release shows in search results, the story will already be old
SEO activity should focus on driving traffic to pages which will lead customers into the sales funnel, but if you’re trying to optimise a press release for the same set of keywords, you’re diluting and confusing that activity. You would be wasting resources by pushing your audience to a piece of online content that has practically zero value for them.
It makes much more sense to use a press release to help drive traffic to a relevant landing page. In order to do this effectively you need to know two things:
- The address of the page which you want to drive traffic to
- The keywords that you want to optimise that page for
The SEO team should be able to give you this information, and it’s important that the landing page and related keywords are both relevant to the content of the press release. Make sure your press release includes a link to the landing page, using the keywords in the text that describes the link (this is what SEO people call ‘anchor text’). For example:
- Text 100 is a global technology PR agency
In this example the anchor text is “technology PR agency” and we’ve linked to a relevant landing page on the company website. This helps the search engines associate those keywords with that web-page. If possible try to include the link in the first couple of paragraphs of the release’s body copy, this is where it will do the most good.
Are you ready for the big secret that nobody else will tell you? You’ve already done everything you need to optimise the release for SEO. Really, it’s that simple.
Remember, we’re not trying to drive traffic to the release itself, we’re simply using the release to improve the SEO of your chosen landing page, so there’s nothing to be gained from trying to over-optimise the rest of the release.
What happens next?
Good: If the release is hosted on the same website as the landing page (perhaps in the company’s online press centre) you get a little SEO value from an internal link (links within the same site).
Better: If the release is syndicated via an online wire service, you get extra SEO value from external links (links from third party sites)
Best: If the story gets picked up by the media and they keep the link you embedded, you get a lot of SEO value by having a keyword rich link to your landing page from an authoritative and highly relevant third party site – this is the holy grail of SEO, and it’s where PR can really contribute a lot of value
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