Thinking of using a press release for SEO?
Anyone who has began researching SEO tactics has surely heard about press releases and how they can help improve ranking—but why and how? Press releases undoubtedly help boost a website’s ranking. After all, a well-written press release tells readers about your company, and it will also provide your website with crucial, high-quality backlinks.
One press release can be posted on as many as 600 websites maintained by various media outlets, and every time that press release is posted, the publishing website will link back to your website, and that’s something Google loves to see happening.
Do Press Releases Help SEO?
A successful press release is about more than just presenting your company. It needs to be structured in an intelligent way that is both informative and inviting.
Backlinks are the first half of what makes press releases such a powerful SEO tactic. The other half is content.
Press Release SEO: Backlinks Explained
So, why are backlinks so important, anyway? Backlinks are something search engines love to see. Google’s bots crawl hundreds of thousands of websites each day to index their content and the other sites their content links to. When an article on someone else’s site links to your site, Google sees that as a good sign. It means someone else is talking about you and, more than that, linking back to you.
But, there’s more to it than that.
Google is going to use its smart algorithms and think about what the website that linked to you writes about. There are certain sites you do not want linking to you because they can get you blacklisted. That’s why cheap SEO tactics often make a site’s ranking worst. They use comment spam to give you “backlinks”. Google hates comment spam.
Additionally, if Google figures out that the site that linked to you is no more than a backlink churning website made just for the sake of linking out to people’s websites (because the webmaster is being paid to do so), they aren’t going to like those links either.
So, it’s about more than getting backlinks. It’s about getting high-quality backlinks from relevant sites that are ranked nicely themselves. This is where the press release comes in. A quality press release will be posted on a variety of “authority websites” that Google trusts to produce quality, authentic content. When Google sees your link pop up on one of those sites, you’re golden.
Press Release SEO Content
Now, the second part of the equation is the content of your press release. For the most successful campaign, press release SEO must be spot on.
Because really, SEO is great and all and you want Google to see those quality backlinks, but you also want your readers to learn about your company and to drive traffic to your website.
When Google crawls a website and sees your link, they’ll be happy. But when readers look at your press release and just see a bunch of poorly written content produced only for the sake of linking back to your site, they will not be so happy.
You need quality content that is relevant to your website and nice for readers to look at. It needs to be informative rather than focused on keyword stuffing and link building. If you write a high-quality press release, it will go on a high-quality media outlet which in itself will give a huge boost to your SEO.
- Learn more about How to Write SEO Content here.
Don’t worry about trying to stuff keywords in on top of that, focus on making the content count because readers—potential customers—are what matter most once your content is out there.
Are Press Releases Really that Good for SEO?
It sounds so perfect and simple, right? Write a good press release, get it published, and enjoy a huge SEO boost. But, there is one thing that you should note just for the sake of full disclosure.
At some point in time, for some reason or another, your press release could be removed. There’s no telling why or if this might happen. Among 600 websites, one link removal won’t really matter, but it is something you should be aware of.
You might be wondering, “How would my link be removed?” With third-party websites, the publisher of that website can decide at some point to remove it for whatever reason that will be outside of your control.
Now, what are the repercussions of that?
In truth, you’re highly unlikely to ever even know if it’s been removed unless you are actively watching your backlinks everyday in Google Search Console or in a tool like Ahrefs. If it is removed, it will usually be removed within the first 6 months due to the press cycle.
How can you counter this?
The best way around this is to make sure you are regularly publishing newsworthy press releases. This is one of the reasons we created our Diesel Press Release Service, to make it easy to gain press on-demand, without businesses needing to know the end-to-end PR cycle.
Writing an SEO Press Release
All in all, writing the most effective press release consists of having relevant, quality content so it gets posted to relevant, high-quality sources. There are hundreds of sites out there that are considered “authority sites” because they only post such quality content and they only link to websites that have quality content. Those are the sites you want to see your link on. Not in the form of comment spam, but in the form of a high-quality article that links back to your website.
With a few links like that, you’ll begin seeing your ranking increase day after day because these articles have a cumulative effect. These articles will actually be viewed by real human readers, so even after the initial SEO boost from Google seeing your link and getting happy, readers will also be seeing your article, becoming interested, and clicking through to your website to see what you offer.
Press Releases & SEO Summary
Today press releases are an undervalued SEO strategy. By publishing a release to hundreds of trusted media authorities, marketers and small businesses are able to not only build brand awareness and drive targeted traffic to their websites, but also gain mass SEO benefits.
Of course, SEO is a continual process so press releases should be used regularly to ensure increased website rankings and traffic can be maintained and increase over time.
