A good press release writer can tell you how it used to be: that press releases were ways of announcing company or organizational news and once that was accomplished, their usefulness was done.
With more and more companies having a web presence though, press releases are becoming a new content marketing tool, especially following the Google algorithm update. Here’s how to produce excellent press releases and use them in a fashion that helps improve a website’s ranking in the search engines.
What to write releases for
Even if you have a small company that doesn’t do a whole lot that you may consider to be newsworthy, there are still a number of things you can put press releases out for. Have you developed a new product, service or offering? What about that Chamber of Commerce or other local award? Are you displaying at a regional expo? What about the partnership you’ve formed with another local business, school or government organization?
What about clients that have had great success with your services or products? Write a case study, post it on your website and ask the client if they would do the same. Once you have everything set up, put out a press release about the case study, which will bring you even more publicity and backlinks, which we’ll discuss in a moment.
Marketing and keywords
Press releases help put your company’s announcements into the light of day, but what else can you do with it? A good press release writer will incorporate subtle marketing messages and keywords into your press releases to help make your press releases show up in searches and will provide more traffic back to your website.
Backlinks
Part of the reason you want to put press releases out as often as possible is to build the number of backlinks you have, or links that are on other sites that point back to your website. These links show up during searches to determine your website’s ranking. Your page ranking is based on many different criteria, but there are two we’re going to focus on for press releases on this article:
- The text around the link will be used to determine the relevance of the page that the link is found on to rank how relevant they are to each other.
- The page ranking of the website the press release is posted on will affect how high your press release or website shows up in search results.
Once you’ve gotten the hang of how to use press releases to increase your visibility on the internet, you’ll be able to spot other ways you can build your ranking through guest posts on other blogs, by writing your own blog that is not hosted by your domain, using multimedia to convey your message and using social media marketing effectively. So what’s stopping you? Have a press release writer put together a few releases for you and see the difference it makes.
Cathleen V is a multi-talented writer with experience in many different fields. She focuses on tutorial, content, blog and article writing for small and medium business management and development, content optimization and marketing, arts businesses, crafts, agriculture, science, construction and home improvement, homesteading arts, food, nutrition and natural health. She is a top 1% content writer out of over 22,000.
