How Does Press Release Help Improve Your Google Ranking?

The success of the mission in sending out the press release was signified by the number of magazines and newspapers that published the release, and the quality and size of readership of those publications.

This is still true, to a certain regard. However, the purpose of the press release distribution has now evolved to such an extent that it could reasonably be argued its primary function, or functions, has or have now changed. Now, the release submission aims to spread far and wide, like wildfire, and catch media either across the country, across the market, across the region, or even across the internet (depending on geotargeting, market localization, etc.). This is because when the press release is published verbatim or “uneditorialised”, it will contain precious links and backlinks to your company’s assets and platforms; this essentially connects buyers or consumers to your valuable owned content and information, as well as enabling them to enter your sales funnel, such as in the case where your business has its own integrated e-store.

So, we can say that the main purpose of sending out a press release distribution – a key fundamental service provided by Gemini PR – nowadays is to boost your online visibility and enhance your organic reach and inbound visitation.

The intrinsic business value of the press release has actually now increased, even though paradoxically it is rare now that the PR agency will supply printed press clippings; everything is online, and therefore permanent. This means it will deliver value forever, and to everyone online, potentially. Previously, if your release made it to print in a glossy magazine, it would be seen by anyone who picked up that magazine in the hotel lobby, dental studio, waiting room or hair salon, and probably for a period of four months. But you would not know the number of people who had seen your piece – you may have noticed an increase in sales at your boutique, for example, but you wouldn’t necessarily know if that was a result of your article being published.

Now, with a digital release distribution, it’s easy to see this data from your owned site analytics. Perhaps more importantly though, the digital release distribution is literally bringing people to your website and e-store, with the latter being a direct driver of revenue for your business.

Also, there is an element of Quality Lead Capture that the ‘release send’ is also driving. You can be as targeted with your messaging as is appropriate to your target audience; and so you are connecting directly to your decision-making buyers who will purchase directly from you as a result of having seen your release on-line (hopefully also far and wide), thereby achieving high quality lead capture and repeated new lead generation (leadgen).

You may be very familiar with the importance of creating SEO Structured Content on your own website. After all, it’s how you rank on Google and Yahoo, and it’s how you get eyeballs on your product ranges. It’s also worth noting that you should follow a somewhat similar thesis when composing your press release for dissemination; don’t worry, Gemini PR will do this for you for free as part of the release package – unless you prefer to do it yourself or already have the content ready to go.

It’s actually easier to optimise a press release for SEO than it is for your main corporate site. That’s because the keywords will cycle repeatedly and your key points for inclusion will be spotlighted as a simple consequence of the grammar, structure, patina, syntax, flow, storytelling waterfall and general formatting of the release. It works a certain way, which is why the industry standard PR news release document looks the way it does.

With your own site, you will need to pay careful attention to the structure and set up your page tree and H1/H2 headers, etc., in such a way as that it achieves SEO capture.

The release is much less of a hassle in this regard, because it is rich with all of the “essential aminos” that need to be in there to tell your story anyway; that means that the press release is optimised to hell as a natural consequence of it being a press release, i.e.- a highly-focused delivery mechanism for your key messages and brand awareness/product push, with all of the things you need to say, and none of the stuff you don’t.

A few things to bear in mind …

1. Online competition analysis – It is typical (some would argue mega essential) that when optimising your main website you carefully consider what your competition is doing in terms of their keyword targeting, and how successful they are in capturing search on terms you wish to target. The press release however is much more focused on what you’re doing and what you’re all about. It can be helpful to do your keyword research before composing the release, but truthfully it is not essential; this is because the content is being vetted by recipient media organisations for “publishability” and relevance to their readership, not by the search engine. It’s less of a worry here, but there are touchpoints you may be able to target with a bit of simple Googling research.

2. Targeted Keywords and longtail keywords – Longtail keywords are where you take your target keyword which is wide open and highly competitive (like searching on Google for “sneakers” – you’re never going to rank with a new search). So, we would expand that to be more descriptive, like “Sneakers store import American in Bangkok”, which would much more easily carve out a niche for ourselves that we could feasibly rank for. These will be formed within your press release by accident as you are writing your story, but it’s worth thinking if you can find ways to force their inclusion. Some of the benefits are:

• Long tail keywords correspond to user intentions
• Compared to non-longtail keywords, long tail keywords are more descriptive and more helpfully focused
• Longtail keywords are more prevalent than head keywords
• The conversion rates for long-tail keywords are greater
• Build trust and authority for your website with long tail keywords
• More visitors than the estimated search volume will visit your website

3. Targeted Keywords and longtail keywords – The use of H1 and H2 headers for your website’s SEO development is REALLY important for ranking and inbound capture. The use of subheadings in press release composition is more controversial, in the sense that some releases are very short, and so look weird if they are unnecessarily split in two by a segment header for the second half. Also, your release may be broken up with the inclusion of large, good quality product photos (always a good idea), so adding subheadings can make the flow of the release awkward. However, in a long-form text-only corporate style release, it’s easy to add them and obviously therefore a good idea for SEO purposes.

SEO in the earlier days of the development of the search engine was all about repetition of key terms ad nauseum (“keyword stuffing”). Now, the AI of the search engines is so smart that it understands how to effectively parse findings while downregulating (or even penalising) sites that go too far with their cyclical repetition (see this page as an example; we’ve only done this to the title once).

Quality writing along with expression of relevant key terms that deliver your content mission are paramount, and you can also consider …

1. Brand storytelling – the ability of the piece to effectively create an origin orientation for the reader, and bring them along with you on the journey as you describe how you got here, what you’re all about, and why your product or service is valuable to the potential customer

2. Informational content – The press release is King here, as this is its main purpose, and

3. Images and meta data – Meta tagging is generally not relevant to the release itself, simply as they are sent to media in PDF format and not as “publishable direct text” to be lifted. Images are crazy-important though, as having hi-res hero photos will bring a huge boost to the number of media organisations willing to publish your story.

It should be said for reasons of transparency that if a PR agency sends out a release for you and it is published on 35 news and lifestyle sites, you will probably achieve around 3-4 backlinks. This is because releases are editorialised to fit the publishing guidelines of the magazine in-house. The chance of achieving backlinks increases massively in cases where the placement is paid in some way, or where the media organisation knows and likes the brand and the relationship is ongoing.

1. Publish in authoritative websites (DA checker) – It’s easy to quickly check the DA of a media site, and Gemini PR offers a super-helpful data curation where this work is already done for you. View the media dataset, including reach and domain authority cut-through, with the Best-PR-Agency Media List.

2. Backlinks on related keywords – the holy grail of targeted inbound referrals, although difficult to achieve through the standard release blast. Please speak to your dedicated PR consultant to discuss options, as this usually requires either a paid (or at least minimally-paid) release placement to achieve successfully.

3. Do-follow and no-follow – Outbound connections usually come in two flavours. Those are a follow-up connection (or “follow”) and an Unfollow link. A “Dofollow” or “Follow” link instructs search engines that it is OK to follow the link to its destination, crawl the data site, and classify the information it discovers since it is pertinent to the content on the source page/post. In essence, it is comparable to endorsing or recommending the information on the destination website.

As a result, Google transfers part of the PageRank (a ranking criteria for SEO) from the source website to the destination domain. The “no follow” link tells search engines to ignore the destination link. Because Nofollow links do not pass PageRank they likely don’t impact search engine rankings. Therefore, any outbound links in your release should be Follow links – however, it’s worth remembering that many of the recipient media organisations getting your release will remove them anyway in line with their own internal editorial submission guidelines. They are likely to be published on blogs and specialist sites and so are worth including.