How to Optimize Your Press Release for SEO
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the practice of improving your website’s visibility on search engines. SEO improves your visibility when people search for queriers related to your business.
In fact, according to Backlinko, the first result on Google gets 31.7% of clicks. While only 0.78% of people click on results from the second page.
These numbers demonstrate the significance of using effective SEO strategies in a company’s marketing plan.
In this day and age, brands must get creative in how they appeal to search engines and boost their rankings. Companies need multiple marketing channels to stand out online and rank high in search results.
One particular marketing channel that can help fuel organizations SEO efforts is press releases.
Press release distribution can help brands improve SEO. In this blog post, we share tips on creating high-quality, SEO-focused campaigns.
How does SEO Work?
Search engines use “spiders” or robots that crawl the internet. These spiders collect information about the contents of a website’s pages including:
- Backlinks
- Internal links
- Page speed
- Title tags
Search engines like Google use these factors and more to determine if your content’s a good fit for a user’s query.
4 Must Haves When Writing an SEO-Focused Press Release
The potential of creating high-quality backlinks is one of the many benefits of including consistent press release distribution into your overall marketing and communication strategy.
But, to get to this point, you need to deploy SEO strategies to help you make the most of your campaigns.
Consider these four tips when writing your next campaign.
Newsworthiness
A press release aims to attract attention from a company’s target audience, particularly the media, to gain media coverage.
The foundational piece of a successful press release campaign lies in the actual topic of the content. The relevancy and newsworthiness of the content you create and distribute can make or break its performance.
Learn How to Develop Newsworthy Angles with our Smart Start guide. In this guide, you’ll learn how to improve the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Focus on Language
Never sacrifice the quality of your content for SEO. While keywords are essential, you want to write content that feels natural to the reader. When people spend more time on your content and interact with it more, search engines view your work as valuable. This, in turn, improves your SEO performance.
When writing press releases, it’s important to balance addressing your audience’s needs and preferences with using relevant SEO keywords.
Avoid the temptation of keywords stuffing as it negatively impacts the effectiveness and readability of your campaign.
Strategic Hyperlinks
Your press releases should include at least three to five hyperlinks. Here’s an example:
- One hyperlink in the introduction (typically you’d hyperlink your brand’s name)
- One to two in the text of the press release
- One in the boilerplate
The hyperlinks you use should drive traffic to relevant pages on your website that align with the topic of your press release.
When possible, make sure the anchor text (the clickable text of the link) is the target keyword of your campaign.
Maximize Multimedia
Include a high-quality image in every press release you distribute. Including an image can improve visibility when sharing press releases across social platforms. When you include an image in your press release, include your SEO keyword for that campaign in the ALT text of the image. The ALT text of your images is a contributing factor of SEO ranking.
As SEO changes, PR professionals should remember these tips when writing and distributing press releases to the public.
If you’re ready to improve your SEO with our press release optimization services, we’re ready to help. Explore our distribution channels to find the right one for your news.
