Online PR: Creating the News not Reporting the News

October 8, 2010
by Alex Whyles

The use of Press Releases has been in the SEO mainstream for awhile now, with most SEO’s viewing the practice as a way of increasing brand awareness and gaining back links. As with most Off Page work, Online PR has its own fine art in order to get results. The ultimate aim for any PR is to get picked up by the mainstream press in order to give it significance; that way your client can go some way in being established as a trusted brand, whilst also gaining some valuable high authority back links.

However, there is more to your Online PR Strategy that should be taken into consideration. In numerous verticals, press releases can provide more real estate for a client because Google is constantly looking for ways in which to make results more relevant.

The example above illustrates how Google News is being added into search results pages. You might be surprised to see how many visits are generated from a well written piece of PR that appears in the search engine results pages (a quick look through your reporting stats will reveal some surprising results for example, if you’re using Google Analytics, look at ‘All Traffic Sources’ within the ‘Traffic Sources’ option).

Half a dozen visits from a targeted audience could result in improving your bottom line at minimal cost and effort, particularly as your Conversion rate could be higher than your websites average.

Creating a Masterpiece
To begin with you should be looking to create a PR that is worthy of attention. The subject matter can range from either a client’s recent success (“We changed this based on customer’s feedback and now our service has improved”), a response to a recent event in the news or ideally getting your client to analyse their own data to spot trends that can be tied into current affairs. It can even be a bit quirky but you should always make that the information your provide re-enforces your claim.
Once the subject matter has been decided the following areas should be paid particular attention to:

PR Title
This needs to be eye catching, punchy and accurately describe the PR subject matter. Ideally you want to be adding in keywords and an associated brand name.

First Paragraph – Who? What? Where? Why? How?
Most people (particularly journalists) don’t have the time to read a lengthy PR so make sure you answer all of these questions in the first paragraph or two. It provides an overview of the piece and will essentially decide whether it will be picked up by journalists/entice people to carry on reading.

Length
This should be no more than 350 words. To paraphrase an old quote – “If you can’t say it in 350 words, don’t say it at all”.

Links
There should be no more than x1 anchor text link per 100 words or a maximum of 3 links per PR. To gain the full value of each link, you should use different anchor text and different landing pages, but ensure that the PR continues to flow and reads well. Do not use links that don’t target your particular client’s website – it’s a PR, not a blog post.

Claiming more real estate – optimised images
A user’s eyes will be drawn to images within the search results pages, therefore the immediate area surrounding your PR is prime ‘real estate’. Images should be optimised using the ALT tag (as well as an appropriately named file) so that it is possible for it to appear next to the PR but also in Google Images.

Distribution
This is quite an important one but it will depend on your budget. After taking the time to carefully create the best PR in the world, you want to make sure it gets as much exposure as possible; not just to be used in the mainstream press but to also create as many back links as possible. There are a number of free PR distribution services (such as Press Box) as well as paid for ones (PR Web). You should consider varying the distribution channels as much as possible.

Creating relevant content for search engines and engaging content for the human eye are (usually) 2 separate skills; your Online PR should ideally do both. You should be looking to create a PR that is a natural fit towards your target keywords and in turn help you to achieve better rankings. However, you also want to get a PR that will be picked up and distributed through out the mainstream press. By running both processes in parallel you should start to see the benefit of raising the profile of your client through Brand (mentions) + keyword (rankings) = Brand Assocation and a happy client.

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