SEO Press Release: The Full Guide, Best Practices & Examples
In the ever-changing digital landscape, having the right SEO strategy can make all the difference for your products or services. One often overlooked aspect of SEO is the power of a good press release. Not only can it get you significant media coverage, but it also contributes to link building, boosting your overall visibility online.
Understanding how to write a press release that optimizes for search engines while still engaging your target audience can prove to be a game-changer. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll walk you through the best practices for crafting SEO press releases, and provide examples to help you get started on this potent tool in your SEO arsenal.
Table of Contents
What is SEO press release?
An SEO press release is like a news story about your company’s latest happenings, new products, or services. But it’s not just any news story; it’s written with SEO in mind. That means using certain keywords and links in the text. This off-page SEO method helps get your news out on the web, but it also helps boost your website’s SEO, making it easier for people to find you online. It’s a great way to get the word out about your business and improve your site’s search engine ranking at the same time.
What are the benefits of press releases for SEO?
The benefits of a press release for SEO are both direct and indirect, offering a range of advantages for your online presence. The direct benefit is the potential for the press release URL to rank in search engine results pages (SERPs), which, while not common, can certainly happen. The indirect benefits, however, are where the real value lies. Press releases can boost your SEO indirectly by increasing your brand visibility, generating quality backlinks, and attracting more organic traffic. They can also help your company gain media coverage, which can lead to more people talking about and linking to your website. In essence, press releases can be a powerful tool in your SEO toolbox, amplifying your brand’s message while also enhancing your online findability.
Do press releases work for SEO?
Absolutely, press releases can work for SEO, but the effect is often more indirect.
Creating a press release is about more than just writing—it’s about crafting a story that grabs attention, earns media coverage, and follows SEO best practices. When done correctly, a press release can transform into a valuable tool for your brand. It can raise awareness about your business, drive more visitors to your website, and enhance your brand’s credibility. Plus, a well-written, SEO-friendly press release can boost your link building efforts, contributing to improved search engine rankings. So, while the impact of press releases on SEO might not be direct, they can indeed offer substantial benefits for your overall digital marketing strategy.
Compared with paid advertising and other SEO solutions, press releases are both effective and economical. If done properly with a reputable distribution partner, you’ll increase website traffic and maximize your SEO efforts with just a single press release syndication. We will walk you through the specific press release tactics to get there.
But first, let’s briefly talk about what a press release is not.
- It’s not your main link building strategy
- It’s not a panacea for bad press and negative reviews
- It’s not a magic bullet to propel you in the SERPs
You can’t put a band-aid on a bullet wound.
Press releases by themselves can’t rank a website. But if you create a well-written press release, optimize it for a specific set of keywords, then distribute it to authoritative, relevant news outlets, press releases can be an impactful piece of your overall SEO strategy. It will help you reach your target audience, acquire relevant backlinks, increase traffic, and can lead to a boost in sales.
But don’t just take our word for it. See for yourself with these 3rd party press release case studies.
You Can Rank a Press Release
A study on the effectiveness of press releases for gaining backlinks was conducted by Matt Cutts after he commented in a Google forum thread stating that press releases do not provide links of any real benefit when it comes to ranking. This was a bold statement, but was it really true?
To test this theory, Cutts issued a press release using the anchor text ‘Leasreepressmm’, which pointed to Cutts’ blog. The aim was to see if the blog could be ranked for that particular keyword, even though it was irrelevant to the blog’s other content.
The results showed that Cutts’ press release was ranking for the target keyword. The experiment was a resounding success. Not only can press releases offer powerful backlinks, but they’re also a great way to rank your website. In fact, the blog in question is still ranking years after the initial study was performed.
Media Coverage Impacts Traffic & Backlinks
If you’re still not sold on press releases, we’ve got some additional data that might just change your mind. In another popular study done by Moz, it was shown that media coverage does affect a brand’s organic traffic, as well as the backlinks. Perhaps the best example of this is the clothing brand Roman Originals.
A few years ago, this brand went viral from a simple article of clothing: a dress. You may remember this particular dress, which sparked a worldwide debate when people simply couldn’t agree on the color scheme.
This dress received huge amounts of attention from everyday individuals, celebrities, and major publishers such as Time, Wired, and BuzzFeed. Their product attracted massive media coverage that led to some asstounding results.
Based on the Moz analysis, Roman Originals saw an increase of 17.5K press mentions, which led to a nearly 420% increase in US organic traffic. Additionally, the brand received a 2.3K% increase in new backlinks. Talk about a boost to your SEO efforts. Their global exposure led to an increase of 560% in global sales within the 24 hours following the story going viral.
The benefits of press releases are real.
Benefits of Press Releases
While the best press release SEO strategies continue to shift, their benefits remain. Our team sees their impact in day-to-day implementation, including exposure, flexibility, easy creation, and impactful results.
Boost Sales with Exposure to New Audience
If you’re looking to quickly expand your online visibility, press releases can help you reach a larger audience and boost sales. A properly written press release, distributed to the right entities will get your company immediate exposure and increase your traffic. Especially if the release is published on authoritative or high-traffic sites with an established audience.
To maximize reach, use a quality press release syndication service that quickly blasts out your content. Our syndication services send your press release to hundreds of authoritative news outlets, getting you published on more sites. Syndication also cuts down on manual outreach, saving you time!
Efficiently Build Links
Instead of working months to build individual links, you can amass many meaningful backlinks from a single press release. Write just one piece of content then push it out to thousands of outlets. You can quickly build and strengthen your backlink profile without the time consuming aspects of building links.
You’re only limited by the amount of time you spend on outreach. But we’ve got an insider tip for that too. Press release syndication services will handle the distribution and outreach for you, providing even more time savings.
Indexed for Powerful SEO
Your press release links are much more likely to be indexed, because search engines regularly crawl news outlets and websites due to the higher frequency of content. We all know indexed links are much more powerful. Press releases and the links they generate provide high-powered White Label SEO you can leverage to get better results for clients.
Oftentimes, link building efforts go unnoticed because they aren’t crawled by search engines. However, with your content stored in the Google database, you know it’s been crawled and see a bigger impact for your SEO efforts.
Flexibility
You can distribute press releases once a month or every week, depending on your company’s needs and budget. This flexibility makes press releases effective no matter the size of your brand or amount of newsworthy updates. We recommend press releases are distributed at least quarterly in order to keep your business relevant with Google and other search engines.
Easy To Create
If you follow the inverted pyramid style of writing, you have a basic outline for every single press release. Just plugin your brand’s announcement and details. Then send off for publishing. This easy-to-create format allows you to distribute press releases faster than other content. For instance, you can create a press release for the pre-launch, launch, and post-launch of a new product.
Fast Results
News is published fast. Within a short frame of time, you should begin to see links and positive effects from your press release distributions. To increase traffic suddenly, you can create several releases on the same subject but with different approaches to the topic.
Press releases reinforce many SEO efforts, like link building and signal creation. They can also increase brand prominence, online visibility, authority, trust, exposure, and NAP placement to rank higher in the SERPs.
These benefits are not out of your reach.
We’ll teach you the specific press release SEO strategies we use to maximize results. If you spend just a little more time optimizing your press release, you’re going to see positive results in traffic and publicity.
If writing and optimizing sounds like a lot of work, you have other options! There are many inexpensive press release services, that include both writing and distribution. Web 2.0 Ranker offers a press release service that handles everything from writing the release to getting it published on authoritative sites.
If you want to write a press release and optimize it yourself, first you’ll need to decide which type of press release you’ll write…
Types of Press Releases
Press releases used to be filled with facts and newsworthy information, but many businesses are now distributing press releases with SEO fluff. They’re full of promotional content, keywords, and hyperlinks to associate sites and other networks that can manipulate bots to show their content in search engines. This attempt to manipulate or misuse press releases doesn’t help anyone. Your press release will be rejected by most media outlets, which is a loss of time and money for your company. It also doesn’t give your brand the best reputation amongst outlets.
In order to avoid this misuse of press releases, we recommend following the 5 main types of press releases. These work well for all types of businesses and should be considered when writing your own release for distribution.
General News Press Release
This release doesn’t really include any big news, but is written in a newsworthy manner with a powerful headline to grab the attention of your readers. This release should announce something small or updated that is happening in your company.
Launching Press Release
If your company is working on a project or service that is nearly completed, create a press release announcing the launch. This is the most common form of press release for companies, and is a great way to get the word out to your target audience. For example, you can feature a new location, community initiative, or project you’re launching.
Staff Announcement Press Release
Whether you want to talk about the growth of your company or the addition of a new key staff member, this is the way to do so. If you’ve filled an executive position or hired a new team, be sure to announce this to your audience.
Event Press Release
You can increase exposure for an upcoming event by getting the news out to your target audience. If you have a powerful standing in social media, you might not see much value in this form of press release. However, if you are a small company or a startup without much exposure, this is a great way to increase the amount of consumers your news will reach. An event press release can even help you to grow your audience and social media following a little more.
Product Press Release
Every business has products and services to sell, or else they wouldn’t be a business! But you can use product press releases for more than announcing a new product or service. You can use this release to highlight something that your company offers already. For instance, if you are a lawn care company who offers snow removal, you should create a press release in the winter highlighting this service to consumers who need it.
You can use this form of a press release to go into detail about a specific product or service, but keep in mind that your release should be written more like news, not a sales letter or advertisement.
Now that you know the types of press releases, let’s get into how to write a press release.
How to Write a Press Release
Properly writing and optimizing a press release can really impact your business, but it’s actually a really simple process. Here our entire process from idea through publishing.
Find a Newsworthy Topic
The first step when starting the press release process is to find a newsworthy topic that grabs the attention of the media and your target audience. Your press release must give new or interesting info, otherwise, why would anyone read it?
You need a press release with real news to create real value.
To increase your chances of getting publicity, find a unique angle or aspect to add to your press release. This is a great way to draw in your readers, while also standing out from press releases submitted by other brands.
Write Inverted Pyramid Style
Writing press releases is different from other styles of writing. Instead of writing an introduction that leads the reader, press releases include a summary, then get right into the reason for the release.
As a general rule, press releases follow the Inverted Pyramid Style of writing with the most important, newsworthy information first. Your very first sentence should be the most important information. Then, sprinkle in supporting details as you work through the inverted pyramid. You’ll include a headline, summary, and beginning paragraph for starters. Then, work your way through the quotation paragraph and less-important supporting points.
The most important thing to remember is include a newsworthy message to your target audience. Don’t leave them feeling, “so what?”
Write in Third Person Point Of View
When writing your press release, your point of view should be impartial. Your release shouldn’t sound like you telling your readers about your company and news, it should sound like a journalist reporting the facts. That’s why you should always write in third person.
Third person writing is a great way to give an outside perspective on the events in question, whereas first person is generally used with calls to action and sales letters. Think back to newspapers and magazines for reference. Oftentimes, you don’t even know the writer until you’ve gotten to the end of the article.
Of course, there is an exception to this rule when writing the quotation paragraph of your press release. If you are quoting the company, a partner, or a customer, it is perfectly acceptable to use first person language.
Headline with an Action Verb
When writing a press release, you need to get across the right message and information to your target audience. Remember, you’re writing a press release, NOT a sales letter. You don’t need an extremely descriptive headline, just cover the main points.
A good rule of thumb for creating a headline is to include an active verb and your brand name. This creates an easily digestible headline that informs readers.
Think about headlines in a newspaper for example. These headlines quickly and concisely announce the news shared in the article while catching your readers’ eye.
Short & Sweet Summary
This is perhaps the easiest part of the entire press release writing process. Your summary should be no more than a paragraph, and should give readers a brief description of the content to follow.
You don’t want your summary to mimic your first paragraph. The audiences can quickly lose interest if you’re being repetitive. Be short and to the point without saying too much.
Think about the back cover or inside flap of your favorite book. In most cases, these areas give you just enough information to be interested in what you are about to read, while not giving away the entire story.
Include Dateline: City, State, and Issuing Date
There is no point reading a press release for a lawn care company in New York if you live in Oregon. To avoid this mix up, you’ll want to include a dateline consisting of the city, state, and the issuing date of the press release in the first line of your copy.
Nearly every press release will include this. You can think of it as an industry standard that shows outlets you’re professional.
Introduction and 5W1H
After your dateline will be the introduction of your announcement, which should include the most crucial information first. The introduction should be the highlights of your release so that your target audience can understand the message of your release by only reading the first few sentences. Keep in mind, your introduction should be different from your summary.
Following your introduction, the first paragraph of your release should provide your readers with information and answers to the 5W1H rule of writing: Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How. It goes without saying that you’ll want to provide these answers in a way that grabs their attention.
Never Ask Questions
Press releases are all about announcing news, so you shouldn’t ask any questions in your release. Your message and copy should always come across clear and concise.
Your target audience is interested in learning more about you and your company, not being asked a bunch of questions that require them to think of solutions. When writing your press release, offer your customers solutions and products that make life easier for them.
End with the Boilerplate
Someone reading your press release may want to know more about your company, or what they are most known for in their industry. This is where the boilerplate comes in handy.
The boilerplate is a short paragraph, usually the last sentences of the release, where you include information about your company or organization. Add details about your company’s background, specialities, and any notable features or services. You may choose to use a subheading like, “About (Company Name)” in order to separate this piece from the body of the release in order to help readers easily locate this information.
Don’t Forget Contact Info
It is important that you also provide your target audience and the outlets with a company name, phone number, and email address. This just makes it that much easier for potential customers to contact you and also helps you to gain authority.
Be sure to include these crucial pieces in the top right corner.
Now that you know how to write your own press release, you can work towards maximizing exposure and publish rates. Next, you need to optimize press releases for maximum impact.
Press Release SEO Tactics
While writing style and formatting are important, for the best results you must apply SEO and consider link building opportunities. We will start with the basics, then give you specific strategies we use to get the most our of press releases. You’ll know exactly how to optimize press releases for search engines and building links.
The Basics
If you are interested in writing a press release for SEO value, and you should be, you’ll want to start by understanding the basis of SEO tactics.
Choose the Right Keywords
When optimizing your press release, choose keywords that people search for fairly regularly. Consider what common phrases your audience uses to find you. By doing this, you can start to rank your content for particular keywords.
To find keywords, you might want to use our favorite free tool, Google Keyword Planner. You can find the search volume of your keywords and get ideas of popular search terms. Paid tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush, and Moz also offer keyword research tools.
You can also do research on whether you should use short-tailed or long-tailed keywords to get the best results. Generally, short-tail terms will be more competitive but can reach a larger audience. Longer-tail keywords will be less competitive, more focused, and easier to rank for, but the search volume is lower.
Now that you have your keywords, you’ll want to include them in your headline, summary, and core content. But be sure not to overuse them. Over-optimization can be counterproductive to ranking.
Avoid Google’s Penalties
Be careful of Google’s penalties, which you can incur by using too many keywords, also known as keyword stuffing. Google’s aim is to penalize those who keyword stuff in order to manipulate the search engines to rank higher. But even if you don’t intentionally overuse keywords, you could still be penalized. Always be on the lookout for overuse.
The best way to avoid keyword stuffing is by using semantic keywords and related words similar to your main keywords. When you use a variety of terms and phrases in your content you protect yourself against Google penalties. To get more LSI keywords, try using LSIGraph or a synonym tool.
Google also penalizes linking that’s unnatural or forced for SEO purposes. This means you’ll want to create a unique release with links that are relevant and meaningful.
But there is another way to avoid Google’s penalties. Try to include no-follow links in your press release. When you add these links, you are telling Google bots not to count those links as an endorsement. This can help you to avoid penalties while still getting valuable referral traffic from the links in your press release.
Now, let’s get into our exact stratgies for how we optimize press releases…
Exact Methodology of Our Top Press Release SEO Strategies
To maximize the impact of your press release, you need to “SEO it”. Implement the exact methods we use on our own press releases to get safe and effective results.
1. Leverage Brand Links and Mentions from Authority
How to Safely Build Links with this Press Release SEO Strategy
You don’t want to do more harm than good with your press release. The biggest factor here is making sure you are using safe brand anchor text in the body of the press release. If you would prefer a keyword anchor, link out to properties like your social profiles or citations used in the company’s JSON-LD script under “same as” section.
We recommend you only use two links and anchor types in the content of the release:
- Branded Anchor Linked to Homepage or Location/Service Page
- Keyword Anchor Linked to Top Social Profile or Citation Listing
You’ll get a third link opportunity in the contact section of your press release during syndication, and this will always be a naked URL link back to your website homepage. This contact section is extremely important to your local SEO/GMB ranking efforts.
If this method of link building sounds too good to be true, here’s the catch: premium news sites will only keep your release up for a short time. You’ll get powerful brand mentions from authority domains, but these premium news sites will purge their releases after 60 to 90 days. So expect to see link drop off around this time and prepare for it by having a new release ready to syndicate.
2. Push Keyword Relevance to Important Silo Pages
You can influence rankings when you have enough authority sites talking about the same keywords or key phrases linking back to your page; even if these keywords aren’t hypertext links. This is called RankBrain. RankBrain can use the Hummingbird algorithm and the Semantic Web to rank search results.
If enough sources link to a site, and the surrounding content on those sites is keyword specific, the linked site becomes more likely to be associated with those keywords. This can also increase the search engine results page (SERP) position for those related or LSI keywords because the pages linking back to your own are able to pass on that keyword relevance in addition to any link equity that you might be getting.
A well optimized and well written press release should correlate a target page or site with a certain set of keywords and their respective LSI variations.
3. Build Brand Prominence For GMB Rankings
One of the easiest and most affordable ways to increase the local maps ranking of your Google My Business listing is quickly boosting your online brand prominence with a well-targeted local press release. In a previous post we talked about how brand prominence is one of three major Google My Business ranking factors.
Multiple tests and multiple SEO professionals all agree; local press releases work exceptionally well for increasing prominence.
Here is how to optimize your press release to boost your GMB.
Strategically Stack Links
The effectiveness comes from stacking the brand’s links strategically within the press release. We use a keyword anchor to link to the Maps CID URL first and foremost for business with or without a shown address. As our second link, we want to use a variation of our main keyword and link this to one of our top citations or brand mentions. And finally, for the third link, we’ll be using a naked URL to the homepage or location page used on our listing. If you remember from earlier in this post, we mentioned that the third link of every release is a naked URL in the contact section of the release.
Be sure to treat the NAP in the contact section of the press release the same way that you would any important business listing. Consistency is key, as these count as unstructured citations and brand mentions, so your business info needs to be correct or you could be creating ineffective links. This works towards building a stronger Knowledge Graph for your brand.
4. Embed A Google Places Map Inside The Press Release
If you plan on using press releases for higher map 3 Pack rankings for your GMB listings, make sure the press service you’re using allows you to embed a Google Places Map inside of the release.
This does a couple of things for you…
First, it helps you to convince local search algorithms of the increased prominence of your brand thanks to mentions from authority news sites. Second, you’re linking to the brand’s Google Maps listing in a white hat method, also for increased prominence. And finally, it acts to drive even more exposure (and traffic) to the business’s maps profile.
All of this makes the map embed in a press release a particularly powerful strategy when it comes to increasing your GMB rankings.
As a part of our GMB optimization tactics, we are always on the lookout for ways to include a map embed in our creatives. You’ll notice in the GMB campaign that we include the map embed in the press release, as well as our citations, social accounts, brand links, and more. Not all of the accounts we create allow for this embed feature, so it’s important that we utilize it where we can during the campaign. Press releases are a particularly powerful option for boosting your listing this way thanks to the power of the authority news sites and the volume of nice brand mentions we will receive at syndication.
5. Use Newswire Syndication Services to Drive Real Traffic
Forget using risky crowd search type platforms. Use a press release distribution service for real traffic results without the hassle or the uncertainty. After all, the goal of any SEO effort is to ultimately drive traffic to your website.
You can expect to receive real referral traffic to your targeted page(s) when you use a quality newswire syndication service with authority news outlets and Google News placement. This ensure you’ll get more targeted traffic, so plan to incorporate this into your search optimization campaigns to give clients quick and easy wins.
If you’re new to press releases, you’re probably debating between a free or relatively cheap service and some of the most expensive (and theoretically most effective) distribution services on the market. It can be hard to know which way to go. Free services don’t report where your press release is published after distribution. The expensive services report where your release will appear, but there won’t be much additional room in your marketing budget. You have a third option….
Mid-level press release services offer the best opportunity for your news to be picked up by premium news sites, including Google News, without busting through your entire budget. And unlike their cheaper counterparts, these services will give you a full report on your press release syndication, including a list of your live links. You can actually view the sources that picked up your press release, just like the more expensive services.
Find yourself an expert press release syndication service with a great price tag (like us) and start seeing the benefits of press releases in your marketing strategy without breaking the bank.
This isn’t the limit of a press release either.
Launch Jacking
You can also leverage press syndication to effectively launch jack and siphon traffic from trending search terms. This lesser-known SEO strategy can generate massive traffic in a very short window. So while you might be getting only temporary nofollow links from a press syndication, you can squeeze additional value from these backlinks.
There’s a world of possibilities for how you can work this mini but mighty SEO tactic into an ongoing local or organic SEO service. Just take a look at some of the traffic we’ve obtained from a very niche related press release.
Push out your press releases to hundreds of high-quality, authoritative outlets with Web 2.0 Ranker newswire syndication services. In addition to our quality standards, we guarantee Google News placement so you can maximize traffic. But we also provide detailed reporting…
Reporting
Our press release reporting is twofold. Not only will you get a report of all the sites on which your release has been syndicated, with links, but you’ll also receive a report of the traffic generated from your press release as well.2
At the end of the day, you need a press release that is SEO friendly, can reach your target audience, and help you get your site ranked in the SERPS. With our press release SEO tips, you can truly get the most out of each piece of content.
Don’t have the time to go through this entire process? Could your time be better spent? We also offer an entirely done-for-you press release service that guarantees Google News placement, writes the release, and distributes it for you through our syndication newswire. Google is always getting smarter, and it can be difficult to get every press release into Google News, so this is a unique benefit not all press release services offer. Be sure to ask!
Learn More About Our DFY Press Release Services
We provide the best done-for-you press release service for agencies. Our team handles the entire process – from writing your press release through distribution and publishing.
Get A Better Wholesale Press Release with Web 20
We recently built our own press release syndication platform with 450+ of the best media outlets.! This syndicates to Digital Journal and top news affiliates of Fox, CBS, etc. so you can be sure it’s pushed out to well-known media sites.
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Once you’ve written the perfect press release you need to get it published.
Or, go for the best press links at Web 2.0 Ranker….