- First, narrow your focus around to a topic and keywords.
- Focus on a phrase.
- Focus on the phrase early and often.
- Include links.
- When uploading your press release designate a separate webpage for each press release.
- Employ the power of social media
Focus on a phrase: narrow your focus and topic to a handful of words
Ask yourself this question:
What phrase do you want to be searched and found on?
Which words are likely to be repeated throughout the text? These questions will help you answer what to do next.
Here’s an example:
Let’s say that you are an arts nonprofit organization in the Los Angeles area and you are throwing a community engagement event. You might focus on a phrase like:
- “Art activation event Los Angeles” or
- “Art activation event Los Angeles”, or
- “community engagement art event Los Angeles”.
Keywords are supposed to be words that will be frequently used here that the phrase contains. In the example here, the keywords are:
- Los Angeles
- Art activation
- Community engagement
The actual writing and the text needs to be relevant to the phrase. So don’t put “lifestyle and exercise” if it’s about a “community engagement event around art”.
The search algorithm scans the content line by line and analyzes matchups of the phrase being used throughout the release, and how the keywords and the phrase you are using match up with how often those words are repeated in your press release.
By carefully paying attention to little steps like these that can make a big difference in being searched and found.
Focusing on your phrase early and often
Search engines read every word of the press release from the top to bottom. If they have to go all the way to the bottom of the page to find the phrase, it assumes the phrase isn’t relevant to the content and demotes it (places it lower) on the search results. In addition, your ranking gets demoted as you’re giving contradictory messages, by designating a key phrase and not placing it near the top, which suggests it’s not an important phrase.
When optimizing a press release to get better found in the search engines, use your focused phrase, early and often.
Early just means higher up in the release.
Often means using it throughout the release.
The best places for the phrase include:
- Title
- Headings or subheadings near the top
- Throughout the text
- Inside the quote of the release, or it could just be in a descriptive sentence
- URL or permalink,
- Inside the boilerplate of the release
- One of more links in the body of the text
Example: “Anxiety disorder”
URL and keyword match?
Title and keyword match?
- “The Many Faces of Anxiety Disorder”
- “The Many Faces of Anxiety Disorder”
Keyword in Links?
Get more “yes”-es checked off and you get from your phrase more playing power for search engine optimization.
Think of this when looking to write content as a way to, help boost search engine visibility.
The focus phrase “community engagement Los Angeles” can be woven into the title, the subhead, or both, and it can – no should – also be woven in throughout the body of the content.
The boilerplate is the about the company part of the release and, the boilerplate is often the same content used again, and again.
To get that key phrase in there one more time, let’s say the boilerplate for a hotel is: “We’re a luxury resort hotel in Carmel By the Sea, etc, etc…”. You could also vary it to something like: “The hotel has a new conference room, etc, etc…”.
This applies to not just press releases, but to any webpage.
Including links
Another step to get your press release better searched and found is to include links in your strategy. Search engines are looking for three main things when they’re pulling up sites and giving them relevancy.
Architecture: which is essentially the HTML or source code of a website.
Content: which could be the content on a web page, a press release or a blog post.
Linking: Let’s say you’re uploading a press release to your own website, you can have a phrase link to another specific page of your website. If you have a certain page on your website about your target phrase, highlight that phrase in the press release and link it to the other page on your website.
For example, let’s say you are a wedding photographer in Fresno, California, you would have the target phrase wedding photographer Fresno or wedding photographer Fresno, California and in your press release it could be in your boiler page it could be in the body of your content. But if you have that phrase, you know, so and so is a wedding photographer in Fresno, California, wedding photographer Fresno, can link to a specific page on your website that talks about your work as a wedding photographer in Fresno, and that alone can be a really powerful step that makes a big difference in boosting that press release. This is not only good for visibility it gives the search engines you know, a little more algorithmic content to feed on but it also boosts usability meaning the user experience so let’s say someone is generally is interested in learning more about the phrase that your linking to, they can click and instantly go to another page.
When uploading your press release designate a separate webpage for each press release.
Employing the power of social media
So you’ve written your content, woven in the phrases, early, often, and throughout, and you’ve optimized the press release with links, and distributed it to the press release page with best practices. You’re not done yet. There’s one more step you can take, to help your press release content get better searched and found. And that’s, employing the power of social media.
Social media has pushed search engine optimization to completely new levels. Nowadays search engines index posts from social media sites like they do any normal webpage. The same press release posted on social media as a blog link not only gives organizations a beautiful foundation to work from, but it gives them an easy content sharing platform.
Search engines are also looking for and prioritize sites highly trafficked and used with frequent content. So again, social media really comes in and starts to you know. Kind of, become integrated with search engine optimization overall.
So my last recommendation is to take a press release and share it on social media. One of the most strategic places to do that is on a blog. I don’t mean carbon copying, and just paste the press release onto a blog post and publish. Blogs are part of social media, and we’re supposed to be social on social media and not speak in a robotic manner.
So what you would, do is you would do something in a conversational tone, guiding people to go back to the press release. So what you would say is, last week our organization, launched a new product. We distributed a press release last month to our investors, about the product. We wanted to share it with you so that you could learn more about it,”
To sum it all up
Focus on a phrase, use the phrase early and often, including them in links, and pepper them into the blog post linking to your press release.
The phrase is used in the title of the blog post.
It’s used in the body.
Shows up in links.
URL of the press release which has its own separate page.
And so on.
There’s a lot of opportunities, that you can put into play, to get a lot more mileage out of your press release.
