Lasting SEO Results, Part 2: 3 PR Steps for Success
9th August 2012 · 0 Comments
Companies know that appearing at the top of search engine results is important to build corporate awareness, but how can you influence natural search results for your company outside of optimizing your website? In Part 1 of Lasting SEO Results, we learned how PR affects SEO, and in Part 2, we will give practical steps you can take to get those lasting SEO results with PR efforts.
Like we discussed, there are many factors that play into to search engine optimization, and backlinks are one of those important factors. By focusing on PR efforts, you can create quality backlinks to your website, but you may ask, “How do I do that?”
You can use PR to get the some of the best third-party validation for your messages and backlinks to your site. To use PR and gain search results for your company or products, you should focus on three specific efforts, which we’ll discuss alongside a case study of Wineman Technology’s PR efforts as an example:
1. Wire News Releases
Using a service like PR Newswire or PRWeb to wire news releases pushes your news out to third party sites that publish wired news on specific topics. Using a wiring service makes your news more readily available to journalists, and gives your release a place on the wiring service’s website where the release will be hosted long term.
Wineman Technology, an engineering firm that specializes in test solutions, sought to improve PR efforts. Last August, the company wired a news release announcing a new vehicle simulator, Dynacar. The company used PR Newswire for their news release.
Using PR Newswire to wire a release guarantees that the news is distributed to major publications around the country, and that the news lives at a permanent URL on prnewswire.com.
2. Develop Consistent News
Sit down in Q4 with your leadership, sales, and marketing teams and think through the new products, events, partner news and marketing campaigns and activities you have planned for 2013. Rank these by how newsworthy you think they are, prioritize the product announcements, think through news hooks for your campaigns and plan out 4-8 news releases for the year, spaced fairly evenly. This allows you to more easily allocate resources toward creating the news and have a constant flow of coverage and key talking points with journalists.
Wineman Technology planned news releases throughout the year to correlate with product launches, company events, significant customer achievements, and awards. They wired each release with PR Newswire, and the news releases now appear in the first two pages of search result for the company:
Now, a search for Wineman Technology shows multiple news items, boosting public credibility of the company. Each piece of coverage also contains valuable backlinks to the company’s site.
3. Reach out to Targeted Journalists
To increase coverage of your news in the specific publications your target audiences read, your first step is to build relationships with the top 3-5 reporters who cover your company and/or industry. Engage with those journalists to seek out third-party coverage in their publications. Coverage in industry publications not only puts your name in front of all audiences who regularly read those publications, but coverage in those publications will also appear when someone searches for your company. Having these articles appear in search results both boosts the natural optimization of your own site, and provides third-party validation for your product or company. We talk about this and the public relations marathon in detail in our post building relationships with the press.
In addition to Wineman Technology’s news release for Dynacar, the company also reached out to editors who were attending the tradeshow where the news was announced. Wineman Technology experts met with editors, discussed the product, and ultimately gained coverage in top engineering publications.
Design News featured editor-written coverage of Dynacar.
The Dynacar coverage provided third-party validation for the new product.
In Conclusion:
These three PR practices will help you create lasting SEO results. By engaging in PR efforts with wired news releases, consistent news, and outreach to targeted media, you will not only increase PR coverage for your company, but also create the third-party validation through backlinks that delivers SEO improvements for your organic search efforts.
Related blog posts:
Four Steps to Building Meaningful Relationships with Journalists
5 Core Steps in the PR Marathon
Five Practical SEO Tips for Promoting Your Website
Tags: marketing, search engine marketing
