A search engine optimised or SEO-friendly press release is designed to work across a wide range of publication cycles and platforms.
At one time a press release would be sent to various newsrooms and others on your contact lists. These days your message needs to be found across an assortment of news and information outlets, websites and social media networks.
How you structure and optimise the content of your press release is a major factor in search engine ranking. Done well, your press release will rise to the top of the search ranking pages when a user searches for your keywords (see step 4 below).
Here are five steps to get you on your way to writing more SEO-friendly press releases.
It’s important to organise your release in a journo-style inverted pyramid, where the information is prioritised and structured with the most newsworthy information at the top – who/what/why/when/where/how – followed by important information, and then adding more general or background information after that.
Tip: Don’t ‘bury the lead’. Put all important information at the top of your press release.
Headlines need to serve a number of masters: SEO, EDMs, website pages and social media to name a few. When you write a headline for a press release you know an editor may change it before publication, however you still want to get your message across loud and clear.
Although ideal character or word lengths for headlines vary across platforms, a good rule of thumb is to say what you need to say using the least number of words. Try to keep headline length to between eight and 10 words and include one or more of your keywords (see below).
Sub-headlines (or subheads) are used to break up an article or post into sections for better readability. Subheads should be properly nested in relation to the main headline – H2s within an H1, H3s within H2s, and so on.
Tip: Repeat keyword/s in your sub-headings.
Put the critical information in your lead paragraph, often referred to in journalism parlance as the lead (or lede). Tell the complete story in your lead paragraph, and then expand upon it in further paragraphs, providing more information and background as needed.
Your lead paragraph should not be a continuation of your headline. Make sure it makes sense on its own - without the headline. Avoid structuring your lead paragraph as a Q&A style-response to your headline.
Keep your sentences short – they will travel much better across other websites and social media sites which always have character/word limits built into their design. You should think about how the text would be reused and repurposed. It may be used as the excerpt for archives and other indexes, and across a variety of social media platforms. Your lead paragraphs may also be repurposed as meta descriptions.
Don’t start your release with a bullet list or dot points. Use keywords in your lead paragraph, preferably towards the beginning. And make sure to link any references to other webpages.
Tip: Spell out keywords (e.g. artificial intelligence) then introduce acronyms (AI) in parentheses in the lead paragraph.
Keywords are used to describe the main ideas and topics you want to convey in your press release. They are the same words and phrases that potential clients and customers might enter into search engines as they search, often looking for answers to questions, or for products that will help solve an issue.
To give your content a better chance of being found, it’s important to choose keywords that match the words your audience would use. Webpages with relevant content are prioritised in search engine ranking pages (SERPs) above websites that have been created by an algorithm and have way too many keywords.
To develop a strong keyword marketing practice, start by asking: What are your ideal customers looking for and what words do they use to search for it?
The next step is to build your content around the answer to these queries, using the keywords you’ve already chosen, and not too many, not too few. Keywords tell the search engine algorithm when your answer is in fact the best answer for the query that is being searched for. Most marketers will tell you that focusing on somewhere between 2 and 15 keywords in total, 1 or 2 per page, is your best bet.
Choose one or two broad and long-tail (more specific) keywords and use them in a clear and natural way. Examples of broad keywords would be ‘financial adviser’ or ‘wealth manager’, and examples of long-tail keywords would be ‘income protection adviser in Sydney’ or ‘asset allocation adviser in Perth, Western Australia’.
Tip: Include keywords in photo captions, title tags and meta descriptions.
You should always use images in your press release, not only because users like to put a face to a name, or break up their day with interesting pictures, but because images are an important ranking signal when published on the web.
It’s good SEO practice to make images such as headshots available either as attachments or as links to downloads in your press releases. And don’t hold back on image size – some websites might want to feature that headshot on their site.
Just as website image requirements will vary according to a website’s design, so too images used on social media will vary across different platforms. No one image will generally meet all of these requirements but you can make it easier for others to rework your image when making decisions about the images you use and supply.
Be sure to always include an ALT tag both for accessibility compliance and good practice.
Tip: Use images that can be cropped to work in either portrait or landscape format.
You can now confidently go forth and create your SEO-friendly press releases.