For any company with an online presence, press releases are a vital part of internet marketing and search engine optimisation. However, they are often overlooked in favour of more popular techniques, such as blog posting, article syndication, social media updating and the like. If you’ve never written and submitted a press release to an online distribution service, here’s what you’ve been missing.
SEO Benefits of Press Releases
How can writing press releases help your website become further optimised for search engines? For one thing, you can include inbound links to your website. Most press release distribution sites enjoy high ranking with search engines and gaining that inbound link to your site is very valuable.
Another SEO benefit is the use of keywords. If you liberally sprinkle the description, body and tags of your press release with one or two critical keyword phrases, this helps your site (via the inbound link) rank higher for those keywords and rank higher for searches.
Internet Marketing Benefits
The main reason you use internet marketing for your online business is to drive traffic to your website – and hope those visitors make a purchase – right? The idea behind press release distribution is to make the content engaging so that it attracts lots of readers, and those readers click through the link to your website. Readers who already engaged by the content of your press release can be considered prequalified leads.
Here’s another way your internet marketing benefits – press releases are easy to share via social media and they contain the type of information that your fans and friends want to read. Your social media audience is also likely to share the content with their friends and followers so this gives your press release a greater likelihood of going viral.
Press Releases Increase Your Return on Investment
When you invest money in your business to develop and/or offer a new or improved product or service, you are hoping it will result in a boost to your sales numbers – and profitability. But that’s not going to happen as efficiently or as quickly unless your target market is aware of the changes. And that’s what press releases do best: inform your audience about news within your company.
Press releases are also a great vehicle for highlighting public relations news. If your company is sponsoring a local sports team or funding a charity drive, let everyone know about it! You might be surprised at how many people choose a vendor based on their philanthropic and humanitarian efforts.
Every company has something newsworthy to share and the best vehicle for doing this online is a press release. Write it, distribute it, share it and enjoy the boost in sales you are sure to experience.