Dominate Google’s Page 1

By Rafe Gomez on January 10, 2013

Sending out press releases with news, updates, and developments about your company is a great way to build marketplace awareness and generate potential sales.

Implementing a search engine optimisation (SEO) plan that enhances your website content with the right keywords is a great way to increase your company’s search rank and attract business.

Unfortunately, most companies don’t realise that if they combine these two tactics, they’d make each of them even more valuable. They’d also achieve long lasting results that would deliver measurable benefits with tremendous return on investment.

Attract attention

The merging of these two disciplines is called SEO public relations, or SEO PR for short.

SEO PR unites the craft of press release writing with the metrics of SEO keyword research. It allows you to tell a compelling story that attracts immediate attention and creates clicks to your site both now and into the future.

The first step in building an SEO PR news release is to create your release. Focus on one single message that you’d like your readers to remember and write clearly, simply, and concisely.

Next, use a research tool (Wordtracker and Google Adwords are both free and great to start with) to determine the keywords that are most relevant to your product or service and are most searched by your target audience. In terms of Google Adwords, you need a gmail account, and you need to log-in to be able to view the tool.

After that, go to the websites of your competition and analyse the keywords that they use. This will give you ideas of additional keywords that could be helpful to include in your SEO PR news release. Using particular keywords of your larger competitors can help you to leverage their superior market position and actually divert traffic from their site to your site.

Increase your search rank

Finally, after reviewing your list of top keywords and your competitors’ list of top keywords, create a working list of the most desirable gold nugget keywords with the most relevance to your product or service, and are also the most searched by your target audience.

Take these keywords and sprinkle them throughout your news release.  Substitute them for other words that you may have used in your news release that don’t pack as much SEO punch as the ones that you’ve compiled.

You now have an SEO PR news release that will have value and deliver benefits far beyond the usual news cycle of five to seven days that most news releases have.  Your release will come up in the results when people search for the keywords that you’ve sprinkled in, and you’ll be able to attract that traffic.

Your SEO PR. news release will also help to increase your search rank, generate backlinks to your site from the sites that use your news release, and get you discovered by new potential customers.

About Rafe Gomez

Rafe Gomez is a principal at VC Inc. Marketing, which provides messaging, strategy, lead gen/sales support, and SEO content creation/PR services to business owners in a variety of industries across a number of countries. Rafe's work has been featured in the US on Fox News Channel, FoxBusiness.com, MSNBC, and PBS; and in Adweek, the American Express OPEN Forum, Direct Marketing News, and The New York Daily News.

• http://marketingstrategist.co.za/ Byron Martin

  Great Post –

  As an SEO and Digital Marketing Professional I know what value Digital Marketing can bring to a business, whether new or existing.

  One of the quickest ways to drive traffic is by means of Search Engine Advertising – Like PPC (Pay Per Click) as an example, But investing in an organic SEO- and Marketing Strategy is the best for your business in the long run as it build on your Digital Footprint and reputation online, not just in Search Engines.

  Just be careful if you do decide to take on SEO, Social- and other Digital forms of marketing yourself – As the SEO world is an ever constant changing environment with monthly if not weekly updates on Search Engines Algorithms that can have an dramatic effect on your results in Search Engines.

• Michael Wissekerke

  agreed. PR has been a back bone of my organic campaigns for many years. i generally go through the effort of using a tiered approach. so the more newsworthy the more trusted the service i use… unfortunately so does generally the cost

  although stating “dominate” is a bit misleading, a good PR distribution strategy is a one piece of a bigger puzzle.