4 Tips for Writing an SEO-Friendly Press Release

We live in a digital world and businesses just like yours are vying for attention and to stand out from their competition. While there are myriad of tactics to maximize exposure, perhaps the most important is search engine optimization (SEO).

If you’re unfamiliar, SEO is the process of improving your website’s visibility and attracting quality traffic from relevant organic search queries.

When it comes to press release distribution and SEO, the connection is that press releases are a powerful tool for generating backlinks. Which, if you read our previous blog, Backlinks 101: The Do’s and Don’ts of Building Backlinks, you’ll remember backlinks are a key component to boosting SEO performance.

The potential of earning high-quality backlinks for your brand is one of the many benefits consistent press release distribution creates for your business.

But, to get to that point, everything from your press release format to the content of your press release needs to be done with SEO in mind.

Here are four tips for writing an SEO-friendly press release.

‍Pick an Interesting Topic
An interesting, newsworthy press release topic is the foundation of your potential success.

When choosing a topic, you want to keep the end user in mind. When you do this, you better your odds of choosing a topic your audience finds interesting.

Examples of newsworthy topics include:

• Company anniversary
• Awards
• Business funding
• Community involvement
• In-person/virtual events
• New data/industry report
• New hires/promotions
• Rebrand
• Product launch
• Quarterly earnings

We included additional tips and advice in our blog post, 10 Press Release Topic Ideas You Can Use When You’re Feeling Stuck.
No matter the topic, your goal is to write about something interesting and relevant to your target audience to increase your odds of them interacting and sharing your content.

The more your content’s shared, the more search engines will notice and point to your content as a reliable source for relevant search queries to your topic.

‍Choose the Right Keywords
Now that you’ve decided on your press release topic, it’s time to decide on the keyword you’ll focus on.

The keyword should be relevant to the topic and used by your target audience.

If your audience isn’t using the word or phrase, they won’t be able to find your content.

Use your data and research to inform your keyword selection.

Once you’ve selected your SEO keyword, use it in the headline, first paragraph, and at least one to two additional times throughout the press release.

‍Include Attention-Grabbing Multimedia
We highly suggest your press releases include an element of multimedia because it’s shareable content, especially on social media.

In fact, we believe in the power of high-quality multimedia so much that there are NO multimedia fees and you can embed your YouTube videos for free when you use our press release services.