SEO Ate My Press Release!

by John San Filippo, jmsb@johnsanfilippo.com
Subscribe: www.tinyurl.com/jmsbblog

Back in the day, you wrote a press release, issued it, and hoped for one of four possible outcomes:

• An editor or reporter would be so dazzled by your press release that they’d decide to develop it into a full story. (I had a dream this happened to me once.)
• Your press release would fit with some larger story and be incorporated therein.
• Your press release would establish your company and its executives as subject matter experts, increasing their chances of being interviewed later on a similar topic.
• A trade publication would distill your press release down to a few key sentences and use the distilled version as sidebar filler in an upcoming edition.

(All of these outcomes are good – and still viable – although some are clearly more advantageous than others.)

Then along came the Internet. And just as with so many other areas of endeavor, the Internet was very disruptive for the press release business. Just not necessarily in a good way.

 As the Internet exploded, the need for content likewise exploded. However, content budgets didn’t necessarily explode in similar fashion. This made press releases very attractive. Free content written by established industry leaders. Suddenly, press releases were appearing everywhere online.

That’s still a good thing, right?

Somewhere along the way, this caught the attention of the search-engine optimization (SEO) crowd. (For the uninitiated, SEO means “optimizing” your content and its online presentation to increase its chances of being found by someone via Google, Bing, etc.) The first thing you know, old Jed’s a millionaire … wait. That’s not it. The first thing you know, press releases shifted from a PR activity to an SEO activity.

Those SEO sneaksters unleashed their craftiness on press releases and it seemed like press releases would never be the same. Press releases started being written for computers instead of people. Arguments erupted over the proper keyword density for press releases. They became jam-packed with links designed to drive website traffic. In short, they kind of sucked.

Thankfully (IMHO), the big search engines frown on SEO. They want to help you find content because it’s relevant, not because somebody gamed the system with excessive keywords and links. Even more thankfully, those search engine peeps are smart enough to do something about it. In the last year or so, Google has changed its algorithms (that’s a euphemism for search-engine voodoo) to identify and filter out bogus press releases.

So that brings us full circle to writing press releases for actual people – your audience – instead of computers. Don’t get me wrong. It’s still smart to create your press releases with the Googlized world in mind.

For example, use common terminology in favor of your own internal terminology. Personal financial management, or PFM, is a pretty common term, right? Well, at my former employer, for reasons unclear, they chose to call it online financial management, or OFM. What do you think that did for people Googling for PFM? Not much.

The point is, you want people to find your press releases, and you want people to read your press releases. So write your damned press releases for people, not computers.

That is all.