Atlanta Press Release SEO Case Study

You’ve probably seen press releases issued for all sorts of newsworthy events – a new CEO, major new account, research studies published, company mergers, IPOs, and more.  And you’re no doubt well aware that these are released with the intention of getting the person or company (or companies) exposure in the news.   But did you know there’s an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) value to press releases?

If your answer to this question was “yes,” you get a gold star.  And if you’re already doing online press releases for SEO purposes, upgrade that star to platinum.  But we’re guessing that even if you’re doing this as an ongoing part of your marketing strategy, you could be doing it better.  Here’s an example of one thing we did for a recent client:

Atlanta Automotive SEO Press Release

This client is a car dealership specializing in high-end, luxury and sports cars.  They sell lots of BMW, Mercedes, Porsche and others along with more exotic cars such as Ferrari, Lamborghini, Aston Martin, Maybach and more.

What we did with 2 SEO-maxed press releases

Technically, an event doesn’t have to be worthy of being a major story on CNN to be worthy of a press release.  In this case, the car dealership had acquired a couple of beauties, along with quite a few others.  So as an experiment, we wrote 2 very highly optimized press releases to get the SEO value from them.

We chose 2 cars that we knew were pretty competitive – Mercedes-Benz and BMW.  We figured out our target keywords and used them appropriately (not too much, not too little – balance is important in everything) and then we submitted each of these 2 SEO-friendly press releases to 2 online press release distribution sites.  We’d tell you which ones, but we’d have to kill you (just kidding, but we’re still not going to tell you).

Once all of this was done, we went on to other tasks, then retired for the night and checked back the next day.

SEO Press Release Results for Car Dealership

What did we find? Well, 20 hours later, that’s not even a full day, we had at least 30 new PAGE ONE results, for over 25 keywords that we weren’t even on page one before this happened.  And these were pretty competitive keywords, though some were more “long-tail” than others.

The Press Release SEO takeaway

The great thing about press releases and SEO is that you can get results VERY fast, even for very competitive keywords.  The drawback is that press releases are inherently news, and old news isn’t news anymore, so the results don’t have much “staying power” from an SEO standpoint.  However, the links are still there, so it does have some residual value.  Besides, this method can help you get some fast results while your other SEO efforts are kicking in.   The bottom line: it’s well worth doing, and doing regularly.  Just keep coming up with new reasons to send out press releases. Your SEO efforts will be rewarded.