More and more people are using online news sources to find information on products, services, companies and ideas. Most press releases published online are read by the public looking for data and a survey by Outsell found that online press releases are a major source of data for BtoB buyers prior to purchase.
There are some distinct advantages to having your news releases found via search engines:
- You know they are interested in that subject because they asked for it by keyword.
- Online releases can be tracked – for the first time you can get statistics of how many times your press release was accessed or downloaded.
In the State of the Media 2011 report Pew Research Center states that the one factor that most impacted the news industry in the last decade was search engines. Why would search engines affect news consumption?
The Internet gave people the ability to search online for news they‘re interested in and find sources they trust. Since 88% of economically-active Americans are on the Internet, and using a search engine is high on the list of online activities, learning how to write a news release for both the public and the search engines, are skills PR professionals must master.
Where should you aim to have your release indexed?
There are many choices for news online – according to Nielsen ratings the top ten online news websites are:
- Yahoo! News
- MSNBC
- CNN
- AOL News
- NYTimes.com
- Fox News
- Google News
- ABC News
- USAToday.com
- Washington Post
As you can see, some of the mainstream media websites are high on the list and you should be building relationships with journalists and bloggers from these publications. But you may be surprised to see that Yahoo News is number one – they have the largest news audience in the world! And Google News and AOL News are also on the list. Your news releases must be written so that they will be indexed in these news search engines and ranked well for the subject of the release, so it can be found by interested people who are searching for news on the subject – and found by bloggers and journalists research the subject.
After a couple of weeks, when your release is no longer considered news, it will migrate from the news search to the web search index.
Web Search
When you type a word or phrase into Google, or another search engine, you are using Web Search. And by the way – this is how 98% of reporters start a story. They use Google to find sources and background information for their stories.
If you want your news releases to be ranked high in a search engine for a particular word or phrase, so that journalists searching for sources on that subject find your content, it is essential to understand how the search engines evaluate and rank content.
Google and other search engines operate on a technical algorithm, but luckily we don’t have to have a PhD in Math to understand it. The search engines have been quite open about what they’re looking for:
- Good content that is relevant to the word or phrase someone searches for.
- A ‘good reputation’ for having quality content on this subject.
How do search engines gauge this concept of reputation online? They evaluate the number and quality of links, from other sites, that refer people to your news releases that have been indexed and stored in the search engines under a particular word or phrase.
For example: If you have a news release about cancer care, the search engines look at the release to see whether those words appear in the right places throughout the release AND they look for links to the release on other websites, blogs and tweets that refer to this release with words ‘cancer care.’
Search Engine Results Pages
For many years search engines only displayed links to ten websites on a search results page. They had other sections of the search engine where you could search for images, news, video and blogs.
In the fall of 2007 Google changed the way they displayed their search results and started to include news, images and video in their general web search results. Soon, other search engines followed suit and now they all deliver what they call “blended search results.”
Why is this important to PR and news releases?
Blended search opens the door to page one search engine visibility for your news release and multimedia content. Search engines are looking for news content and video to feature on the first page of a “blended search result.” So, if you have well-written, search-optimized news releases and videos they could be featured on page one in a web search for your key phrases.
