SEO firms join forces with PR news release service to extend the reach of their clients online
"Search engine promotion is a new element of the marketing mix that combines search engine optimization (SEO) and public relations (PR) to address the large and growing audience of people who use Google News, Yahoo News, and other news search engines" said PR Web at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose this week.
They announced that they are partnering with SEO firms to help their clients get better searchability of their press releases.
SEO firms are optimizing press releases? Where are the PR agencies in all this? The race goes to the swift and they just got sidelined.
"Optimizing press releases is the next logical extension of a holistic online marketing campaign. The added visibility it will give our clients is an untapped resource.”
commented Dana Todd, Executive Vice President of SiteLab International Inc
Imagine hearing that from an SEO firm. SEO is an untapped resource and every press release that gets posted on a website or sent on the wire must be optimized to get maximum exposure. The news service on search engines has been gaining ground for over a year now.
In a recent whitepaper about PR and the Online Opportunity, Dee Rambeau of DVCO Technologies wrote "If online services are mission-critical, and the technologies required to deliver these services have been developed and tested, then why have so many business communication professionals been slow to adopt their own service offering?"
Are we so consumed with our own fixed ideas and grooved-in ways of doing PR that we can’t see the change in global communication? As our audiences rush to the Internet, we’ll find ourselves on the side of the information super highway waving a printed press release no one wants to read.
And if you are savvy enough to put it online, it had better be optimized so the right people can find it.
Global PR Blog Week attracted a fair amount of traffic – several hundred visitors a day still come to read the conversations. But if you consider the total number of PR practitoners around the world, that’s a drop in the ocean!
Looking at the metrics, almost all of their top referrers were other blogs. It seems we were singing to the choir. Too many PR professionals have not even heard of blogs, blogging and content syndication through news feeds. This incredible tool is out there waiting to be adopted by the PR industry.
Optimizing your press releases, creating news feeds for chosen journalists and providing them with an online media room that meets their needs goes a long way to putting PR on the Net – where it should be.
