Transcript
Hi guys. And welcome to another edition of Zupo's SEO Talk & Tea.
Today's conversation is, When Press Releases Still Make Sense In SEO. This is a really important conversation because press releases were very popular in the early days of SEO, back in the 2010s and before. Many people were using PR and press releases very heavily to do link building. Ultimately, Google has pretty much nixed that and said that they are not a valid link building strategy, and you can get penalized for heavy-duty PR link building. Therefore, I wanted to discuss today, most people have turned away from PR, but I think there is a misconception that PR in itself is just a negative when there actually still is a lot of positive. So if you are a PR person watching this, this is a shout-out to those PR people. We still very much need you. And there's still value in SEO with the PR.
But before we jump on in, I want to introduce the tea we have today. We have this golden packaging which... Maybe it's glaring on you guys. Hopefully, it's not. But this is a chrysanthemum tea. And again, this is a popular player in our tea channel. Actually it's SEO and tea channel. But it's a very popular... In this channel I bring it up a lot. It's a [inaudible 00:01:12]. So technically, it's actually not a tea. So that means it has no caffeine. But it still has dried chrysanthemum flowers and then you brew it just like any other tea. And then you enjoy it. Very popular for kids to drink as a childhood drink. I drank a little bit of it as a kid. But I like to drink it sometimes in the evening, when I just want something warm and floral before I go to bed. That's sometimes what I'll drink.
Well, let's go ahead and get talking about PR and SEO. Again, like I mentioned, PR has been something that has been avoided by SEO for a while. And that's for good reason. A lot of people were heavily spamming and overusing PR strategies, where they would put press releases out, linking to their website in the press release in hopes of acquiring links. Now, the problem is people did this so much that Google essentially was aware of this and then nixed it. And then says it's against their guidelines, it's not really above board. Therefore, PR has been heavily moved away from [inaudible 00:02:05] in the last 10 years. It's been a long time. This is a really old conversation that we're having. But the reason why I wanted to film this video is because even in my own experience, I have learned that PR isn't always a bad thing. To be honest, I have a lot of value from some of my clients in doing some PR link building strategies.
So let me give you an example. A lot of the times PR is bad when you have nothing to truly announce when you're sending out a press release. And I know that sounds harsh, but I mean this in the way that you're trying to make a press release purely for link building purposes. So a good example is if a company has a website and they create a new page. If you create a new press release saying, "Hey, we created this new page. We're announcing this new page on our website." I really don't know if that's press release-worthy. I feel like unless you have a very specific reason for this page to be so amazing, there's really no reason to be announcing. And you see a lot of those kind of things, a lot of bad spammy PR press releases.
But where I have seen it actually make sense is some of my clients they are different industries. And so some are in engineering, some are in technology and sometimes they do have these big news. For example, one of my clients has acquired two companies in the last two years. And so they'll announce press releases in their engineering industry saying, "Hey, we just want to announce that we have acquired this company to bolster this side of our business or that side of our business."
And where we have found press releases to actually work is targeted press releases and relevant press releases. Once we acquire the companies, the marketing team and my company work together to identify relevant publications. And when I say relevant, I don't mean just general engineering. I mean down to exactly what that business portion that they're acquiring is relevant to. So a good example is, the company acquired a company that was better at dealing with software. So we went to that engineering software niche, went to the publications and sent them the press release announcing, "Hey, we've acquired this company and is bolstering our ability. And we're merging the abilities to better sell the software to more companies that may need it."
And therefore, a lot of these publications actually publish the press release because they want to see relevant news in their industry. So we did acquire links that way. And so what I'm trying to impart is that press releases are not always bad. If you can find... There's two things. One is, it has to be newsworthy. And unfortunately it can be a difficult for some companies to find something that's newsworthy. Or you may have impostor syndrome where you just feel like your size is not there. There are many ways to kind of do it. You just have to do some investigating about what is press release-worthy.
You can do some big marketing camp... No, I won't say campaign, but you can do a marketing... What do they call it? It's a display or a marketing show. And it's a really cool thing that you do in the public. I'm losing the word right now. But for example, it's a marketing stunt. There you go. A PR marketing stunt. You can run one of those and get your press release out. You can run a social good campaign and do your press release like that. It has to be newsworthy at the end of the day.
And then second, it needs to be relevant. It has to be relevant to the publication in that you are pitching the press release to in hopes that they will publish it. That is when I've seen PR and press releases still work. And I mean that in a purely SEO sense. PR is still a very valuable body of work but I would say if you're doing PR purely for SEO, you're not going to be finding a lot of value out of it. You need to still kind of meet the base level of it has to be newsworthy and it has to be relevant to the publication you are pitching that PR piece to.
So hopefully that will help you in your own link building. It's another tool in your tool belt that you can use. But I would say, just like any tool, you can't use that one too much. There are very specific occasions of when you can. So hopefully that will help you in your own link building strategies. I'm going to pour out my tea right now. And if you guys found that video valuable, please like and subscribe. And I hope to see you guys again soon.
Thanks everybody.