6 Ways You’re Missing Out If Your SEO Campaigns Don’t Include Press Coverage
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Press coverage is an essential part of the modern SEO mix. Google has been engaged for the last few years in a relentless push towards rewarding brands in search and returning their results near the top. Alongside all the other things you do to represent your business as a brand (events, supporting charities and recruitment), obtaining quality press mentions and coverage is another important cog. Real brands get real press coverage, it’s as simple as that. Real brands don’t just obtain easy to pick up links and mentions on DA30+ blogs.
Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool. … Brand affinity is clearly hard wired. It is so fundamental to human existence that it’s not going away. It must have a genetic component.
Eric Schmidt, Google Chair via Business Insider
SEO agencies, and in-house SEOs who continue to focus only on links and on-site optimization are missing the huge opportunity to build a real brand for the businesses they represent. Here are some of the main benefits of obtaining press coverage:
- Google is getting better at identifying ‘entities’ and the context in which a link is placed so when a business is covered in an article about a certain topic, it conveys a certain amount of additional authority to that company when it writes about that topic.
- Many pieces of press coverage will include links to the company that is being covered. On top of the newer (and developing) capacities that Google has, this traditional signal can be obtained in the form of high authority articles from high authority journalists linking to the business.
- Immediate sales from the press coverage are common. Readers are shown to trust editorial content more than ads, and often this is a nice ‘side benefit’ to your SEO efforts – the long term value of any links, and the short term value of the sales and traffic boost your customers obtain.
- For those who also manage paid advertising budgets, all the extra traffic from high impact press coverage can be retargeted, often with an extremely high conversion rate, with future ads.
- It’s often really easy to obtain links to the press articles you receive, since your outreach doesn’t involve asking for a link to a commercial site. Where these also contain links this means you can boost the impact of that link for a low cost by sharing that article with influencers and using your normal link building and promotional strategies.
The final and, for many of you, the most important benefit you’re missing out on is client satisfaction. They absolutely love to see their business covered in the press. It’s much easier for both agencies and in-house teams to obtain the budgets they need for high-impact pieces of content if the client or boss is confident of receiving some high-impact press coverage to match. Developing your skills at handling the press and securing coverage for your clients will help you secure bigger budgets for bigger projects from your increasingly happy clients. Oh and don’t forget all the extra sales they’ll be getting from the previous 5 benefits too.
Complete Guide to the Press for SEO Professionals
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