Pimping Out the Pressroom – Optimizing for SEO and PR

If you’re in the business of optimizing websites, you probably drool at the idea of getting into your client’s press releases. They can be an easy source of regular, fresh content for the site, while optimized distribution helps with link building.

But it’s time for the SEO community to think beyond the press release when it comes to the newsroom. In fact, some would argue that the press release is dead; I’m not going there right now. But I will give you some ideas to really dig in and optimize the content of this active area of a client’s (or your own) website even if they don’t use press releases.

Why the Effort?

For SEO and for plain old PR, it’s a good idea to build out this section of a website. (You can even set up a pressroom for a company that has never issued a press release and doesn’t intend to start.) Here’s why:

• With everything an editor, blogger or journalist might want to know all in one place, life becomes super easy for someone wanting to include you in a media story (and hence building opportunities for natural inbound links from media coverage).
• There’s an opportunity to create and work with unique content that can be spread over multiple individual pages, with new topics added frequently.
• It makes you look good for knowing how to do this.

Building a Newsroom that Makes Sense for Journalists and Search Engines

Many companies simply list their press releases down the page and call it a pressroom. But when you understand what journalists, editors and bloggers might want to find in a pressroom, you start to realize you can do so much more here.

Your press center can be divvied up into multiple pages, all linked from the main pressroom page. This main page becomes the news and resources hub for anyone in the media who may be interested in your company or industry. From this main hub page, you’ll be linking to all the resources and info you can offer.

You can call this main pressroom page whatever you like, it doesn’t have to be “pressroom”. You might want to work the word “news” in, especially if it helps with search terms. A company called HappyFace Plastic Surgery could name their pressroom HappyFace Plastic Surgery News Center, for example.

What to Include on Your Main Newsroom Hub Page

On the main newsroom page, include these items below as a start. You may find you have different things you can display here, depending on the company’s resources and whether private or public. (I’m assuming this is a private company that doesn’t already have an investor relations section, etc.)

People

The PR contact at your company must be easy to get hold of. List this person right at the top of the main page, and include his or her cell phone number so an editor on a deadline can get hold quickly. (It’s also a good idea to use a general email for this contact that different people in the company can access, like pr@yourcompany.com, so it weathers any changes in personnel, vacations, etc.)

Link to leadership profiles. Each should have his or her own dedicated page, complete with a photo and a link to their LinkedIn profile, if possible. This is a great help for networking and gathering data when a journalist wants to reference the person you’ve just quoted in a press release, for example.

Company News

Your press releases should be available from this page, of course. Depending on how many you have to work with, you can just show the most recent handful, and then link to a page that lists all for the current year. In this section, you can also list previous years’ archives, so someone researching a story can easily access news items according to timeframe. If you don’t have enough to warrant breaking them out by year, you could simply link to a page to “view all press releases” and list them down that page.

If you don’t have press releases to work with, no worries. Simple announcement statements are fine, too. You could also include a feed from your blog on this page. Or, for that matter, your Twitter account or Facebook updates.

However, one thing you don’t want to do here is overwhelm with clutter, so if it’s not a main source of news about your company, don’t give it space here. You can include all your social media feed options on a satellite page linked from the main newsroom hub or simply link to your presence from here using the site icons.

Places to Connect with You

This includes online places like the social media outlets where you’re active as well as in-person events like tradeshows. On your main pressroom page, you may want to list a few of the most important and include a link to another page that lists every event you attend and all the places you can be found online.

Remember, you want to keep your main newsroom page clear and concise while maximizing the amount of information you can make available. This is a great way to built out lots of unique content pages!

In the Media

Whether people are talking about you on product review sites or in magazine articles, you’ll want to help point editors toward this third-party information. We like to write a unique introduction to the story and add any relevant background, perhaps highlighting the part where our client is mentioned, in addition to linking to the publication’s website.

This doesn’t have to be limited to the type of magazine coverage you see some companies getting. If you’re mentioned in an article by a local chamber of commerce, if you’re getting reviews on Google Places, or even if a blogger writes about you, work with what you’ve got.

Resources You Offer

Do you have a knowledge center on your website? Do you publish a newsletter? Are company personnel available for speaking engagements? Make sure all these items are detailed, either simply listed and linked from a section on the main pressroom page or listed on a dedicated page if warranted.

Videos are hot. If you’ve got videos, link to them here, by category if there are lots of them.

What else?

Partnership programs
Charities you contribute to
Testimonials
Whatever an editor in your industry might like to know about you…

Include a “Discussion Topics” section

Here you list the hot topics you or someone at your company is willing and able to talk to someone in the press about. Get as dangerous as you comfortably can here – it’s a great opportunity for keywords! Try to think of terms that a blogger or journalist might be searching on.

You could potentially link them to comprehensive content on each subject if you have it (such as all blog posts tagged with these terms) or a page detailing your expertise on the subject.

Our HappyFace Plastic Surgery center could potentially list the following as discussion topics:

• Celebrity plastic surgery
• New technology that reverses aging
• Risks of plastic surgery
• And so on…

Even if these are not direct sales-related keywords, they could help you get an interview and score media coverage, as long as they actually are within the company’s realm of expertise.

So, this is just a start. Think of all the others things that can be added to pimp out your pressroom for SEO and PR! Be sure to add your two cents worth below and let me know all the ways that you’re optimizing press centers here…

Photo credit: FaceMePLS