Mediaboss Marketing

This is the first of a three-part article about Public Relations for SEO. Let me start by saying that a press release written, issued and leveraged properly, can result in word-of-mouth, articles paraphrasing the release, and at a minimum, at least some backlinks. But, a press release alone will get much less exposure than one coupled with outreach to individual journalists and bloggers directly prior to issuing it.

A few years ago, I launched a website called FindHow, and we gave it a full-court press from a PR standpoint.In this series of articles, Ill run through all the best practices we leveraged. Before we start, the results we garnered for our launch are shown below.

In the first month of FindHows existence, it surpassed 15,000 unique visitors and eventually grew to around the 100,000 uniques mark. After about five months, the Public Relations effort had resulted in a total of around 18,000 links to the site, primarily because of prominent media mentions that boosted the sites credibility and aided word of mouth:

Figure 1 Result: Prominent Media Mentions, Traffic, and Links

The six Major Public Relations Steps that we followed, which can improve your SEO rankings and increase conversions are listed below. This article will cover the first two, and subsequent articles will cover the rest.

If you have not read Positioning: The Battle for the Mind by Ries & Trout, you should run, not walk, to your Kindle and download it. They make the point that when positioning a product, service or company, the most important thing is not the company or the product name itself its the category that it sits in and the trend that it relates to.

Unless youre Dean Kamen with the Segway, the press is not going to want to talk about your product, service or website if its in a class by itself. Its far better to convince them that there is a big trend going on, which you happen to be at the forefront of. You may (heaven forbid) even want to mention competitors to prove there is really a trend.

Ries and Trout point out that the best position to take in the mind is first, although its not the only position (you can position yourself as the alternative, for example, like 7-Up, the UnCola).

When planning the launch of FindHow, we decided that we would position it as a search engine, but clearly, it wasnt the first one; it was 15 years too late for that.

More here:
Public Relations For SEO: The Complete Guide