How To Get Extra Web Visitors From Online Press Releases

Press Release Web Traffic – No Magic Bullet, Just Useful Advice

We are firmly convinced that the biggest benefit to publishing online press releases is simply increased traffic to your website, as we discussed in these articles.  That leads to the obvious question – “How do I get traffic from my press releases?”

We don’t claim any “inside information” about how Google or other search engines work (and anyone who does claim such a thing is, well, at least stretching the truth…) – but we watch what happens on our press release websites carefully, and we have some useful advice.

First, though, we need to describe some common sources of press release web traffic.

Standard Web Searches for Market-Related Keywords

Standard web searches (as opposed to specialized searches, such as those for News or Blogs) will yield longer-lasting traffic additions, since they are less time-sensitive than many specialized searches.  

Standard Web Searches for Company, Product & Brand Names

Most searches for a company name or a brand name will yield good first-page search placement without benefit of any press releases or other publicity, simply because these terms are usually rather unique.  However, we’ve seen many instances where the existence of a press release in the search results can bolster your positioning, branding, and control for this type of search.

“How To” in 4 Steps

Our advice about “how to” get additional traffic is simple, and consists of 4 steps, that we believe should be done on a regular, continuing basis – these steps are:

1. Research
2. Write & Publish
3. Measure
4. Repeat

Research

The goal of this step is to identify a list of keywords and phrases associated with your own marketplace.  There are many many resources to help with this. Our favorite is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. You don’t need to have a Google Adwords account to use it, it is free, and the information you can find is invaluable.  You can input phrases or even websites and the tool will give you lists of associated words and phrases.  You should make a list of those that are most applicable to your own marketing goals.

You will use the list you create to come up with press releases you will write and publish.

Another bit of ongoing research that may be helpful is to keep abreast of Google Trends – as you watch the “hot” topics that folks are searching for, you may find it possible to use some of these current trends in your press release headline, or as a hook or angle in your release.

Write & Publish

The list of keywords you create, and perhaps your awareness of the “hot trends” of the moment, can be used to create the headlines for your press releases.  The headline of your press release is probably the single most important item used by the search engines to place your release in the search results.

Also, when you write your headline, keep the keyword phrase you used near the beginning of the headline.  We recommend including it in the first 60 characters or so.

When it comes to writing the content, we strongly recommend that you do not obsess about it much. Do not try to stuff it with the keywords you’ve learned about in your research.  Just write naturally about the topic in your headline, write unique content (copying content from elsewhere will likely make your good research and headline useless…) – and the keywords in the content will take care of themselves, and the search engines will “know” what it’s about.

Measure

Once your press release is published, you need to measure the traffic that it generates. You can see how many views your release has had on SEOPressReleases.com, but you really ought to be aware of more than that.  We recommend that you put some sort of tracking code on your website, to learn about where your traffic is coming from, and what keywords are being searched on to find you.  Google Analytics is a powerful (and free) solution, and it’s fine, but frankly, we find it a bit cumbersome.  You might want to try a service like Statcounter, which is very powerful, easy-to-use, and is inexpensive (also has a great free option).

Repeat

If you do the research and craft a single press release, you should not expect that doing that one time will produce great results.  If it does, that’s great, but you were luckier than smart.  It’s not wise to expect that every press release will be a winner.  However, with repetition and persistence you will learn more over time about what it takes to write press releases that produce traffic.

When it comes to online press releases, we recommend that you send at least one release per week.

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