Marketing Matrix: Are You Wasting Budget With Online Press Release Distribution?

Posted by Tim Grice

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

The title of this post may come across a little contentious, however I hope by the end of it you understand where I am coming from.

Over the years, I have been privileged enough to work with some large businesses that can afford to throw big budgets at online marketing. One of the first tasks I undertake is a meeting to discuss previous strategies. As my main focus is natural search, one of the things I always find interesting is discussing link building strategies carried out by previous agencies and internal SEOs. This can be quite enlightening, but really worrying at the same time, you begin to realise fairly quickly why SEO gets such bad press.

One of the things that always makes my head spin is companies who invest in pumping out online press releases through well-known services for the sheer purpose of building links!

"So, what's your link building strategy?", "Well, we send out press releases every week and get thousands of links!” fantastic. You realise at this point the road ahead is a long one.

This is my opinion and you can disagree with me in the comments, sending out press releases through services such as PRnewswire or Marketwire is not a link building strategy, in fact paying for these services alone is nothing but a waste of time and money.

So, I did a little research as I wanted to confirm my long held belief, asking 20 different SEOs to give a rough figure as to how much each of their clients spend on Online press release distribution. I have to say even I was shocked by the figures (a quick thank you to all those who responded, cheers guys).

Press Release Spend

As you can see 40% of clients were spending £2000 - £3000 a month on press release distribution alone, even at the most expensive rates that’s 6 - 10 per month. Do you really have that much to talk about? On top of that, 2.5% were spending over £5000 per month on press release distribution, that figure is staggering!

I work with some very big brands and they would struggle to fulfill that quota. When I asked why this amount was being spent each month, the same answers came back, "The MD/CEO/Marketing Director believes it to be a solid link building strategy". I know this isn't large enough to be a meaningful sample, but it gives you a slight insight into the minds of some fairly big organisations.

Why is it a Terrible Strategy

I'm sure you're all aware that a good link building strategy should:

Follow natural linking patterns
Be aimed at acquiring links from unique domains
Incorporate social signals

So let's go through this step by step:

Is it natural?

You're sending the same content out to multiple hubs, with the same links in the same anchor text which automatically updates within seconds. Natural? Nah, at least not on its own.

Links from unique domains?

Sure, the first time you send a press release out all your links will be from unique domains. Maybe if you use multiple distribution services you will get plenty of links from unique domains. However if you use these services month after month, all you're doing is acquiring low quality links from the same domains over and over again.

Incorporating social signals?

Erm... nope. The only way this could develop social signals is if someone actually read these releases and referred back to your site through twitter or Facebook etc...

So alone press releases are not a good link building strategy. To emphasise the point a little more I monitored a recent press release that I distributed:

press release results

Out of just over 300 hubs precisely 299 were in my report from the distribution service. A month later I checked OSE where I found 36 unique linking domains, out of these only 11 were indexed in Google and my Google alerts account only picked up on four of them. Personally I think this is some indication as to how Google value these types of links.

It's not All Doom and Gloom

I guess I better get a little more positive before I start receiving nasty emails from some of these distribution services and press release fan boys :). I honestly believe that press releases can be used to benefit rankings!

I am sure some of you won't agree, but I am a firm believer in creating 'noise' links, but we'll go into that in a little while. Press releases can be used effectively as part of an integrated link building strategy.

pres release link strategy

Now I know there are other elements but I just want to cover a few of the basics:

1) Creating the Bait

So many people think link bait has to be absolutely amazing, never before seen, wonderfully awesome content. Slight exaggeration but let’s continue... Link bait in my opinion has more to do with the site publishing the content than the actual content itself. Sometimes really average content can garner tons of links simply because the site publishing it has some authority. I have seen terrible content flying around Twitter or Facebook for the simple reason that it was published on the Telegraph or New York Times etc...

So as budding SEOs, the first step to creating link bait isn't thinking up the idea, instead it is making relationships and reaching out to the right people. Getting great content on the right publication just about guarantees some decent links, of course the article published will have to refer/link back to the site you are targeting.

2) Creating noise links

What's the first thing that happens when you get an article published on a well read and well respected publication? It gets scraped hundreds of times.

A very quick example:

I had a link from the White Board Friday on 'Links in Old Content' (Thanks Cyrus). My site went on that same day to receive over 50 pingbacks! Up to date it is over 100! Thanks SEOmoz :)

In my opinion all these type of links (scraped links) help to raise the link profile and authority of my site. So what is the harm in giving them a push once in a while?

Google knows these popular websites get scraped and creating more of them if you have a link from a strong site, is not going to harm you and in my opinion it helps.

So provide some unique commentary of your own on the article and publish to your favourite newswire, article directories and content hubs. My personal advice would be to use plenty of variation with your anchor text as not to upset any of the algorithms.

3) Guest posting

Yes it's old news, but a really important aspect of link strategy; you should be constantly building a list of blogs you can write for whenever you want to push a new peice of content/link bait. Be proactive in reaching out to relevant bloggers. Feed them genuine content, not just a rewritten article you copied from ezinearticles. You want to make sure that when your story goes live on Fox News you have plenty of friends who will cover it and link back to your site as well as the publication. Guaranteed link bait :)

4) Social signals

Last but certainly not least is creating the right social signals and utilise all your resources.

As well as regularly reaching out to bloggers you should also be reaching out on Twitter and Facebook. When the time comes your new friends will be more than happy to tweet, stumble and share your ultra link worthy content.

You will also notice that content on highly authoritative resources is almost always more likely to get shared, and more sharing = more links.

So back to press releases...

Using them as a one dimensional strategy = waste of time, money and energy.

Incorporating them into an overall link building strategy, utilising them only when the content is worth sharing = winning formula.

Heading a team that builds thousands of links every month through viral and social promotions gives me some tremendous insights and I have seen the above strategy work time and time again in boosting rankings and overall organic traffic to a website.

One caveat I'll add - If you're the super industry authority and have a large readership, keep your best content for yourself.

There are lots of tools, tips and techniques out there that will help enhance a link building campaign. However we need to figure out how they fit into our overall strategy and not just throw budget mindlessly at well sold services.

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