Learning how to write a press release for Google News is a five-step process that can be taught in a half-day public relations workshop. So, why haven’t more public relations firms and departments seized this opportunity?
As Columbus discovered, training the crews of the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria how to sail west was a relatively straightforward task. The real challenge was convincing Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand that they wouldn’t fall off the edge of the world.
Google News represents a shift in the PR paradigm. That explains why so few innovators and early adopters have started exploring this new medium. Nevertheless, this is a voyage that you won’t want to miss.
The first step in learning how to write a press release for Google News is identifying a target audience and developing a segmentation strategy. This requires a re-definition of public relations that is significantly broader than media relations.
Many PR people think their primary purpose is to pitch the press, not reach prospects. Since Google News uses computer algorithms instead of human editors, they can’t imagine placing stories there. However, among the 4,500 “news sources” that Google News continuously crawls are PR Newswire, Business Wire, Market Wire, and PR Web.
When users search Google News for a term or phrase, they often find press releases as well as articles on the first three pages of results. This means that PR people can use Google News to pitch their news stories directly to prospects.
PR people can also use Google News to reach the press. According to the annual Middleberg/Ross Survey of Media in the Wired World, “Journalists now use the Internet as easily as the phone.” For article research, 92% of journalists working at newspapers, magazines and broadcast outlets nationwide go online – and 81% say they search online daily.
This is a new way of looking at the PR world.
The second step is conducting keyword research and finding your search term sweet spot. This requires learning to use a keyword suggestion tool.
Overture offers a free keyword suggestion tool, but it has limitations. While it tells you how many times a term was searched on last month, it doesn’t tell you how many competing web pages use the same term.
This is why most serious search engine optimizers use Wordtracker. While it isn’t free, it combines a database of 313 million search queries over the last 60 days with tools that make mining the information easy.
For example, while writing this article, I used Wordtracker to identify the best search terms for Google. It helped me discover that the phrase, “how to write a press release” gets 76 searches a day, but faces 11,000 competing web pages. Nevertheless, this makes it better than alternatives, such as “how to write an effective press release” or “how to write press releases”, which get fewer searches and face proportionally more competition.
The third step is focusing on Google News, even though it is relatively new.
Launched in September 2002, Google News is still technically in “beta”. However, it already deserves to be on your “A” list.
According to Nielsen//NetRatings, Google News attracted 3.4 million unique users in July 2003. This ranked Google News in the top 20 current events and global news sites, in a comparable position to BBC News.
According to comScore’s Media Metrix, which uses a different methodology, Google News had 2.24 million unique visitors in August 2003, making it the 17th most popular general news site, right behind LATimes.com.
As Mark Glazer observed recently in the Online Journalism Review, “Not too shabby for an upstart in beta with essentially no editorial staff.”
The fourth step is optimizing press releases to get high rankings on Google News for as long as possible.
According to an iProspect survey, less than 19% of search engine users review more than three pages of results before selecting a listing. This puts a premium on getting a top 30 ranking.
Google News gets 100,000 articles a day and includes them for 30 days. That creates an index of 3 million articles from the past month. The challenge is writing a press release that is one of the 30 most relevant articles out of the 3 million in the index for a specific search term or phrase.
To succeed, you need to do half a dozen things well. According to Marcia Yudkin, author of 11 books, this includes:
The fifth and final step is tracking optimization’s effects and measuring promotion’s results. This requires learning to use Web analytics and other measuring tools.
According to a survey last year by the CMO Council, senior marketing executives find themselves in the position of having to justify resources based on very tangible metrics. The survey also found that, while press and analyst influence remain important, lead generation and sales are the new metrics of marketing performance.
This represents both a challenge and an opportunity for PR people. Fortunately, there are a variety of tools for measuring success.
New versions of WebTrends, ClickTracks, Urchin and HitBox enable you to do more than analyze log files to see the actual terms people used to reach your Web site. They now enable you to “close the loop” by measuring sales conversions and return on investment (ROI).
These are the ways that senior marketing executives want to measure success and these are the kind of statistics that can re-launch careers in public relations.
In short, there are tremendous benefits to those who learn how to write a press release for Google News. The only risks involve convincing your clients or colleagues that sailing west is really a more rewarding route to the east.
Greg Jarboe is the co-founder and CEO of SEO-PR, which provides search engine optimization and public relations services to Southwest Airlines, Verizon SuperPages.com, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), and a growing list of other organizations. Jarboe is also the editor of SEO-PRs News Blog.
