SEOWhy a Professional Press Center Boosts Your Link Building Campaigns

Why a Professional Press Center Boosts Your Link Building Campaigns

More than just a place to publish your past press releases, a press center makes your very best content easily available for anyone who might write about and link to your site.

A good professional press centre can you give any link building campaign a significant boost. But to design one, SEOs need to understand its real purpose and the essential elements that must be included to make it work. Here’s the top five ways a press center can boost a link building campaign:

  1. A professional press center can give a journalist confidence in your website and that makes it more likely that they’ll give you an editorial link.
  2. A journalist can find all your best material in one place. That makes them more likely to use it and makes sure they don’t miss something important.
  3. Journalists often have questions they’d like answered, and if they can’t find the answers they’ll get frustrated and move on the another story. But a press center shows them exactly where to find the information they need and gives them contact details so they can speak to someone if they want to.
  4. A professional press center makes you stand out from your competitors who have really not thought through the function of the press center – the journalist is more likely to write about you rather than your competitors.
  5. A press center by itself can attract a significant number of links to your site as the screenshot below from Majestic.com shows.

majestic-press-center

Your chances of getting media coverage can be greatly enhanced if you have a professional press center on your site. But that doesn’t mean you have to invest in a lot of expensive features – the challenges are more strategic than technical. With some careful planning, you can create a press center that’s really going to impress any journalist thinking of writing about your company.

The secret is to understand what the journalist really wants and make sure that you provide it. Essentially, journalists and bloggers want to write a ‘good story’ about your company, and they want to write it as quickly and as accurately as possible.

And it’s the job of your press center to provide everything a journalist needs to be able to write that good story about you. That should be the main focus of your press center – anything that diverts the journalist away from that job should be avoided.

Research from TEKGROUP in their Online Newsroom Survey Report of 2015, sets out the most important features that the journalist looks for in an online newsroom or press center. Here’s a screenshot from the report:

 

newsroom-features

Unless you’re a very large company, you probably won’t need number one on the list, search functionality. But PR contacts, news releases and photos are essential.

The ability to give journalists email alerts or breaking stories is probably a ‘must have’ for only the largest of companies or organizations.

So let’s look at the elements that every small-to-medium-sized company should be thinking about:

  1. The latest news releases
    This is fundamental and should be right at the top of the home page of your press center. A quick glance and a journalist will see the latest news in your company. Aim to show between two to three of your latest releases. You don’t need to show more but it’s good to provide a link to older releases, just in case the journalist is interested in digging deep.
  2. PR contact details
    PR contact details should be immediately obvious and need to be given prominence. The top right hand corner is the best place for this. Include a name, telephone number, email address and links to social media accounts.
  3. Your company in the news
    Here you can list any coverage you have won in the past. Include links to the original articles if you can. The fact that your company has already been featured in the media is important because it increases the journalist’s trust in your brand. If other journalists have already trusted you, they can feel confident that you are a reliable source.
  4. About your company
    Here you should publish a well-written description of your company and what makes you different. Introduce your founders, write about your team members and give a sense of the real people behind the company.
  5. Our company on the web
    In this section, you can list articles that you have written and submitted to top industry blogs. If you have published an article on a leading publication, then not only does a new journalist get more detail about you and your company, but their trust in you as a reliable source also increases.
  6. Your own content
    Content that you control so from a journalist’s point of view, it’s not totally objective. But nevertheless it can be useful to a journalist so here you can list the best or the most popular of your posts, videos or even services that you’ve published on your site.
  7. Links for potential customers
    Earlier we said it was important not to divert a journalist from the job of writing a good story about your company. So you don’t necessarily want the journalist to read sales copy or information specifically written for customers.However, it’s not just journalists who will end up on your press center, members of the public and potential customers will find their way there too. Don’t discourage them – it’s important to be open about how you deal with the press, but you should also provide links to what they’re really looking for – your products and services!

Of course, having a great press center is not much use if you’re not actively creating newsworthy content, seeking out new media outlets and contacting journalists and editors. However, it does mean that any journalist visiting will get a very professional impression of your site and they’ll also get everything they need to write a great story about your company.

And that of course will make them more likely to give you an editorial link.

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