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Optimizing Press Releases: SEO is Now About Natural Writing, Social Sharing & Interesting Content

Interpreting your press release results with PR Newswire’s Visibility Reports

Your release is written, approved, and has crossed the wire. You heave a big sigh. But you can’t relax yet. Now you need to prove the ROI on that press release to your boss.  PR Newswire’s Visibility Reports can help you quickly and easily quantify your results.

Immediate Results: ReleaseWatch Reports
Within a couple hours of issuing your press release, a ReleaseWatch report will be delivered via email.  This report showcases the display of your press release on a sample of sites from our press release syndication network.

As you’ll see from your ReleaseWatch report, your press release will appear on a variety of news web sites – from some of the Internet’s largest (like Yahoo! and AOL) to smaller niche sites serving a particular locality or industry.

Online Visibility
In combination with the places your release is posted online, you can use the number of online views your release received on prnewswire.com to gauge the consumer audience reading your news. The spider hits also give you a good idea of the level of availability your release has in search engine results – this number reveals how many times search engine spiders have found and indexed your news.

The Visibility Reports provide two ways for you to put your online results into context. One method is to use the Online Score shown at the top of the Online Visibility page. This score is created by comparing the results of your release against other releases sent to the same industry, allowing you to quickly see how your results compared to peer releases. But perhaps you’d prefer to see how the release fared compared to your own average. Go to the Release Summary page, click Compare Releases, select two releases and click submit. The results you see include the individual numbers for the two releases you selected along with your company average. Using this, you can easily determine if these releases are performing up to your normal level of success.

Finally, you can use the world map, or click through to the US-state map to determine whether or not your message resonated with the geographical audience you were hoping to reach.

Media Visibility
The Media Score at the top of the Media Visibility page tells you at a glance compares your media results against other releases sent to the same industries. Use the timeline to see if that activity happened all at once or was spread over several days, so that you know how long your news remained a topic of interest. You can then dig deeper into the results to see which outlets the journalists viewing your news actually work for, and which industries they typically cover.

See if those same news outlets have continued to read your releases over time by switching your view to “All Releases” for a quarter or a year. This will help you stay on top of a constantly changing media environment.

Search Visibility
Use your SEO Score to measure your success in writing a search engine friendly release. The score takes into account the number of times your search engine optimized release has been read, as well as how many times those readers clicked from the release to your specified landing pages, and compares this to other releases sent to the same industries.

See which keywords brought the most readers to your news, as well as which keywords were the most successful at driving additional traffic to your landing page(s), by using the Search Term Details table. Use the Top Search Terms button to dig even deeper into keywords, seeing which terms have been used the most over time (since February 1, 2008) to reach your news and your landing pages. This gives you valuable insight into which terms your audience uses most to find you, enabling you to write more compelling releases in the future.

Engagement
Is news release engagement increasingly on your mind? Do you sometimes wonder how to make sense of it? A good way to better understand reader engagement is to consider three of Forrester Research’s 4 i’s of Engagement (interaction, intimacy and influence) to with respect to your press release. Were your customers exhibiting interaction with your release by printing a copy of it? Did they express a certain level of intimacy with it by sharing it with others using social bookmarks like MySpace, Facebook, My Yahoo or Digg? Did they attempt to influence others by emailing it to others or grabbing the permalink to your release? Visibility Reports show you which of these actions readers took, help you understand what those actions imply about your readers, and illustrate how that level of engagement compares with other releases sent to the same industries so that you can determine your success in this vital area.

Monitoring and measuring the results of a PR campaign can be a daunting task, but PR Newswire’s reporting services provide a valuable tool for communications professionals that enable you to benchmark results, understand which messages had the most traction with audiences and demonstrate the return on investment in a convenient and easy-to-use platform.