Googlize Your Press Releases with News Ads

Many pundits have weighed in on the pros and cons of PR firms dabbling in Search Engine Optimization techniques. Most of the Big Guys are buying-up SEO experts, to serve as a resource to their other marcomm shops. Certainly, if nothing else, PR agencies need to be cognizant of SEO principles when writing content for news releases, et al.

But there’s another mechanism for applying SEO techniques to the PR realm, courtesy of my favorite innovator, Shannon Whitley.

Shannon has integrated his PRXBuilder service with the Google AdWords API, so that his PRX customers can optimize every news release for the Google Ad Network. Creating a “NewsAd” is a simple part of creating a release at the PRXBuilder site.

The result is deceptively effective. This is another tool in PR’s new-media arsenal.

Example: Widgets Corp. announces a new product, the BigWidget. Their Social Media News Release can now not only include T’rati tags but can also use “NewsAds,” using keywords to optimize their release for organic SEO as well as for the Google Ad Network. If the prospect sees a NewsAd during their Google search for “widgets,” their subsequent click will take them right to the Widgets Corp. news release for the BigWidget.

Shannon recently ran his own experiment, using the launch of our Newshound Facebook app as a test case. He found that:

“(The) NewsAd-assisted release was almost 7 times more likely to be viewed when compared to (a typical) release. Additionally, the Google ad itself has been displayed over 430,000 times across the internet. Although the 430,000 viewers didn’t see the full release, they’ve at least seen the (Newshound) name and a little blurb about it.”

Those are some heady statistics for a first-run with the NewsAd service.

Creating a contextual ADVERTISEMENT for NEWS RELEASES is a cool and powerful concept. Hard to see a downside. Color me intrigued.

Related links from Tom Foremski (who takes an interesting POV) and Shannon himself.

P.S. – Yes, of course you can create your own “NewsAds” without using PRXBuilder. But it’s great that PRXBuilder has automated the process. (Have you ever created an AdWords campaign on your own? It’s not rocket science, but it’s also not a lickety-split project.)

Continue reading here: PR Helps Raise Venture Capital

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