Leveraging Press Releases for Citations

Press releases are an outdated strategy of building links for traditional SEO.

But they are still very useful tools for Google Business Profiles.

Here is the process at a high level:

  • Write one brief article about your company.
  • Include your company’s NAP information within the article.
  • Add your GMB listing’s link to the article.
  • Get the article distributed to multiple press release websites.

Why does this work?

This acts as another source for expanding your citation footprint.

As your article gets added to different press release websites, it means you’re building more citations.

These extra citations give your listing a competitive edge.

That’s because most of your competitors aren’t building any citations in the first place.

And the ones that do will stop after they’ve exhausted all available directories.

The process

Step 1: Write an article

The article can be about 350-500 words in length.

If you aren’t sure what to write about, here are some topics to get started:

  • Launching a new product or service
  • A company update (e.g. a new senior hire)
  • Your company’s perspective on something happening in your industry

Step 2: Add your NAP information

As a refresher, NAP stands for:

  • Name of your business
  • Address
  • Phone number

As with other citations, you should make sure the formatting of these exactly matches what is on your Google Business Profile.

Step 3: Add your GMB share URL

Go to Google maps and search for your business.

Click the Share icon to select the URL:

Add a line like this to your press release (right before your NAP):

To learn more, please find us on Google: [URL]

Note: Do not add your website’s URL to the article.

At best, links from press release websites are not valued by Google.

At worse, they can be viewed as link spam and actually hurt your website.

Step 4: Submit your article for distribution

Since we are doing this to expand our citation footprint, we don’t necessarily need to get on the largest news sites in the world.

(If we’re being honest, they wouldn’t be interested in a press release about a company’s new website anyways.)

To get the job done, we should be taking advantage of free distribution services.

As many of these submit to the same websites, I recommend using a maximum of two.

Here is a list:

A quick reminder

Before using this process, you should build citations on relevant directories first.

Please refer to these processes for more information.