Press Releases – Key Tool in 2017 Online Marketing

Local search and Google’s 3-pack continues to be a huge deal because there is so much money for businesses in ranking. Recently one study suggested that the proximity of businesses to the searcher may be the #1 ranking factor. This is now agreed among experienced SEOs.  However, it is only part of the story…

Here’s what our team has observed with thousands of search engine results and online press release results:

• With many standard searches for standard business types, how close the searcher is to the physical business is a huge factor in the rankings that appear.
• Google largely determines the physical address of a business by the number of times and the consistency that it’s address and other contact details appear online on multiple sites (we call these “citations”).
• Google knows whether people visit the businesses by tracking their phone’s location. This can create a snowball where higher rankings lead to more customers, which leads to higher rankings, which leads to more customers.
• Getting more citations, links and traffic on quality sites is one way to dramatically increase rankings when someone close to a business searches for that business type.
• Online press releases on our service will get you over 200 of these Google safe citations in under 24 hours. Whether it is the citations that cause the increase in rankings, or the increase in click through traffic and customers is unclear… it seems to be the two working together that is generating great results for local businesses.
• It’s vitally important to make sure you use the same address and contact details everywhere the business address appears online, and produce an engaging press release.

Less Standard Searches…

One problem with this type of thinking is that a huge percentage of searches are non-standard.   And a huge little known key to getting local traffic online is to target non-standard searches and/or very low competition searches where Google doesn’t show it’s 3-pack search results.

These non-standard searches might appear:

• When you search for a small suburb or area and the business type
• When you search for an unusual business type or an unusual or less standard type of service or product (like elbow injury treatment instead of chiropracter)
• On any highly specific search that includes longer tail ultra-specific keywords

We’ve observed over and over that ranking for these search terms is easier, lasts much longer, and can bring in valuable traffic…especially if you’re targeting search terms with “buyer intent”.

And yes, using online press releases is one extremely fast, efficient way of growing a businesses customer base, and sending the right signals, and that is why we’ve seen local business grow 300% in months as a result of great ongoing press release campaigns.

Having a lot of quality unique content on your site that includes local search terms is also very helpful…especially if you’re linking to that content with your online press releases.