How To Write A Press Release For Google News

Learning how to write a press release for Google News is afive-step process that can be taught in a half-day public relationsworkshop. So, why haven't more public relations firms and departmentsseized this opportunity?

As Columbus discovered, training the crews of the Nina,Pinta, and Santa Maria how to sail west was a relativelystraightforward task. The real challenge was convincing Queen Isabellaand King Ferdinand that they wouldn't fall off the edge of the world.

Google News represents a shift in the PR paradigm. Thatexplains why so few innovators and early adopters have startedexploring this new medium. Nevertheless, this is a voyage that youwon't want to miss.

The first step in learning how to write a press release forGoogle News is identifying a target audience and developing asegmentation strategy. This requires a re-definition of publicrelations that is significantly broader than media relations.

Many PR people think their primary purpose is to pitch thepress, not reach prospects. Since Google News uses computer algorithmsinstead of human editors, they can't imagine placing stories there.However, among the 4,500 "news sources" that Google News continuouslycrawls are PR Newswire, Business Wire, Market Wire, and PR Web.

When users search Google News for a term or phrase, they oftenfind press releases as well as articles on the first three pages ofresults. This means that PR people can use Google News to pitch theirnews stories directly to prospects.

PR people can also use Google News to reach the press.According to the annual Middleberg/Ross Survey of Media in the WiredWorld, "Journalists now use the Internet as easily as the phone." Forarticle research, 92% of journalists working at newspapers, magazinesand broadcast outlets nationwide go online - and 81% say they searchonline daily.

This is a new way of looking at the PR world.

The second step is conducting keyword research and finding yoursearch term sweet spot. This requires learning to use a keywordsuggestion tool.

Overture offers a free keyword suggestion tool, but it haslimitations. While it tells you how many times a term was searched onlast month, it doesn't tell you how many competing web pages use thesame term.

This is why most serious search engine optimizers useWordtracker. While it isn't free, it combines a database of 313 millionsearch queries over the last 60 days with tools that make mining theinformation easy.

For example, while writing this article, I used Wordtracker toidentify the best search terms for Google. It helped me discover thatthe phrase, "how to write a press release" gets 76 searches a day, butfaces 11,000 competing web pages. Nevertheless, this makes it betterthan alternatives, such as "how to write an effective press release" or"how to write press releases", which get fewer searches and faceproportionally more competition.

The third step is focusing on Google News, even though it is relatively new.

Launched in September 2002, Google News is still technically in "beta". However, it already deserves to be on your "A" list.

According to Nielsen//NetRatings, Google News attracted 3.4million unique users in July 2003. This ranked Google News in the top20 current events and global news sites, in a comparable position toBBC News.

According to comScore's Media Metrix, which uses a differentmethodology, Google News had 2.24 million unique visitors in August2003, making it the 17th most popular general news site, right behindLATimes.com.

As Mark Glazer observed recently in the Online JournalismReview, "Not too shabby for an upstart in beta with essentially noeditorial staff."

The fourth step is optimizing press releases to get high rankings on Google News for as long as possible.

According to an iProspect survey, less than 19% of searchengine users review more than three pages of results before selecting alisting. This puts a premium on getting a top 30 ranking.

Google News gets 100,000 articles a day and includes them for30 days. That creates an index of 3 million articles from the pastmonth. The challenge is writing a press release that is one of the 30most relevant articles out of the 3 million in the index for a specificsearch term or phrase.

To succeed, you need to do half a dozen things well. According to Marcia Yudkin, author of 11 books, this includes:

Decide on a keyword phrase that ties in to the product or service you are promoting and that people actually search for.

Place this phrase into your press release headline and repeat it around three times within the body of your press release.

Unless the proper name of your product or service isalready well-known, emphasize its generic description rather than itsname.

Likewise, substitute keyword phrases for pronouns like "it" or "its" to increase their overall frequency in the release.

Include a subhead, which in turn includes your keyword phrase, if your release goes on for more than three paragraphs.

Post your release at your own Web site on its own page,linked from your home page, in addition to submitting it to yourfavorite press release distribution service.

The fifth and final step is tracking optimization's effects andmeasuring promotion's results. This requires learning to use Webanalytics and other measuring tools.

According to a survey last year by the CMO Council, seniormarketing executives find themselves in the position of having tojustify resources based on very tangible metrics. The survey also foundthat, while press and analyst influence remain important, leadgeneration and sales are the new metrics of marketing performance.

This represents both a challenge and an opportunity for PRpeople. Fortunately, there are a variety of tools for measuringsuccess.

New versions of WebTrends, ClickTracks, Urchin and HitBoxenable you to do more than analyze log files to see the actual termspeople used to reach your Web site. They now enable you to "close theloop" by measuring sales conversions and return on investment (ROI).

These are the ways that senior marketing executives want tomeasure success and these are the kind of statistics that can re-launchcareers in public relations.

In short, there are tremendous benefits to those who learn howto write a press release for Google News. The only risks involveconvincing your clients or colleagues that sailing west is really amore rewarding route to the east.

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