Optimized news releases are an effective, proven technique that can improve your Web site’s visibility and search engine rankings. Especially when used in conjunction with other tactics, a news release strategy can be a powerful component of your interactive marketing plan.
However, that’s no reason to churn out release after release, essentially spamming the media for the sake of building backlinks to your Web site. Instead, focus on developing a newsworthy story and presenting it in a way that will engage your audience, and you’ll get far better results.
Why, you ask?
Well, if your readers, whether it’s the media or general public, find your story interesting enough… compelling enough… they will create the buzz that naturally generates placements, online and offline. The key is crafting that engaging news release, one that connects with your audience. Consider that your Holy Grail…
With this in mind, the best feature in PR Newswire’s new reporting platform is the Engagement Index. Currently in Beta testing, the new PR Newswire release reporting system will not disappoint. In fact, it’s pretty slick from both an SEO and PR perspective.
Since it’s not been officially released yet, I probably shouldn’t give away too much information. However, I simply can’t resist giving you a sneak peak of the new platform’s best feature:
the news release engagement index
If an engaging news release is your Holy Grail, consider the engagement index the path that will get you there.
Whether you are an SEO or PR professional, it’s imperative to know if your news
release is compelling users to take action - and to understand what those actions are. Are you telling the right story, the right way, to the right people, at the right time? Now, with just a few clicks of the mouse, you can find out just how actionable your news releases are.
The new Engagement Index measures how many readers took action after reading your story. It’s based on marketing’s new key metric - engagement - as introduced by Forrester in 2007. Made of four components (involvement, interaction, intimacy and influence), the engagement index as proposed by Forrester is believed to provide a more holistic understanding of your customer’s actions because it considers the effects of social media.
As applied in PR Newswire’s engagement index:
- Interaction: Measures interaction, such as printing
- Intimacy: Measures actions that demonstrate an affinity for your release, such as bookmarking on sites like Digg and del.icio.us
- Influence: Measures actions that demonstrate potential advocacy, like blogging
As you can see in the screen shot below, you also get a score (the round, bright green button) that rates how engaging your release was in comparison to others.
Measuring the Engagement of Your News Release
Since you’ll also have the ability compare news releases in the new reporting system, it should be fairly easy to discover trends and gauge how well your news releases are performing from both an SEO and PR perspective. You should be able to glean enough data to figure out how to improve your news releases, too.
Just look for the little green button.
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