Press Releases vs. SEO

The traditional use of press releases versus the new use of business communications-trendy SEO is a topic worth close investigating when planning a marketing strategy for any company. Sports companies, in particular, have a tendency to maintain a very loyal customer base and so stand to benefit from both methods of marketing. SEO excels as a technical means of increasing internet visibility by improving a company’s rankings in search result; a good search engine ranking is the difference between life and death for an internet company (Collins, 2012). Even though press releases are older and less relevant to internet visibility, they also serve an important function. Those loyal customer bases that sports companies often enjoy are maintained through the relatively intimate contact that a press release provides. It feels like a personal statement, crafted for the ears of the customers while SEO can often seem cold and mechanical (“Why press releases”, n.d.).

A mixture of these two strategies is most effective for building and maintaining a healthy customer base. The primary way of getting new customers online and exposing them to persuaders is through search engines and the only way to show up on search engines is through SEO. For this reason, SEO content must be implemented for key search strings to keep the company highly ranked on search results. A shoe company, for instance, might benefit from ranking highly with the search strings “buy running shoes online” or “new basketball shoes”. Press releases, on the other hand, are critical to maintaining customer loyalty. They can ignore the mechanics of SEO and thus be phrased as more intimate, direct interactions with customers. While an SEO article would be required to repeat a specific search string a certain number of times to rank highly on a search engine, a press release would be free to focus on appealing to the purchasing trends of the company’s known customers, such as describing the newest baseball spike as spring comes around. By using both, the company’s marketing strategy attends both potential customers and existing customers.

References

Collins, D. (2012, November 8). Why use SEO to promote your website?. Inwise. Retrieved April 27, 2013, from http://blog.inwise.com/why-use-seo-to-promote-your-website.html 

Why press releases are important in your marketing strategy. (n.d.). Words Worth Reading. Retrieved April 27, 2013, from www.wordsworthreading.co.uk