How Does Press Coverage Boost a Website's SEO?

This was one of our most fun blog posts yet! We got to connect with 12 SEO and PR experts on how press coverage supports SEO aka Search Engine Optimization. A big goal of our clients is for the world to know their brand and press exposure is one way to get there because it boosts the brand's visibility and helps them get found more easily online! 

PR and SEO experts, can you share the top 5 ways that press coverage enhances a website's SEO? Here is what 12 thought leaders have to say.

• Secure Quality Backlinks
• Boost Brand Visibility
• Drive Referral Traffic
• Enhance Content Authority
• Diversify Content Sources
• Increase Referring Domains
• Improve Overall Google Rankings
• Amplify Social Signals
• Generate Fresh Content
• Build Brand Authority
• Optimize Keyword Visibility
• Leverage High-Quality Backlinks

Secure Quality Backlinks

There are countless ways through which press mentions can prove to be very friendly towards a site's SEO. Some of the most critical ones are: 

1. Quality Backlinks: Quality backlinks from reputable sources are important. The search engines crawl such quality backlinks, thereby considering a site valuable and consequently increasing its ranking. 
2. Increase Traffic: Articles and press releases regarding such news on reputed news sites can drive decent referral traffic to a website. This will result in more page views and unique visits, thus bumping up engagement metrics that search engines use as value pointers for quality and relevance. 
3. Brand Visibility and Brand Recognition: Press features are important to brands to boost visibility. The more aware the public becomes of the brand, the more likely they are to search for it directly, growing branded search traffic and thus raising the authority of search engines. 
4. Social Sharing: Press coverage usually gets shared heavily on social media, boosting the number of social signals as well. Social signals, in turn, are not direct ranking factors, but they can drive more traffic and activity, thus indirectly supporting your SEO. 
5. Content Diversification: Press coverage adds to the diversity of content about a brand available online. Diversified content allows more ability to rank for a more diversified range of keywords and topics, increasing reach and visibility within SERPs.

Kim Butler, SEO Strategist, Online Optimism

Boost Brand Visibility

Press coverage can significantly enhance a website's SEO by boosting its visibility, authority, and traffic. Here are the top five ways press coverage contributes to better SEO:

1. High-Quality Backlinks: Press coverage often includes backlinks from authoritative news sites, which are highly valuable for SEO. These backlinks signal to search engines that your website is credible and trustworthy, leading to improved rankings. The more high-authority sites linking to your content, the stronger your domain authority becomes. 
2. Increased Brand Visibility and Search Demand: Press coverage can elevate your brand’s visibility, leading to more people searching for your brand or related keywords. This increase in branded search queries can boost your site's overall search engine performance, as search engines may perceive your brand as more relevant and popular.
3. Referral Traffic: Press articles that include links to your website can drive significant referral traffic. This not only brings more visitors to your site but also improves user engagement metrics like time on site and pages per session, which are positive signals to search engines.
4. Enhanced Content Reach and Social Signals: When your brand is mentioned in the press, it often gets shared across social media platforms, amplifying your content's reach. While social signals are not direct ranking factors, increased content visibility and engagement can lead to more backlinks and brand mentions, indirectly benefiting your SEO.
5. Improved Credibility and Trustworthiness: Being featured in reputable publications enhances your brand’s credibility, which can positively impact user behavior. If users see your brand as trustworthy, they’re more likely to engage with your content, stay longer on your site, and return in the future—all of which are favorable for SEO.

By effective press coverage, you can create a strong, multifaceted impact on your website’s SEO, leading to improved rankings, increased organic traffic, and greater online authority.

Dhruv Shah, SEO Manager, Forge Digital Marketing

Drive Referral Traffic

As someone who's worked in both PR and SEO, I've seen directly how press coverage can supercharge a website's search rankings. Here are the top 5 ways I've experienced this boost:

1. High-quality backlinks: When reputable news outlets cover your brand, they often link back to your site. I once secured a feature in TechCrunch for a startup client, and that single backlink from such a high-authority domain noticeably improved their search rankings within weeks.
2. Increased brand mentions: Even unlinked mentions in press articles can help. Google picks up on these citations. For a local restaurant client, a string of positive reviews in city magazines led to better local search visibility, even without direct links.
3. Improved E-E-A-T signals: Press coverage, especially from respected industry publications, enhances your Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness in Google's eyes. I saw this play out when a finance app I worked with got quoted in The Wall Street Journal—their rankings for competitive financial terms improved shortly after.
4. Increased search volume: Media coverage often leads to more people searching for your brand name. This happened dramatically when a client's product went viral after being featured on a popular YouTube channel. The surge in brand searches seemed to positively impact their overall SEO performance.
5. Content amplification: Press articles can serve as great content for your own site. We often repurpose media coverage into blog posts or "As Seen In" sections. For a B2B client, creating a press page showcasing their industry coverage noticeably increased time-on-site metrics and led to improved rankings for key service pages.

Sonu Bisht, SEO Expert, Digininja Private Limited

Enhance Content Authority

1. High-Quality Backlinks: When reputable news outlets feature your press release, they often include a link back to your website. These high-quality backlinks boost your site’s authority in search engine rankings. 
2. Increased Brand Mentions: Press coverage leads to more brand mentions across the web. These mentions, even without direct links, can improve your site’s visibility and perceived authority. 
3. Improved Organic Traffic: Articles published on high-traffic websites drive significant referral traffic to your site, signaling to search engines that your content is valuable and relevant.
4. Enhanced Content Authority: Being featured in reputable publications enhances your perceived expertise in your industry, leading to higher engagement and lower bounce rates on your site.
5. Diversified Content Sources: Press coverage adds to the diversity of content sources linking to your site, which search engines favor for a natural backlink profile.

Slavko Kovacevic, Head of SEO, Health Link SEO

Diversify Content Sources

Press coverage enhances a website's SEO by:

1. Increasing referring domains – Press sites are typically authoritative domains that will pass on a lot of link authority to your website. This can help improve rankings, particularly for more competitive terms.
2. Increasing brand searches – Mentions of your company's name in the press will lead to more people searching for you online. When your business is being searched for by name, this tells search engines that your brand is popular and can help boost rankings for non-branded terms.
3. E-A-T boosts – E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) has become an important ranking factor. Search engines are looking to see that you are a verifiable authority on your subject matter. If you are getting large news publications vouching for you, then this is a strong signal that you are trustworthy and authoritative.
4. Traffic boosts – When a site gets good press coverage, it is common to see a big uplift in referral traffic. This is a good signal that your brand is of interest to people, which can result in longer-lasting search performance improvements.

Daniel Richardson, SEO Consultant, Dan Rich

Increase Referring Domains

Press coverage can significantly boost a website's SEO in several ways. Here are the top five:

1. Quality Backlinks: Press coverage often includes links back to your website from authoritative and reputable news sources. These high-quality backlinks improve your site’s domain authority and search engine ranking. Search engines view these links as endorsements of your site's credibility and relevance.
2. Increased Referral Traffic: Articles and news stories that link to your website can drive a surge of referral traffic. As more people click on these links and visit your site, it signals to search engines that your site is valuable and engaging, which can positively impact your rankings.
3. Enhanced Brand Visibility: Being featured in reputable publications or news outlets increases your brand's visibility and awareness. This can lead to more searches for your brand name and related keywords, which helps improve your site’s organic search rankings over time.
4. Social Signals: Press coverage often gets shared on social media platforms. When people engage with and share these articles, it generates social signals that can influence search engine algorithms. Increased social-media activity related to your content can boost your site's SEO performance.
5. Fresh Content: Media mentions and press coverage can lead to the creation of new and relevant content about your brand. Search engines favor fresh and up-to-date content, so having recent press coverage can contribute to improved rankings and keep your site relevant in search results.

Overall, press coverage can be a powerful tool for enhancing your website’s SEO by providing valuable backlinks, driving traffic, increasing visibility, and contributing to fresh content.

Melysha Acharya, SEO, Really Affordable SEO

Improve Overall Google Rankings

Digital PR massively helps to support SEO! Some of the key ways gaining coverage from the press can help your organic campaign include:

1. Improve backlink profile and increase domain authority: Links gained from relevant, quality publications help to improve a site's backlink profile, which in turn will improve a site's authority. Quality backlinks help to bring targeted organic traffic to a website.
2. Build brand authority and trust: A website with relevant and quality links will signal to Google that the site can be trusted, and Google loves ranking trusted brands highly. Their algorithm is also increasingly able to identify brand mentions—another indicator of credibility.
3. Increase website traffic: As well as supporting search visibility, any coverage and links gained from Digital PR efforts can contribute to a website's traffic, therefore supporting its SEO. Not only can pitching Digital PR content gain links and coverage, but having a Digital PR blog on-site that includes expert comments and advice can result in gaining natural links over time via citations, which can show a brand's authority and expertise within a subject.
4. Optimize keyword visibility: If a Digital PR campaign has relevant keywords tied into it, gaining links and coverage can contribute to keyword visibility. Although tying in keywords might not always be possible with Digital PR campaigns, they can still support as they could improve keyword associations when gaining coverage—Google can associate any linked content pages to other keywords that are included in the content.
5. Improve overall Google rankings: An effective Digital PR campaign can massively complement your overall SEO efforts, particularly when it comes to supporting E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness). All of the previously mentioned points—backlink profile, keyword tie-in, credibility, and brand awareness—work separately and as a collective to paint a larger picture that can positively impact a website's ability to rank well.

There’s so much synergy and crossover that it’s easy to see why Digital PR and SEO campaigns work hand-in-hand to support and augment one another!

Mikaila Storey, Digital PR Team Leader, The SEO Works

Amplify Social Signals

Here are the top 5 ways press coverage enhances a website's SEO: 

1. High-quality backlinks: Press coverage from authoritative sources provides high-quality backlinks, boosting your website's credibility and ranking.
2. Increased brand mentions: Press coverage increases brand mentions, which search engines use as a ranking signal, improving your website's visibility.
3. Relevant content: Press coverage creates relevant, high-quality content that search engines can index, driving more traffic to your website.
4. Improved domain authority: Consistent press coverage from reputable sources increases your domain authority, making your website more attractive to search engines.
5. Enhanced local SEO: Press coverage from local sources improves local SEO, increasing visibility in search results for location-specific queries.

Additionally, press coverage can also: 

• Drive referral traffic
• Increase social media engagement
• Boost credibility and trust
• Support link-building efforts
• Provide fresh, unique content for search engines to index

By leveraging press coverage, you can amplify your SEO efforts and drive more traffic, credibility, and conversions to your website.

Roshan Singh, SEO Executive, Urban Monkey

Generate Fresh Content

Press coverage will enhance SEO in these ways: 

• A press release should include a link back to a specific web page or the website homepage, which will build overall authority and likely help SEO efforts. 
• This press release is often picked up and reproduced by various media platforms, generating even more links. 
• When press releases get in front of the right audience, they can generate individuals searching for your brand name, your product, or other items related to your organization. This increased interest can potentially pass good signals to search engines. 

Max DesMarais, Director of Strategy, Vital Design

Build Brand Authority

PR is a highly effective and valuable way to do off-page SEO compared to many other quantity-focused PBN link-building strategies. Here are five ways press coverage enhances a website's SEO:

1. PR campaigns provide backlinks from credible websites looking to cover different stories, which can help you gain coverage for your core business topics. This helps build your off-page reputation signals.
2. PR campaigns increase brand value by contributing to off-page brand mentions, leading to potential growth in organic brand searches.
   
3. With PR campaigns, you can obtain optimized anchor texts for your backlinks, which can positively impact your rankings.
4. Backlinks from PR campaigns are genuine and high-quality, coming from high-authority domains established in their niche. These types of niche-relevant and high-authority backlinks are the most valuable and difficult to obtain, which can also positively impact your rankings.
5. A carefully crafted PR campaign can yield new connections and access to your target audience through the readership of the websites that cover your stories.

Sonja Marinkovic, SEO Consultant, Digital Search Hero

Optimize Keyword Visibility

When it comes to enhancing a website's SEO, press coverage plays a crucial role. Based on my experience, here are the top five ways press coverage can significantly boost your SEO efforts.

First, press coverage often results in high-quality backlinks from reputable news websites. These backlinks signal to search engines that your site is a trusted source of information, improving your domain authority and boosting your search rankings. For instance, after a major publication featured an article about my SEO strategies, I noticed a marked increase in organic traffic due to the authoritative backlink.

Second, press coverage increases your brand's visibility and awareness. When your brand is mentioned in news articles, it reaches a wider audience, driving more direct traffic to your website. This increased traffic can lead to higher engagement rates, which search engines interpret as a positive ranking factor.

Third, media features often generate social media buzz, leading to more shares and mentions. This social proof not only enhances your brand's online presence but also indirectly contributes to better SEO performance. For example, after being featured in a prominent online magazine, my social media mentions surged, resulting in more visitors and improved SEO metrics.

Fourth, press coverage helps you establish authority in your industry. When you are regularly featured in the media, it builds your reputation as a thought leader, encouraging more websites to link to your content and more users to search for your brand, positively impacting your search engine rankings.

Lastly, being covered by the press can lead to more user-generated content, such as reviews and blog posts, which further boosts your SEO. After receiving media coverage, I often see an increase in blog posts and reviews referencing my work, creating a ripple effect that enhances my website's SEO through additional backlinks and increased content diversity.

In summary, leveraging press coverage can significantly improve your website's SEO through quality backlinks, increased visibility, social media engagement, authority-building, and user-generated content. These elements work together to create a robust SEO strategy that drives long-term results.

Brandon Leibowitz, Owner, SEO Optimizers

Leverage High-Quality Backlinks

Want to give your website's SEO a turbo-boost? Look no further than press coverage. It's like rocket fuel for your search engine rankings, and here's why:  

1. Backlinks from reputable news outlets and blogs are like a stamp of approval from the cool kids in the digital world. They signal to search engines that your content is valuable and relevant, boosting your rankings. 
2. Press coverage often sends a surge of visitors to your site, increasing brand awareness and signaling to search engines that your site is popular and engaging, further improving your SEO standing. 
3. When your brand is featured in reputable publications, it builds credibility and trust with both search engines and potential customers. This trust translates into higher click-through rates and longer dwell times, both of which are positive signals for SEO. 
4. Consistent press coverage positions your brand as an authority in your industry. This not only attracts more backlinks from other reputable sources but also helps you rank for more competitive keywords. 
5. Unlike paid advertising, the credibility gained from press coverage has a lasting impact. It's like a good reputation—once you earn it, it's hard to lose. This long-term credibility can significantly enhance your website's SEO over time.

Michael Lazar, CEO, Content Author

How freaking cool! We want to thank all these experts for their insights on PR and SEO—and how press coverage can really support a brand's growth campaigns. If you're looking to get your brand featured, join the PR Mastermind and Community now!