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Ask HN: Are there better options than PR Web out there?

14 points by AdilD ↗ HN
I'm trying to increase my SEO so I wanted to start using a PR service that could help and I'm wondering if anyone has any thoughts and/or recommendations if whether PR Web is the best way to go or if there are competitor sites out there that are as efficient at a better cost. I know you got to spend money to make money but with their prices ranging from 80 - 360 USD per press release, it could really ad up. Especially because I'm in the ticket domain (www.tickettrunk.com) so I'll need to do it several times.

Thanks!

12 comments

[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 31.4 ms ] thread
davidcann
I'd be interested to know if mass press releases work at all. I wonder if anyone really reads them when they come from no-name startups.
auston
Definitely! As long as the story is interesting or engaging or sometimes you just have to be relevant.
teej
SEO via PR releases? That sounds like a terrible idea. Why don't you start a topical blog? Spend that money to hire a subject expert to write a few blog posts for you to get you started.

SEO is comprised of two things: original, relevant, fresh content and strategies to make that content visible. Your content is the most important thing -period-. The SEO "strategies" are tools to help Google understand your content. If your content isn't good, it doesn't even matter what else you do.

noodle
i think his intent for SEO via PR releases is that they provide a well-written release and people will scrape it for content to throw on their own sites, providing contextual backlinks.

which is an ok plan, i suppose.

/not a SEO expert but plays one on tv

AdilD
Yea that's essentially what i was thinking and I honestly don't know if that's even a good idea, not an expert either.

We have a news section on the site, as I decided to treat our facebook fan page (havent published yet) as our blog since I think the big problem with fan pages is that they dont have ongoing content. But realizing the need for content on the site, I thought a 'news' section would suffice. These same news articles I was thinking of publishing using PR web (or something like it), as I had come to understand that it could help your SEO.

I suppose its worth mentioning that I don't event know if that's a great use of our money since we operate in the ticket domain so to imporve our ceo we would be competing with the mega-sites who crush us in resources. So thinking of that way, maybe its worth more my time to spend the money on advertising?

byrneseyeview
PRWeb is probably the best press release distributor, as far as PR for SEO goes. People do read them, they rank well, etc.

I agree with the others, with reservations: the thing to remember about SEO is that the results compound; if you bring in 20% more visitors with your off-site marketing, and you get 20% higher conversions with your on-site redesign, that's 44% more customers. If you're going to do a PR, make sure you have a blog for your new visitors to read, too.

(Incidentally, I work at a company that does SEO, including press releases. Email address is in the profile).

AdilD
I asked this in a question above, would a company news section accomplish the same objective of a blog? i.e. Ticket Trunk sponsors charity event (news) vs Why we sponsor Charities (Blog).

To my limited understanding they would and if that's the case, then is having a news section itself an SEO strategy?

byrneseyeview
A news section looks more official; a blog section gets more traffic. If you have enough time for both, do it; if you have to pick, do a blog.

One problem with a news section is that you can't do one if you aren't generating news. Your blog can be trivial, but your news section needs to have higher standards.

auston
I know you didn't ask for feedback on your site - but for SEO purposes - I'd recommend putting the search box + a few recommended events on the front page.

Additionally - I'd mess with the title tags to be more descriptive/targeted like for the home page "Buy & Sell Tickets Online - TicketTrunk" or for the events page "Tickets for events in Ontario" (same with search result pages)

Lastly, multiple press releases being released one after the other (in my opinion - I don't know for sure) will likely be picked up/flagged as trying to game Google & will have a negative effect.

I try to space mine out for important things like launch, system improvements, milestones & event sponsorship.

with that said - I recommend ereleases.com very good syndication (onto high quality sites like Forbes, etc)

AdilD
haha, I didnt ask for feedback on my site directly because I wanted to make sure the information was general enough for anyone to use but thanks for taking that extra step!

Valid point about the search box and recommended events. As you see, we do exactly that on the "buy tickets" page and the reason why we didn't do that on the name page as one of our goals was to be as intuitive and non-cluttered as possible. So we were very particular about where we spaced things, in case you were curious why.

Re: Title tags, great point.

And valid points about the press releases. Part of my marketing strategy has been giving away free events to NGos, charities, etc. (and not to mention, it helps us really put our money where our mouth is in terms of being the opposite of Ticketmaster) so I thought I could do a press release for each time I did this. Now at the rate I'm doing this, it would happen about twice a week however the LAST thing I want to be is a spammer so spacing it out for larger announcements makes sense from this perspective.

thanks!