137: How to Score an SEO Advantage When Writing a Press Release with Rich Brooks

Communicators, if you have to write a press release this week, you should listen to this episode. And if you're writing a press release and only posting it to your website, then you must listen to this episode. Welcome to the Confident Communications Podcast. Helping communicators find the right response at the right time and delivering it in the right place. In this episode, you. You'll learn why SEO is important in public relations and how to use it in your press releases to achieve more reach. My guest, Rich Brooks, is the founder and president of Flight New Media, a digital agency in Portland, Maine that's been in business for over 24 years. Rich is a nationally recognized speaker on entrepreneurship, digital marketing and social media. But for this episode, he is providing us with a first class plan for how to optimize your PR efforts using SEO. Take a listen, Rich. Here we are. We are going to complete this podcast and talk about SEO and scoring an SEO advantage when writing a press release. Part of the problem is I feel I could talk to you for hours just about digital marketing. So offline. You and I have had many conversations about this, but when I hit the record button, and I'm bringing you on today because there's a very unique aspect to SEO that you can bring to people who work in communications and it's how to use it to publicize the business. So welcome to the podcast.

Well, thank you so much. I'm looking forward to this conversation.

Now, Rich, you have a lot of experience. So you've been running a digital agency for almost 25 years, am I correct?

Yeah, well, we just turned 24, so we're starting to prepare for the big 25.

Are you going to have a big 25th anniversary?

Yes. What that looks like, I can't tell you right now is we haven't decided when we did our 20th. We kind of reworked our logo a little bit for that special year, so we might do something similar to that. And we're hopefully going to be having the Agents of Change next year, our annual annual conference. So maybe we'll do something celebratory there as well. We'll have to see.

Oh, well. So I don't know the gift that you're supposed to bring someone for a 25th anniversary when it's a digital, a successful digital agency.

But if you're happy, NFT is my guess.

That's a good one. Sure. All right. Well, Rich, I'm looking forward to talking about this topic because I want to learn more about this topic. So we're getting, we're getting into A niche here. So we have SEO search engine optimization, which is a huge topic which we could talk about for days, but we're going to take that, the SEO and apply it to how a communicator can use it when writing any type of press material, press collateral or a press release. So first of all, just give me your idea of how you can use the overall the idea of digital and marketing and online SEO for press.

Well, sure, I mean there's a couple of different ways of approaching this, but the bottom line is a PR professional is looking to get more visibility for her client. So that's the approach that we have for SEO as well. So there's a lot of alignment here between PR and SEO in my opinion. And there's some things that you can do when CR crafting a press release, especially one that's going to go on a website that you control or that your client controls, things that you can do that's just going to increase the visibility and has a lot of benefits on top of that as well. And we can get super nerdy, but we can also just start right at the top. And the bottom line is when people start to do searches for products, services, solutions, thinking about the keywords that they might use when they go to Google and then starting to work them into your press release.

Okay, I'm stepping in the shoes of a lot of people here and I'm making some assumptions, but I think most people are familiar with the term keyword. They know, oh, there's these special words that apply to my business that people understand online. Are we still in a key word world or are we in a key phrase? Are we still using both?

I think the words are interchangeable. I mean you could be more specific and say key phrase. And to be honest, because we have gotten better as a species in terms of doing intelligent searches, likely we're using multi word phrases in Google search engine these days anyways in the search bar. So you can use them either way. Keywords is just tends to be the word that people often use when they are describing this.

Okay, so it is interchangeable. So if someone is sitting down and they're getting ready to write a press release, should they be saying to themselves, when I write this, I need to first think about SEO here. Should every press release nowadays have some type of element, some type of Googleable search element written in?

I think that really depends on the client and your goals. I would say even today when I write blog posts, not every one is necessarily written for the purposes of SEO or Google Visibility. But in the back of my mind, in part because I've done this so often, there's certain best practices that I put in place. And it's important to understand that Google has gotten a lot savvier about consumer intent or searcher intent. So if you're doing, if you've got a little bit of SEO knowledge and you can put that into, insert that into your press release, then chances are you're doing good, not just for Google, but also for your client and for their customers or for their prospects. So understanding the keywords is really just market research.

Now, you mentioned something interesting there, that we're talking about the very basic information. So if you have a communicator, they don't have a lot of digital marketing experience. What are the most basic elements that need to be included in a press release where it can be searchable online? Beneficial.

So to really oversimplify SEO, there's two main components, what are called on page elements and off page elements. Off page elements are the links that come in from other websites to your, in this case, press release or blog post. We can put that aside for right now. It's very important. But when you're crafting your press release, you don't control how many people will ultimately link to it, but you do control the on page parts, which are how do the words on the page match up with the search that's being done. And so from that standpoint, first you want to do some keyword research and we can talk about that. And then once you know the right words to use, it's important to put them in the right places on the page, the optimal places on the page. And some of those things include the title tag, which doesn't actually show up on the page, but usually will appear in the title bar, the tabs up at the top, and then there's a meta description, which doesn't have a huge impact on your search visibility, but can increase the number of people who click on your link. And those are things that might be a little bit nerdy if you're just used to using a Word Doc or even a Google Doc to write these things out. But they are important. In fact, I would argue the title is the most important thing you can do. So that's an important thing to understand. And if you're using a website like WordPress, then there is a box, a field when you're creating this for the title. And if you're really just writing up a press release and submitting it to a client so they can Put it on their website. Then it's just important for you to say, here's the title above, and, you know, above everything else. And then you can write out your press release.

Okay, you mentioned being nerdy about this. Let's be nerdy. All right, let's go to step one. You mentioned the research. I'm sitting down, I'm writing a press release. What am I using to figure out the keywords or key phrases that I want to include in the press release?

All right. This is easier to explain if we come up with a business that we can just use as an example. So do you have a business that we can just kind of play around with here?

Okay, I'll tell you a business I worked with this week, and it's banking. Could you do something with that?

Perfect. So let's say that we're doing something with the bank. We've got a press release for the bank, and we want to get it out there. So some of the things that I might do. And let's say that. Can we say that it's the opening of a new branch?

Of course you can say that. Let's do it.

Let's do that. So one of the things that I would do is if I'm not an agency, like. Like we are like flight New media is, and I just want something for free. There's a couple of tools that I might recommend. One is the Google Keyword Planner. And you can just Google that phrase, Google Keyword Planner. It'll be the first result. Click on that. Now, you do have to set up a Google Ads account to use this tool. That is free. But a little pro tip that if you just turn on ads for one day and do a little bit of this research right now, you will actually get more accurate results. Google gives you better results to people who are advertising. And so you can advertise for one day, five bucks. Shut it off at the end of the day.

Okay. I have a question. I have to insert it here. As a PR person asking a digital marketing expert, do you think Google Ads is a good idea for press?

I don't know that it would be my number one choice for press, but it can be absolutely fantastic for driving promotion.

Yeah. Say, let's say you're doing something proactive and you're announcing something. It certainly would help views if this was a metric that you cared about. It would certainly help views on a website. Correct.

Again, you'd have to think about, like, if we're talking about opening up a new branch, you got to think about what are the searches being done and do people have commercial intent? Google shows ads when it believes the search includes commercial intent. In other words, somebody's looking to buy something. So if instead, this was about a new auto, auto loan program that the bank was rolling out, that might be something that would be a little bit more valuable. But still, honestly, I would probably run my Google Ads to drive traffic to the auto loan page on the website, and I would be linking from the press release over to the auto loan page. Does that make sense?

Oh, it does. And I have to say I'm happy that I asked you this question, because buying ad time for the purpose of PR has always been in my brain. And I know that there should, that there could be a magic formula to do it. And you just explained a way that you could do that. You could drive someone back to a page. Okay, good. So you're talking about the research and how you would research keyword phrases.

Yeah. So you could use that Google tool, or another one that might have a little bit less barrier to entry but might not give you quite as much detail, is a tool called ubersuggest. So those two tools are very similar. Use whichever one you're more comfortable with, and what you're going to do is, let's actually go to that auto loan program, because I think that's a little bit easier to use here. So we've got an auto loan. We're finally launching this new program. We want to get some promotion around it. So we start typing into either one of these apps. I'll just say ubersuggest. We start typing into ubersuggest things like auto loan, car loan, car payments. We just start brainstorming. And I actually have this technique I call the five perspective. So it's product. What is the actual product, which obviously we just talked about. What is the problem that our customer has? So maybe they need a new car, used car, or transportation. What is the solution that we're bringing to the table? What are the specific features of the loan? And if you've ever taken a sales course, you know, you never sell on features, you always sell on benefits. But on the Internet, it's a little reversed because likely your ideal customers have already done their research. They know more than your salespeople, and the more specific their features are, like the terms, the apr, whatever it might be, then they're going to be more ready to make a buying decision. They're closer to that buying decision, and those are the people we want to be in front of. So come up with, you know, brainstorm your features as well. And then the last thing might be your competition. So what are some of the things that people might do to get a loan? That an auto loan that don't involve the bank, and it could be maybe getting one from the dealership. So I might write a blog post, this might be outside of the press release, or I might work it into the press release, compliment it. Exactly why a bank loan is better than the loan you're going to get from the dealer. People are searching on that auto dealer loan thing, and then we're going to find our content, why we explain our bank is actually a better opportunity for you to get that loan. So those are the five perspectives I use to generate keywords. And then because I don't know which ones actually have the most search volume or how competitive each search term is, I take a few of those and I put them into ubersuggest. What ubersuggest or Google Keyword Planner is going to do is they're going to not just tell me how much search volume and how much competition there is for those phrases, they're also going to give me other search terms, other keywords that might be better for me or better for my, you know, more searched on, better opportunity. So I take a look at these, and the two big things, like I mentioned before, that I want to compare are how much search volume is there? So in a given month, how many people are searching for these search terms? And that is important because if we have a great search term and we can rank number one, but nobody's searching for it, what's the point? And the other thing is competition. It's not that you shouldn't go after auto loan if that's the best, most opportune phrase for you, but there's like a billion other people in the world vying for that same phrase. It just gives you an idea, though, of how competitive the phrase might be. So you might want to say something more like Boston Auto Loan or Auto Loan near me, or Auto Loan for bad credit, whatever the phrases that are relevant for your particular press release. So this starts to give you what your best opportunities are. And so I usually write those down, Excel, spreadsheet, spray paint them on a wall, whatever your fashion, however you like to do it. And then you've got this shortened list of keywords, and you really want to start to put them at this point into your press release. And then we can get into where is it most important in that press release.

Okay, so let's go to the second element right now. And you mentioned placement. So we're sitting down. We now have our boilerplate. We're getting ready to write. We've done the research. We know the keywords, we know the competitive, we know how we're trying to sell here. In this press release, start with the title and the subtitle. How am I writing those?

Yeah. So the title is going to be the big blue link that appears on Google. It's also going to be that thing, like I said, that doesn't appear within the browser frame, but appears in that little tab up the top. So if we were going to do a press release about this new auto loan program for people with bad credit, then all of a sudden what we're going to do is basically put our best keywords and let's say that the best keyword was bad credit. Auto loan. Right. So I would probably start my press release trying to put those words as close to the front of that title as possible. So bad credit, we've got not a loan for you or whatever it is. I know you're not supposed to get too promotional on press releases, not really my area of expertise. But I want to get that best. The best keywords up at the front of that sentence or the best front of that title, because there's just a little bit more weight at the beginning rather than the end there. So I'm not going to worry about the bank name or anything like that, because it's going to go on the bank website. I might include it. But my primary thing is going to be talking about auto loans for bad credit clients or customers. So that goes in the title and then in the meta description, which again, does not appear on the page and is not necessarily a direct ranking factor, but it is where the. It's underneath the big blue link. It's the two sentences, more or less of black text below the big blue link.

And the person using WordPress right now, if they were writing and they're listening to you, where exactly are they looking for the meta description where they can write it? Where would you explain that?

I recommend using a plugin called Yoast, which looks like the word toast, except it's got a Y at the beginning, and that's going to have a field for entering in your meta description. So that's probably the best way to do it. It's a freemium plug. Again, you can use the free version forever. So you're going to put that in there. And what you might want to do in this case is just, you know, it's consider it to be one to two sentence ad. You can even include a phone number in it. So if somebody's looking on their phone and they stumble across this press release on your client's website, they could actually call directly from the Google results page to your client. So that's a little pro tip.

Hold on, hold on. On this pro tip. So this is interesting to me. So in my head, I have to tell you, I have two channels in my head right now. I'm listening to you, I'm following you, I'm tracking you. But then the consultant side of my head is rewriting how to write a press release for my clients right now because you're putting such interesting tips in here. Now, the meta tag, which I know that you, you know, it just summarizes really what, what the blog post or what the press release is about. But you just said a phone number. So if you had on a press release how you have contact information, would it be beneficial to put the contact information in the meta tag or would that be lost? Would that be.

I think it's too much information. I think just having the number. Because the phone number then becomes this blue link right in the middle of the description on the phone. So that would be good to drive traffic. And you wouldn't want to drive traffic to your consultancy business. I'm guessing you'd want to drive traffic to the bank and make.

No, no, not the consultancy. But if someone were writing a press release, you always have a contact for your press person. I was thinking there. Okay, but just, you're going to have to, you're going to have to go off the cuff with me for a little bit here. And this is not in your expertise, but if you were talking about this, the meta tag, and if someone were to write a press release, is there something beneficial that in a meta tag that might catch the eye of a journalist? I don't even know if you would know the answer, but I don't know if you want to.

I think that that would probably, I would actually, you know, volley that back to your side of the net and say you probably have a better sense of what might be attractive to a journalist as opposed to me, because you work with them all the time. Because I'm thinking about this from the customer standpoint, the ultimate customer.

But here, Rich, this is the, this is why you have me thinking so much. Selling a product is no different than selling an idea that you want the press to get to pick up. The only thing different than what you're Saying, and what I do for a living is people have to pay for it. Right. Like we're getting into advertising. We public relations is we want people to find out this information without having putting any money behind it. However, we're still selling an idea. So you're bringing this idea of digital marketing to it.

If you felt that journalists who maybe write about either automotive or the banking industry might be intrigued, might be doing a relevant search and the purpose of this press release on your client's website was meant to attract journalists rather than clients interest because it's a press release and say not a blog post or a sales letter that's on the website, then sure, whatever you think that might be relevant is like you might throw in some words that talk about the fact that you've got an expert ready for an interview or whatever it is that might get that. So yes, you certainly could. I've never thought of it this way myself, but if your main goal is to get journalists to pick up the phone and reach out to you, then I think that it makes sense that you might write the meta description in a way that would attract a journalist's attention. And you and from the little I know about press releases is you don't want to get too salesy in them anyways. It'll turn off a journalist, but no one's going to see the meta description. So you might have an opportunity here. The journalist is not he or she did not receive this from you via email. They're doing a Google search perhaps to source an article and you could say like in the meta description, like we've got experts ready to speak to journalists. Maybe not that heavy handed, but something along those lines.

Okay, so I like how you're thinking. All right, so let's get back. I took you off track there, but we're still close about the placement. So talk about the title, the subtitle, what we're looking for here for headlines.

So we talked about the title already. That's going to be the big blue link and that's where you definitely want to lead with your best keywords. Again, it doesn't appear on the page. The rest of the page should be structured using header and subheader tags, which are basically your H1 through H6 tags. I almost exclusively use H1 through H3. I usually don't go beyond that, but.

Some people explain that to someone who doesn't know what H1 or H3 means.

Sure. So you don't need to know this except in the back of your mind. If you're putting together the page yourself, or even if you're just doing a Word Doc or a Google Doc, you're going to have headers and subheaders, and they're going to be of different sizes. In the Google Doc or in the Word Doc, you'll see like header 1, header 2, header 3. It's the exact same thing, except in HTML it's h1, h2, h3 through h6.

Okay, good.

And there's a pecking order where h1 is the most important, most valuable. You should only use one H1 tag per page. That's the current best practices and probably will be the best practices going forward. Back in the day, we'd make everything in H1 tag to attorney, but people stopped paying or Google stopped paying attention to them. So 1h1 tag is the best way to go. And that should repeat your keywords. You could even use the same thing as your title. But you could try and cast a wider net, I like to say, and come up with some other, maybe some secondary phrases as well that would be good, like car loan. Instead of if you used auto loan up there, use car loan down here. And I say that knowing full well that Google has gotten better and better at semantic search, meaning that they know that a car loan and an auto loan is basically the same thing. So my thinking, however, is that whenever we use the words that our customers use, it automatically creates a better bond. So if the example I sometimes use is if you have, let's say, a press release about rhinoplasty, but everybody thinking about nose jobs, that's going to be a break for them. Even if Google understands they're the same thing, somebody wants to hear the language that they use repeated back to them. So that's how I might approach the difference between the title tag and the H1 tag. And then below that, what I usually do when I'm writing up a blog post, which in many ways is similar to a press release, maybe mine is a little bit more educational focused, but that's about it. We're still trying to share an idea, right? So I will usually create an outline and I'll just go through the best, most important questions that I need to answer, and Those become my H2 or H3 tags. And if I'm looking for what are the right questions, yes, I've already done my keyword research, but two other tools that I'll just throw out there for people who want to go to the next level. One is called Answer the Public, and it's@AnswerThePublic.com so you know this one and basically you put in one to two words in that like car loan or bad credit. And it comes back with all of these relevant searches that people have already done at the search engines. So you can start to see what questions should I make sure I'm answering in this press release or blog post. And so you might start working those in to your H2 and H3 tags and then answering those, you know, raising the point and then answering those questions. And I know that that's not the perfect structure for a traditional press release, but it's a good way to kind of think about it, especially because journalists are just like everybody else. Nobody reads, they just scan. So those bigger, bolder subheaders are going to catch the eye of the reader, whether they're a journalist or a potential customer.

I'm at the age where I've been in this business for a long time and the press release has not changed a lot. It is the same format it's always been, but I think it's now starting to morph around the digital that we're in. Are there any other pro tips or tricks using links, using anything else with this idea of digital marketing that you, that communicator could add into a press release?

There's certainly a few other things. First of all, besides using your keywords in your H1 and H2 and H3 tags, you also really want to get to the point quickly, which is probably going to good advice anyways for a press release and get your keywords into that first one to two sentence. What we don't want to do is over emphasize or over optimize this press release because we still want it to read like we're talking to a human being, but getting to the point and explaining it. And again, maybe another way of saying car loans or another way of saying bad credit. So work in some similar phrases in that first sentence or two. That's going to be helpful. We talked a little bit about how we could create links in this press release over to another page on the website. That might be beneficial too. So if somebody comes to this, you know, they go to the news section or they follow a link and they get to this press release. We want to make it as easy as possible for somebody to be like, no, I have terrible credit, I absolutely need this. And click on the link and go to the sales page. But also it tells Google what that sales page or the application form or whatever it is is all about. So it also has SEO benefits too. So that's SEO benef from your press release to the sales page or the conversion page. But as far as getting inbound links, that's a science unto itself. There are things that you can do, like you can explain inbound links. So inbound links would be from another website to yours. So press releases are not going to get a lot of natural inbound links unless it's something really, really dramatic. And maybe it is. But if you've got something great, then yes, people will link to it. And if there are people in your industry, especially bloggers, because we've been talking about journalists, and I've been thinking about journalists from the local paper or the local TV station. But let's face it, bloggers and podcasters and YouTubers are a powerful force too. So should definitely consider them as we're creating this content. So if you are, I follow a lot of like Nichy nerdy stuff, like superhero, Marvel Universe, cinematic universe, all this sort of stuff. If you Marvel releases a press release about who's going to be starring in the new Shang Chai movie or something like that, there are going to be a bunch of bloggers out there that are going to reference it and link back to the original article. So yes, you could get some links this way. And in the same way that you reach out to journalists, you could also reach out to bloggers and podcasters who might be more familiar with the linking protocols and would reference your article and link to it. So that also great. And of course, it's very contextual link. So if you've got people who have blogs about how to overcome bad credit to improve your credit, all these sort of things. Absolutely reach out to them, especially if you're already in a relationship, tell them about this and hopefully they'll link back to this article as they're talking about another opportunity or something like that.

Those are great tips. Okay, how about video or imagery?

It's almost like you're reading my mind. Because of course traditional press releases were just black on white. Nothing ever changed. Because we're talking about a more flexible platform here. I would definitely say if you can include images, if you can include video, that's very powerful. In fact, I'd lean into the video component if you can do it, because one of the ranking factors, not the most important one, but one of the ranking factors is time on page. So the more time visitors spend on your web page, the more benefit you get from a search engine optimization standpoint, it's not as important as some of the other things we talked about, but it does signal to Google that this is good content. Well, what's going to get people to slow down and really get involved with this page more than a video? So maybe you include a video that could be anybody's video. Honestly, you could just embed a related video. But of course, if your client has a video on how to get a new car, if you have terrible credit and you embed that in this, people are going to stop. Many people will watch that video. The video is a minute, three minutes, five minutes, whatever it is, suddenly they're spending so much more time on this page. Google's seeing a higher level of engagement. It's going to reward that behavior.

Okay, are they using the video on YouTube or Vimeo?

I would probably. My rule of thumb, because I use both, my rule of thumb is if I want to get more eyes on it, if it's more marketing focused, then I'm going to use YouTube. If I want more control over who sees it, I put it on Vimeo.

Vimeo has more privacy. YouTube has more opportunity.

That's basically yeah, because a lot of people, I mean, of course there are people who just go to Vimeo and watch whatever videos Vimeo serves up, but that's not how most people use it. But people go to YouTube and they're just watching video after video after video. So there's a lot more opportunity there.

Okay, good. So is there anything else that we've forgotten that you could fully optimize a press release using any type of digital marketing tips?

You can always look at whenever you post something new to the to your website. It's not going to have the trust built up that maybe some more older and established posts do. So I might look at some similar posts or press releases you've done in the past and see if there's an opportunity to link from those posts and press releases to this new one. That would be one extra thing that I would do. And again, you mentioned images. I don't know if they're going to have a huge benefit. But if there is an image that's relevant and you optimize it correctly and you use alt tags, which are basically tells Google what the image is about, you might come up in Google's image search results as well and that might be another avenue for traffic to arrive at the press release.

So alt tags, should everyone be filling out alt tags nowadays?

Always, and for many reasons, including the fact that there are people out there that need at assistive technology to view the web. And so the more information you can Give people who may be visually challenged to understand what the page is about, the better off you are. So if you had a chart that walked people through the five steps to better credit or to get this particular car loan, then you should have an alt tag that at least explains what the chart's about and maybe even some additional information as well.

Okay, I have a left field question for you because this happened to me on a call yesterday with a potential client. They reached out to me because there was a local story and they did not respond at all. And it wasn't necessarily a good one. It was local news. An incident happened. There was no response from the company. The result was if you search this company on Google, the first 10 links are about this incident. Where they don't look, they don't look good. Talk to me about reputation management and can you manage what someone sees when they Google the name of your business or the CEO of your business?

So I am not an online reputation management expert, but I certainly have been in this business long enough that I know some of the tips and tricks.

All right, let's hear it.

Some of the things that I would do is I would make sure that all of my social media platforms were optimized for my company name. Because what I really want to do is get, I want to get everything off that first page that's not about me in the best view. So I'd make sure my LinkedIn profile, company page is up to date. My Facebook, my LinkedIn I would get on TikTok just had one more result to it. Whatever I could possibly do. I would probably also see what kind of positive online reviews I can get. Because if somebody's searching for my company name, then I might get that knowledge box that appears in the right hand column of Google search on desktop and scattered throughout the page on mobile. Because again, that's just going to be more information. People see all this good press about me, all these people who love me, that's going to be very beneficial as well. I'd also look into doing Google posts, which are a whole other thing. And we actually are creating a video and writing about it right now. So that should be up on our website soon. That would be another thing. And then I would just look for other opportunities for me to appear with my company name. So I could be just doing regular press releases and maybe even putting them up to things like PRWeb, which is not something I generally recommend. But again, I'm just trying to eat up as much of those top 10 results as possible to get there. But I have had both clients and people have come to me looking for help. And sometimes there's no easy answer, because if a journalist or a news source has it out for you because they feel like you did wrong, it's hard to get that off the homepage. And even if you do, as soon as they write another article, suddenly it's right back to the top. So to protect ourselves, we should always be considering ourselves as a media empire, our company as a media empire, and we should be creating as much content as possible in as many places as possible, because again, that's just going to fill up as much space. And I see this working because I know some companies that are not good players out there. Right. They've got like, if you go into the Reddit conversations, you can see how many people hate them. But when you do a search on their website or their name, all the first 10 results are all positive. So there are things that you can do to push that off the first page. I also tell my clients, maybe you should think like one bad thing that happens. But if you keep on getting paid for the same stuff, maybe you need to think about your business practices anyway and that'll actually help your reputation more than anything I could offer.

Yeah. Because people, you're offering a lot of white hat solutions, which is really what it should be. I think. I think people think there is a black hat solution to getting rid of links off of a Google.

The problem with black hat solutions, and this is, I only learned about this maybe a month or two ago. There was an article, I want to say, in the New York Times about the cottage industry of bad review sites owned by the same people that promise to clean up your listings. So basically, they publish bad stuff about you and then they tell you, for a small fee, they'll take it down or they'll be able to get it off of this website that they actually already own. So there's an entire cottage industry of really evil people doing this. Yes. And it was fascinating story. I want to say it's in the New York Times, but it might have been another.

Oh, I have to go. I mean, yeah, well, evil, sure, but fascinating. I mean, it is, yeah.

I mean, it's brilliant in a way that probably will get you into the hottest ring of hell. But, you know, bottom line is it is clever.

It is. Oh, my gosh. Speaking of clever, Rich Brooks, that's you. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom. It's. I. I like this idea of bringing in a digital marketing expert to talk about something that people don't traditionally think about is writing a press release and using the same tactics you would use to sell a product that you would to sell an idea. And everything you said oh my gosh, my head. My head is working overtime right now. I need to come up with my cottage industry for this.

Hopefully. Don't be evil.

No, never, Never Evil. No Dr. Evil Rich anything how would someone find you if they wanted to find out more information about you?

If they're interested in my company Flyte New media where@takeflight f l y t e.com if they like podcasts I would love them to come check out my podcast the Agents of Change. You can find it at the Agents of Change. And if you just want to talk to me for whatever reason, I am the Rich Brooks on just about any social media platform out there.

Well, the Rich Books. It was so nice talking to you today on the podcast. So thanks for joining me.

Pleasure.

My thanks to guest Rich Brooks for helping give us communicators the SEO advantage when writing press releases. So what did we learn? Well, for one, we learned that writing a press release is more than just just the writing. It's more than a headline, a quote, three bullet points and three hashtags at the bottom of the page. We write press releases nowadays for sco. We want to write to be seen. Now last week I promised I would add an indestructible tip to each podcast based on the methodologies and frameworks in my book, Reclaim, Control and respond with Confidence in a Media Crisis. So here's your indestructible tip when it comes to press releases. When you want to reach a reporter or a news producer directly with a press release, not the World Wide web, only one person. What you want to do is embed that press release into an email. Don't send it as a Word document or a PDF. Just copy and paste your message, the press release that you already wrote, into the body of your email. So this is to ensure that your information can be seen quickly and easily. Word documents PDFs they can be difficult for reporters to open. Sometimes they're impossible if they're the wrong format or if they're a dated version. So make sure that you just copy and paste directly into the email. You can also attach high res photos and if you have video, you can include a link to video. This is going to help you get your news directly to the reporter as effectively and quickly as possible. And that is going to help you protect your reputation and make you indestructible so for more information on Rich, you can find them@takeflight.com you can also find him on Twitter at thereichbrooks. So that's all for this week on the podcast. Be sure to follow the new Facebook page. Molly McPherson, PR it will soon be a hub for resources to help you make sure your company's reputation is indestructible. I'll see you back here same time next week. Bye for now.