How Press Releases Can Help With SEO

Press releases help SEO indirectly. The links inside a wire distribution are supposed to be nofollowed and pass no ranking credit, so the release itself will not move your position. The value arrives when a journalist reads it and writes their own story, because that story carries an editorial link, a brand mention, and referral traffic that a wire listing never produces.

That distinction decides everything about how you should write, distribute, and budget for a release. Below is what Google's own policy says, what press release submission in SEO genuinely does, and what the people you are pitching say they want.

Do press releases work for SEO?

They work as a media relations tool that produces SEO side effects. They do not work as a link building tactic, and treating them as one is the fastest way to waste a distribution budget.

Here is the mechanism in order. You publish a release. A wire service syndicates it to a few hundred sites, most of which are automated feeds nobody reads. The links in those copies carry no ranking credit. Then, if the news is genuinely interesting to a specific reporter's beat, that reporter writes an original story. That story is the asset. It sits on a domain with real authority, it usually carries a followed editorial link, and it gets read by humans who might buy something.

So the honest answer to "do press releases work for SEO" is that the release is the pitch, not the product. Everything that matters happens after somebody decides to cover you. If nothing about your announcement would interest a reporter who has never heard of you, the release will produce syndicated noise and nothing else.

This is the same logic behind every durable off-page tactic. Our guide to getting high-quality backlinks makes the same argument about guest posts and directories.

What Google's policy actually says about press release links

This is not a matter of opinion or of what worked in 2014. Google names press releases explicitly in its published spam policies, and the wording is worth reading closely.

Under link spam, Google's spam policies for Google web search list as a violation: "Advertorials or native advertising where payment is received for articles that include links that pass ranking credit, or links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases distributed on other sites." The same document then gives the remedy: "It's not a violation of our policies to have such links as long as they are qualified with a rel='nofollow' or rel='sponsored' attribute value to the a tag."

Read that twice. A paid distribution carrying keyword-optimized anchor text is a link scheme by Google's own definition. The same release with qualified links is fine and simply passes no ranking credit. There is no third option where the wire links quietly help.

Google has been consistent on this for over a decade. Reputable wire services now apply nofollow by default for exactly this reason, so the practical effect for most businesses is already baked in.

Press release submission in SEO: what the step really does

Press release submission is the distribution step, and its job is discovery, not authority. Understanding that keeps you from buying the wrong package.

A submission through a service such as Business Wire, PR Newswire, or GlobeNewswire puts your announcement into the newsroom systems and email alerts that working reporters already monitor. That is the product you are paying for. The hundreds of syndicated copies are a byproduct, and a fairly worthless one, since they are near-duplicate pages that Google has no reason to rank.

There is a second, cheaper form of submission that most local businesses skip. Sending the release directly to the three or four reporters who actually cover your industry or your parish costs nothing and converts far better than a blanket wire. For a Louisiana business that means the business desk at The Advocate, the assignment desks at WAFB and WBRZ, the parish news pages, and the trade publication for your sector.

Use both. The wire creates a citable, dated, canonical version of the announcement. The direct pitch is what gets it read.

Benefits of press release submission in SEO

The benefits are real but they are not the ones usually advertised. Here is what each part of the process can and cannot do for search.

The third row deserves attention. Unlinked mentions in credible publications feed the experience, expertise, authority and trust signals described in our post on Google's E-E-A-T framework, and they are increasingly what large language models pull from when they summarize who does what in a given market. A mention with no link is no longer a wasted mention.

How to do press release submission, step by step

The sequence below assumes you have something a stranger would find interesting. If you do not, stop at step one and wait until you do.

1. Confirm the news passes a stranger test. A new location, a hire with a name people know, an acquisition, a contract award, an original piece of data, a community project, a genuine first. A redesigned website is not news.
2. Do the keyword work before you write. Not to stuff the release, but so the headline uses the words your buyers actually search. Our keyword research service page explains how we scope that step.
3. Write the release to journalist standards. Inverted pyramid, real quotes from named people, contact details, and the whole thing under 600 words. The full method is in our guide to writing the perfect press release.
4. Publish it on your own site first. A newsroom page under your domain gives you the canonical, dated version and keeps the announcement working long after the wire copies rot.
5. Submit to one reputable wire. One is enough. Multiple wire services produce more duplicates, not more coverage.
6. Pitch named reporters individually. Short email, subject line that says what happened, the release pasted below rather than attached.
7. Follow up once. Three to seven days later, once, then leave it alone.
8. Track coverage, not links. Log every outlet that ran the story and every mention with no link, and treat those relationships as the asset.

Press release SEO best practices, from the people who read them

Most press release advice is guesswork. Muck Rack surveys working journalists every year, and the findings contradict several habits that persist in SEO circles.

According to Muck Rack's analysis of its State of Journalism research, 73 percent of journalists reject pitches because they are not relevant to their area of coverage, 65 percent prefer pitches under 200 words, and 70 percent say PR professionals are at least moderately important to their success. That last figure matters: reporters are not hostile to being pitched. They are hostile to being pitched badly.

Turn those numbers into rules. Relevance beats volume, so a list of four reporters who cover your beat outperforms a list of four hundred who do not. Length is a filter, so put the news in the first two sentences and let the release carry the detail. And personalization is detectable, so a pitch that names the reporter's last relevant story clears a bar most competitors never reach.

One more practice that is not optional: get the facts right. A single wrong number is enough for a reporter to drop the story and remember your company for the wrong reason.

What actually gets a release picked up

Coverage is not won by writing quality alone. It is won by giving a reporter a story they can file with less work than the alternatives on their desk that morning.

Practically, that means handing over the finished ingredients. Two usable quotes from a named, titled human. High-resolution photographs the outlet can run without a licensing question. Any data behind your claim, in a spreadsheet, so the reporter can check it. A contact who answers the phone the same day. A local angle, because a national release with no local hook is a story every outlet can safely ignore.

Timing does more work than people expect. Announcements sent early in the morning, mid-week, and away from major news cycles get read. A Friday afternoon release competes with the weekend and loses. Press releases are also one of several off-page moves worth running together, and our roundup of off-page SEO techniques shows where they fit.

When a press release is the wrong tool

Plenty of businesses buy distribution for announcements that were never going to be covered. Recognizing those cases saves money and protects your credibility with reporters.

• Routine business updates. A new service page, a rebrand nobody asked about, or an anniversary is website content, not news.
• Anything issued mainly to get a link. Google's policy names this directly, and the links are nofollowed anyway.
• A monthly release schedule. Reporters notice companies that announce nothing every four weeks, and they start filtering.
• Announcements with no named human. A quote attributed to "the company" is a quote no outlet will print.
• News you cannot support with evidence. Journalists routinely name missing or unverifiable sources as a reason to delete a pitch.

If the announcement fails that list, the better spend is usually on the pages that answer buying questions. A separate, data-led look at the same question sits in our post on the data-backed approach to press releases and SEO.

Where to start

Write down the next three things your business will genuinely do that a stranger would find interesting, then plan a release around each one and build the reporter list now rather than the week it happens. If you would rather hand that off, our press release writing and distribution service covers the writing, the wire, and the direct pitching, and we will tell you honestly when an announcement is not worth sending.