Of course, search rankings play an important role (40-50% of website traffic is provided by search engine), so improvement of your visibility is an essential part of your PR strategy. PR is beneficial for SEO as press releases arrange trusted back-links, social signals and content.
For example, optimization of press release for SEO can help to create dozen of pages on Google results and a long list of keywords that were not even supposed to be marked as prior.
The plan for optimization your press release combines further elements:
- defining a goal and target audience;
- focusing on 1-2 keywords in each PR (it must be in the title, sub heading and body copy);
- keywords are obligatory for anchor text as well, instead of using "here";
- images, video and audio materials would be beneficial;
- posting to a company blog or newsroom.
It is worth noticing that press release submission websites and wire services do not give high rank as newly created pages are not well-known. While posting releases on other news search engines can give more prominent results.