See how I went from ranking on page 2 to #1 after PR.
I had been optimizing my category page and trying to improve my SEO ranking for a Yosemite keyword for three or four years by optimizing meta tags, on-page copy and product pages that link to the category pages. I wasn’t consistently ranked in the top 10 however despite my efforts. Then sometime in late 2023, I received an email inquiry from SFGate where the author wanted to interview me for a story on Yosemite.
SFGate Article Mentions
The article was published on December 20th, 2023, featuring my images and quoted me several times throughout. The article also included a link pointing at my homepage. If I were doing this for traditional SEO link building purposes then I would have requested to point the link at my Yosemite landing page as it’s more topically relevant but I was just happy to have received an “earned link”.
Local FOX News In-Studio Interview
Not long after the SFGate article published, I received emails from both ABC and FOX local TV stations requesting to interview me in the studio for a live segment. I responded back several hours later but ABC was on a tight deadline apparently so I missed that opportunity but FOX reached out after and I made an in-studio appearance on December 29th, 2023 which aired that afternoon. When I got home, I mentioned this for social proof on my website, social channels and on my Google Business Profile.
SEO Ranking Improvement
For the two months prior to the PR mentions, I was usually ranked somewhere between the middle of the 2nd page to the bottom of the 1st page on Google. The ranking was certainly not consistent at all. On the day the SFGate article was published, my average position was 6.5 according to Google Search Console. I was tracking my rankings on SEMRush at the time which showed the same results as Google Search Console. I don’t have an active account at the moment otherwise I would have included those rankings here.
From December 20th to 29th, there was a clear increase in ranking. On December 29th, the day of my FOX TV interview, my average position was 3.4.
Over the next two months it’s clear that my ranking had gone from wild fluctuations to stable and increasing until reaching an average position of 1.0 during the last week of February 2024.
February 2024 was the peak but the good news is that in the year since then I have been ranked in the top 2 or 3 nearly everyday since. I have not dipped below 5 on any day since the PR mentions. Most importantly, I’ve made some Yosemite print sales worth thousands of dollars since receiving the increased visibility.
Did Referral Traffic Click Signals Influence Ranking?
Looking back at my GA4 referral traffic from Dec 23 – Feb 24, I received some clicks from the SFGate article but most of it came within two days of the publication date. Hardly enough click data to influence rankings for an extended period of time. I think it would be a stretch attribute the improvement in ranking to anything other than the PR mentions.
Top 6 PR For SEO Takeaways
- Always stay focused on creating good, user-friendly content that resonates with your audience.
- When presented with opportunities to work with the media be ready to jump at the opportunity.
- Quality backlinks are still valuable for SEO.
- Exact match backlink anchor text is not necessary.
- Contextual PR mentions are more important than even getting direct backlinks to your target landing page.
- Promote your PR appearance on all available social channels.
My conclusion here is that the combination of contextual PR mentions in the article along with social proof from the TV appearance helped establish me as an authority on the topic which in-turn has improved my rank on Google.