Learn MoreEver heard of “newsjacking?” Newsjacking sounds nefarious, but it’s really not at all. It’s actually a very respectable and savvy way to add your company’s strengths and perspectives to the online conversation about the news of the day by “hijacking” the news cycle for specific keywords. Newsjacking simply means piggybacking onto trending news stories through the use of search engine public relations via press releases and sometimes blogging.

Think of it as joining in a widespread online conversation by keyword optimization of a combination of online posts that may include press releases, blog posts, and social media. Let’s use a real world example. Let’s say a Fortune 500 company announces the relocation of a corporate office to a city near you. Newsjacking might involve writing a press release optimized for keywords that journalists, employees, and other interested news consumers might be looking for in relation to those keywords. In turn, there can be related content on the client’s website that is optimized for those keywords as well.

In this way, when the public searches Google News for information about that company’s relocation, a successful “newsjacking” would mean they are going to find the press release we just wrote. (Note: Press releases do fall off of the first page of Google News in a few days to a week, depending on the news volume for those keywords.)

There is definitely an art and science to the SEO strategy of newsjacking. It can be extremely profitable and can work well for just about any industry, business, or profession that needs online exposure. It can work with consumer-oriented news, or business-to-business news.

Newsjacking involves some very creativity and strategic thinking, because it requires first the creativity to find news subjects that make a natural fit for the company wanting to do the newsjacking, and second, the strategic ability to figure how to insert oneself into the story by contributing to it in a meaningful way. Third, it requires the technical knowledge of how to optimize press releases for specific topics and how to get them to show up in Google News and other major news outlets.

We can make newsjacking a part of our SEO services or online public relations strategy for your business. With any $1500/mo. or higher SEO plan, we will include at least one newsjacking of a keyword news cycle for you for free. We work hard to make our clients successful in their online marketing efforts!