Randy TheNewsGuy - Press Release Distribution Service | James Dooley SEO Podcasts

In this episode of The James Dooley Podcast, James Dooley sits down with Randy “The News Guy” Rohde from TheNewsGuy.com to deep-dive into how to use press releases as a serious SEO weapon rather than just a PR tick-box. They break down what makes Randy’s service different: human-written, SEO-optimised press releases, smart entity and geo-relevance, powerful reporting, and built-in tiered link support via cloud stacks, Google entity stacks, indexing, and PR booster campaigns. James and Randy walk through how press releases can safely build referring domains, diversify anchor text and link types, and support E-E-A-T, reputation management, and branded SERPs. They also cover advanced tactics like using press releases to rank images, support Google Business Profiles, power up existing backlinks with tier 2 links, and even turn each release into an evergreen podcast episode with strong dofollow links from major podcast platforms. If you’re serious about link diversity and scaling authority without burning your money site, this episode gives you a complete blueprint for using press releases the right way.

Creators and Guests

Host

James Dooley

James Dooley is a UK entrepreneur.

What is James Dooley Podcast?

James Dooley is a Manchester-based entrepreneur, investor, and SEO strategist. James Dooley founded FatRank and PromoSEO, two UK performance marketing agencies that deliver no-win-no-fee lead generation and digital growth systems for ambitious businesses. James Dooley positions himself as an Investorpreneur who invests in UK companies with high growth potential because he believes lead generation is the root of all business success.

The James Dooley Podcast explores the mindset, methods, and mechanics of modern entrepreneurship. James Dooley interviews leading marketers, founders, and innovators to reveal the strategies driving online dominance and business scalability. Each episode unpacks the reality of building a business without mentorship, showing how systems, data, and lead flow replace luck and guesswork.

James Dooley shares hard-earned lessons from scaling digital assets and managing SEO teams across more than 650 industries. James Dooley teaches how to convert leads into long-term revenue through brand positioning, technical SEO, and automation. James Dooley built his career on rank and rent, digital real estate, and performance-based marketing because these models align incentive with outcome.

After turning down dozens of podcast invitations, James Dooley now embraces the platform to share his insights on investorpreneurship, lead generation, AI-driven marketing, and reputation management. James Dooley frequently collaborates with elite entrepreneurs to discuss frameworks for scaling businesses, building authority, and mastering search.

James Dooley is also an expert in online reputation management (ORM), having built and rehabilitated corporate brands across the UK. His approach combines SEO precision, brand engineering, and social proof loops to influence both Google’s Knowledge Graph and public perception.

To feature James Dooley on your podcast or event, connect via social media. James Dooley regularly joins business panels and networking sessions to discuss entrepreneurship, brand growth, and the evolving future of SEO.

James Dooley:
TheNewsGuy, he sells a lot of press releases online at TheNewsGuy.com. Pleased to meet you, how you doing?

Randy TheNewsGuy:
Yeah, hey, good to connect with you, man, finally. It seems like, as we say, we kind of circulate in a lot of the same circles, but I think this is the first time we actually connect and sit down and have a chat, so this is good.

James Dooley:
Yeah, for sure. There’s a lot of crossovers, a lot of people that you speak to who speak very highly of yourself, and then obviously press releases are a hot topic at the moment, where a lot of people are looking to build those referring domain counts up on the backlink profile and stuff like that.

So yeah, I’m going to shoot straight in, Randy, right?

Randy TheNewsGuy:
All right.

James Dooley:
There are quite a few different press release services out there and obviously, yourself, there’s a lot of benefits in using TheNewsGuy.com.

So can you, for the audience who has never used you, try to explain certain reasons of what sets you apart in comparison to other press release services?

Randy TheNewsGuy:
Yeah, yeah. So there are a lot of press release services out there, and I’m not going to badmouth any of them; I think they all probably do a good job.

What I always come back to is: what sets us apart, or what I think is our competitive advantage. It comes down to a few different things.

One, I think, is we use human writers. So you provide your requirements to us, I’ve got an editor, she reviews the stuff, sends it over to our team of writers — we call it the writing desk. It then gets assigned to a specific writer, they write it based on your requirements, it goes back to our editor where she then optimizes it for best SEO performance.

We’ve spent a lot of time training, a lot of time working with our team to really nail this process down. Then we send it back to you for review; you can fully edit whatever you like, and once you say, “Hey, it’s good,” boom — we send it out.

So I think our human writing team — we don’t do AI stuff. We feel like PR is a nuanced skill, and it’s more art than science, more than what you’re going to be able to get appropriately through AI-generated content.

As an example, if we’re like, “Hey, this is about a home services business in Cleveland,” versus something else, we want to be sure that we’re pulling in geo-relative terms to really target and connect the signals on the search engines that this home service is in Cleveland and it’s related. We’re trying to send all those signals that way.

So I think our human writing is a big one.

We’ve also spent a lot of time and resources investing in our reporting. I’ve seen a lot of different reports from competitors; this one I will say, I think we really have nailed down.

We give you an online link so you can go and pull it up online, and then from there you can download the PDF file — and all of the links on the PDF file are active links. Then you can go and do a lot of different things with that; meaning you can go publish it out on PDF sites or whatever.

You can download the report as an Excel file and then do whatever you want with it in an Excel format, or you can use it as-is. We work with a lot of different agencies, and so we can white-label those reports as well, which is great. So it looks like it’s coming from James — “Look at how cool this looks, this is what we did for you.”

And with our reporting, it gives you a full breakdown: here’s how many news sites, here are the links of all of the news sites — you can just click and look at the story — here’s how many views your article has gotten, what the syndication is, you know, like millions of potential views.

We put a lot of effort into that.

We go and we update and pull the API at least three times throughout about a 10–day period. So you get the initial report, then we go in and we update it again after about 5 days, and we do it again after 10 days, just so you get an idea of how this thing continues to pop up.

So I think our reporting is big.

And then the other aspect is just the backend of what we do. We do a lot of automated aspects to help support both the indexing and the “juice” of the PR sites — the news sites.

We have a number of cloud stacks and Google entity stacks that we then take your links into. We take it in different formats: both the PDF or an Excel, we convert it into a Google Sheet because it gives us a bit more flexibility, and we also take just the published article itself off of our newsroom, and then we disperse it onto a number of our private cloud stacks that we utilize, and Google entity stacks.

Essentially those stacks are acting as a tier 2 to fire up all of those news sites that are on your reports.

We also have our own private network of Google News sites, and we drip–feed out your story across our Google News network over about a 6–8 week period. So over time you’re constantly getting additional publications of your news article, constantly giving a signal to both the search engines as well as the articles themselves — like if it’s Digital Journal or AP News or Benzinga or whoever — that they see, “Oh, this story is getting a lot more traction, it’s getting traffic,” and it helps with engagement on their site.

One of the things we always try to do is, because of that — and I’ve seen this and presented it a number of times — by doing engagement on your press releases, you can drive the lifespan of those press releases. I mean, I have press releases that are going on five years old at this point that, because we just continue to do things to create engagement, AP News or Digital Journal is like, “Wow, there’s still traffic, this thing is still pulling activity in here, so let’s just keep it up.”

James Dooley:
With regards to the engagement, is that something that people can get through you, or do you outsource that to somebody else?

Randy TheNewsGuy:
No, we do that. So if you come in — like I say, we’ve got different packages that you can pick up from us, but we also have a lot of different add–ons.

You can say, “Hey, I really want Benzinga and Business Insider,” or a financial piece, or if you’re doing crypto we’ve got a crypto package that you can add on too.

As well we’ve got links that we call our PR booster links, and so we’re building links out to some of your strongest news sites, to really drive, again, that juice and that engagement on those things.

James Dooley:
I think the most important part of all this is what you’re talking about. For anyone that doesn’t know TheNewsGuy.com and Randy, it’s that Randy’s networking with some of the most advanced SEOs there is in the world.

So although he’s providing a press release, he understands everything related to SEO — with regards to optimizing the content, getting the right NLP entities on the page to give you the best chances of ranking.

Then there’s one or two things that he was talking about in the reporting which are very important: if you can export the Excel document of all the links, you can then start loading those into indexing tools or sending those for tier 2 backlinks, which gives them additional power at a page level for each one of those articles.

I think that’s a big part. I’m not going to badmouth any other press release providers at all, but the fact that you are an SEO first and you understand the benefits of this — of getting several hundred referring domains through to the website, then also making certain that they’re optimized for relevance, then also giving it the power with regards to the tier 2s and the indexation, and then you’re talking about traffic and engagement and stuff like that, which keeps them up as well.

All those added benefits are what, in my opinion, set you apart from a lot of other press release services out there.

So anyway, let me just jump into a few different questions, because you’ve shown a few different things and I want to dig a little bit deeper into it.

For anyone who’s never used TheNewsGuy.com: can this press release syndication and distribution be used in the UK, or is it just US? Or can it be used in Australia? Where at present do you have clients and see good results?

Randy TheNewsGuy:
Yeah, yeah. So we have clients worldwide, but primarily US, Canada, UK, Australia — those are kind of our, if I say, primary marketplaces. Those are the clients that we get.

We’ve got different add–ons: so you could get our standard PR package and then get our international add–on to go with that, and pick up sites in Canada and the UK.

If you’re in Canada, we just launched this about three months ago: a big Canadian distribution network. You can pick up, I think, that network is about 25 Canadian news sites all across Canada, which is pretty significant as we’ve pushed that up.

But yeah, and I’m a big believer — I’m curious on your opinion of this — but I’m a believer that a link is a link. So if you get a link from — and some of these are international anyway — AP News, right? It doesn’t matter whether it’s, you know, where your business is — US, UK — AP News is AP News.

But if you get a link from the Dallas Tribune news site, but you’re a business in the UK, it’s still a strong, authoritative link for you. And we’re talking about whatever your subject is, right? If you’re a rubbish collector from the UK, right — it doesn’t matter. We’re going to talk about collecting rubbish, and we’re going to mention Manchester or wherever the hell your business is located. We’re going to drive in the relevancy to it, it’s going to be a good article, and you’re going to get great links from it.

James Dooley:
I think on that, just so you know my thoughts: I completely agree, and I love the fact that you said, “A link is a link.”

In the most recent mastermind that we had, which was talking about backlinks, we sat there with people that don’t procrastinate, they’re not perfectionists, they scale out, they’re doing multiple six figures a month. And one thing that you could see is there was just zero procrastination in there — they just try to get as many different referring domains as they can pointing to your site.

Now, that’s not to say you go and hit GSA directly to the money site and that’s it. But building up those referring domains, in an ideal world — like an ideal link — you’d go down the road of saying it’s relevant, powerful, trusted, do–follow. But the point with all that is there’s a very finite amount of those.

And the biggest link–building myth in the industry is that a backlink needs to tick all of those boxes. It doesn’t. What you do need is a blended mix within your backlink profile.

If you had a lot of powerful links that weren’t relevant, I’d start going down the road of getting some more relevant links. If you had lots of relevant links but there was no power or trust in there, again I’m trying to get more power and trust in there.

But I also like to have a nice mix of do–follow and no–follow links. I also want to make certain I’m diversifying my anchor text as much as I can. So stuff like your press releases — and this is why I wanted to get you on — there are so many added benefits from an SEO standpoint.

So you’re looking at it: you’re getting lots of different referring domains, you’re getting anchor–text diversity because majority of the time I’m just trying to do naked URL–type backlinks, you’re getting lots of no–follow in there, which I quite like because I’m going to get my do–follow from my link inserts, my guest posts, and other types of links if I’m doing PBNs, depending on people’s risk tolerance.

Then you’ve got E-E-A-T signals that are coming back with it as well. A lot of mine, what I try to do is: if I’ve just won an award, I want to do a press release about winning that award. And I want to mention my author’s name, so I’m getting an author brand SERP, I’m getting that the brand’s won lots and lots of awards.

That’s great for doing your brand SERP, so then you’re dominating your brand SERP for what you want, which is huge for reputation management.

Then — which I want to try and touch on in a second, I’m going to ask you certain questions which I know the answer to but the viewers might not — It’s little things like: that same press release can help you rank images better, it can help you rank videos better, it can help you rank Google Business Profiles better, and it’s adding lots of trust with co–citations, getting the NAP in there as well.

So the benefits of press releases are insane, and this is why I wanted to get you on. Because there are certain people that just want do–follow, exact–match anchors. I’m like, “No, you need this diversity in your backlink profile.”

Randy TheNewsGuy:
You’ve got to have the diversity. I was just talking with — so I do a lot of free consultation. You can go onto our site and just book 15 minutes with me and we’ll talk about your next PR project.

I was talking with a guy — what is today, Monday? So it must have been Friday. His competitor is cars.com, right? And he was like, “How do I get there?” We were looking at cars.com — cars.com has something like almost 6 million backlinks, right? It’s huge. Something like 90,000 referring domains.

To your point, not all of those are going to tick your box for the “ultimate best link.” They’re not all going to be relevant, they’re not all going to be do–follow, they’re not all going to be high authority. If you look at their profile, they’re going to have low–quality links, they’re going to have high–authority links, they’ll have everything in between.

That’s all natural. A search engine like Google is going to look at it like: “Hey, if you’re a strong site, you’re going to have people or sites linking to you that are dog crap, you’re going to have really good links as well, and everything in between.”

So I think a good diversification of links is absolutely what’s required.

Now, with our press release, just talking about follows as well: you can come to us and say, “Hey, I want all your no–follow links, it’s going to help with my backlink profile.” But if you need a lot of do–follows, you can do an add–on and pick up do–follow links from us too.

James Dooley:
Yeah, like I said, you want that blended mix.

I think the good thing is as well is that a lot of people obsess over DR (Domain Rating) and DA (Domain Authority). The link is placed on a page, not on a domain. But the good thing about the power and the traffic, which are two massive parts of how good a link is, is: with you being an SEO, you can manipulate those two factors.

You can send engagement and behavioural signals and traffic through to those links, and you can hit tier 2s to it. So where people talk about those factors — well, those are easily manipulated as part of the press release, and it works nicely.

So there’s that part to it as well.

Let’s jump in. People have now seen, “Right, okay, Randy knows what he’s doing, TheNewsGuy.com — I want to order.”

As part of your press release, in the content, can you include images? Can you include videos? And can you include a Google Business embed link?

Randy TheNewsGuy:
All of that stuff — we take care of all of that.

It’s funny you mentioned images specifically, like ranking images. We did that for Craig Campbell — he was doing, this was last year I think, some kind of image–ranking contest.

James Dooley:
Image King?

Randy TheNewsGuy:
Image King, yes, yes. And so at the last minute he came to us like, “Dude, what can you do for me?” So we popped him in one of our premium PRs and ranked his image as the Image King or whatever the exact term was.

The PRs are awesome for that. Yeah, very fun.

James Dooley:
It’s so important. The point is, in my opinion, people look at websites and they don’t treat them like real businesses. When you’re looking at it as a real business, you want that traffic diversification.

I want to be ranking web pages, I want to be ranking images, I want to be ranking videos, I want to be in Google News, I want to be everywhere I possibly can where my customers might be searching.

Especially in some niches — like I build a lot of playgrounds in the UK. One of the major terms where we win a lot of work is “playground designs”, “play area designs”, “children’s playground designs” — because people want to see aesthetically how it’s going to look. And then normally from the designs they’re choosing, “I want that one.”

So anything related to designs, anything related to “ideas” keywords — kitchen ideas, garden ideas — or anything related to kitchen remodelling and stuff like that. Kitchen remodelling is such a lucrative market, but you want to be ranking images.

So if you can go and get a press release and you can rank those images, people might go, “I really like that and I want to order that.” They click from the image — they don’t even click from the web page — it goes through to the site, bam, they’ve got the enquiry. They might make £10–15,000 in the UK, maybe $20,000 — they’re big jobs on the kitchen remodelling side.

Ranking those images is key.

Randy TheNewsGuy:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And with the images, you can do a lot of different things. With the meta information on the images, you can stuff those with keywords or phrases or whatever you want, whatever your SEO strategy is, and then as well link that out to whatever page you want on your website.

All of our PRs, at base, you can put three images in. Then as you go up our tiers, you can put in more images. So it’s very good that way.

James Dooley:
And then what about videos? What are you doing with regards to videos? Can you embed the video on there, can you link through to a video as well?

Randy TheNewsGuy:
Video is a bit more challenging, because as we distribute, some of the news sites will take videos and others don’t. Because of that, it’s a challenge for us on segregating those out.

It’s a process that we’re working on right now — going, “All right, we want to do a video,” and we’ve got to essentially distribute that almost separately than we would anything else.

So our challenge is like: if you come to us and I say, “If you get our standard package you’re going to get somewhere between 400 and 500 news sites,” and then you say, “But Randy, I want to put a video in there,” now I know that shooting it out with a video, 200 of those are not going to work. So now I’ve got to think through how do we overcome that challenge.

But images, no problem; any other kind of embeds, no problem.

James Dooley:
And what about the Google Business Profile embed?

Randy TheNewsGuy:
Yeah, that’s not a problem.

The other thing — I can’t remember what it was, shoot. You said something earlier and I was like, “Oh yeah, I want to be sure I touch base on that,” but now I’ve completely mind–farted.

James Dooley:
Reputation management, was it?

Randy TheNewsGuy:
No, I can’t… I’ll keep talking and it’ll come back.

James Dooley:
Do you try and recommend that everyone that’s got the — they’ve got an address and a phone number — do you always try to make certain, as well as embedding the Google Business Profile, that you try at the bottom to get their name, address, and phone number?

Randy TheNewsGuy:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We try to do an exact match on the citation, right? So whatever it is on the GMB itself. The standard typically is going to be the company name, address, phone, website, and then email if they want an email in there or not. But we always try to get that good, soft citation in there.

James Dooley:
Indexing — can they help boost them with indexing? You touched upon it before. Is that something that you’re doing yourself?

Randy TheNewsGuy:
Yeah, we do that as well. Typically, as we pull your report, we’re taking those news sites and we’re running them through our own indexer. Well, it’s not our indexer — we use a couple of different SaaS indexers and push them through there as well.

We tend to — I don’t know if I’d say “favourites” — but we like a couple of different ones: Omega and CIndex are two of the main ones that we try to push out to.

James Dooley:
And then what about tier–two backlinks? You said you’re doing cloud stacking and stuff like that. I’ll give you another one as well, offline, to test out on the indexing. There’s a new indexing tool out that pretty much will — it’s not out yet, it’s called Indexceptional. It’s not out to the public. It indexes — we’ve run recent tests and it was indexing at 84%. Second best was Index Me Now, but that’s expensive, that’s a dollar per URL.

Randy TheNewsGuy:
Index Me Now is like a buck a link. I can’t do…

James Dooley:
It’s got better indexation than Index Me Now and it’s nowhere near the price of Index Me Now as well.

Randy TheNewsGuy:
Nice. Hook me up, James.

James Dooley:
I think it’s not open to the public yet, but test it, because obviously it’s working. Also it’s 100% guaranteed, so any that don’t index, you don’t pay for.

Randy TheNewsGuy:
Nice. That’s even better. Love it.

James Dooley:
Tier 2s — so what options do people have for tier–two backlinks? For anyone who doesn’t know what a tier 2 is: they’re getting a link that’s then pointing to one of the press release articles, to power that page up, which then is linking through to your money site.

So what are you doing at present? Obviously there are lots of different tools. I’ve seen you on one or two other podcasts with Elias, with SEO Neo. Are you using anything with Money Robot, are you doing anything old–school like RankerX, XRumer, GSA? What are you doing there at tier 2?

Because, to be fair, people laugh about stuff like GSA and XRumer and RankerX and MoneyRobot, but the truth of the matter is: if they’re getting crawled by Google and they’re relevant, they work. I won’t do it directly to my money site, but as tier 2s and tier 3s, they work like gangbusters.

Randy TheNewsGuy:
Well — and this is now connecting back what I wanted to mention earlier, but this is a much better segue.

People, I think, have to remember: when you’re doing a press release, you are creating some very nice tier–one links. You have to think about your news–site links as tier one.

So as an SEO, you’re like, “What am I going to do now with this tier–one? Do I just leave it as it is and hope? Or are you going to build tiers to that? Are you going to build a tier 2, a tier 3 to that tier 1 and push all that juice up?” Absolutely.

So with that, I tell people: take your best — you don’t have to do all of them, you can if you want — but take at least your best ones in your report and build additional links to those.

That’s why internally — and we just do this automatically with every release, it doesn’t matter whether you’re on our standard package or our premium package — it’s going out onto our cloud, onto our very specific private cloud stacks and entity stacks that we’ve built up.

In addition, there are a lot of fun things that you can do to help power these things up. Like I mentioned, we give you the ability to download a PDF report with live links. There are probably 300 or more PDF publishing sites. Some of those take your PDF file, and if your links are live on your PDF file, they’ll keep them live on there as well — and so they’re passing all of that great do–follow juice onto those news–site links.

That’s a great resource to use. We don’t do that service — I’ve thought about actually kicking that up, like, “Hey, we’ll take your PDF and publish it for you,” but you can.

James Dooley:
Why don’t you do that service? It would make sense.

Randy TheNewsGuy:
I don’t know. There are so many things we could be doing, right?

But yeah, so that is a great thing you can do with your PDF file.

Another thing that we like to do — and it’s similar to a process that we do automatically for your PR reports — is: we take your Excel file, pull it down, and convert it into a Google Sheet.

I like Google Sheets because you can rank Google Sheets, right? You can make them public and rank those suckers. So we take them into Google Sheets, and then we do a lot of fun different things with those.

We embed that Google Sheet into our cloud stacks, into our Google entities, but if you’re just doing this to do something on your own, you can take that Google Sheet, put it into a public folder, make that Google Sheet public, put it into a public Google folder, and then send GSA links to both of those things and fire those things up. They’ll take a lot of abuse, but they help with the indexing and push more juice at all of those press release sites.

James Dooley:
So on that, just for people to go through: the Google Sheet has got links to all of the syndicated URLs. You’re setting that as being public on “share / public”. Do you have it that it’s only “view”, you can’t edit and stuff like that?

Randy TheNewsGuy:
Yeah, view–only. You make the sheet public — go in and publish the sheet so it’s public — and then I put that sheet in a public Google Drive folder. Then I take that URL to that folder as well as the URL to the published Google Sheet, and we just start bombing it with links, with GSA.

James Dooley:
Are you doing any Scrapebox blog comments? Are you just doing GSA? Any other…?

Randy TheNewsGuy:
Everything. Just the kitchen sink, just blowing it up. It’s a Google property — they’re not going to hit that. I love abusing Google properties.

This is the kind of stuff you can do.

Then one of the things we do as a service: we’ve got a fairly large Google News site network. So what we can do is what we call our PR Boosters. We take a handful of your best news sites coming off of your PR report, your distribution report, and then we create a relevant article and publish that across our network as one big kind of separate release, almost.

In that, we’re linking the top five, six, eight of your news articles — Yahoo or whoever — and dropping that in there so that all of those Google News sites are powering up and acting as a tier 2 for those tier–one news sites.

That one we do sell as a service — you can grab that one.

James Dooley:
Sounds good.

So, for anyone that’s looking to buy a press release distribution from TheNewsGuy.com, then what little tips and tricks do you try to make certain that they’re doing? With regards to: how many links can be included in the press release, and what anchor texts do you personally recommend from the syndicated links through to your site?

Randy TheNewsGuy:
Let me answer that in a couple of different ways.

First, what we have found over the years — and we’ve been doing this since 2017; we built our newsroom in 2017 and launched it at the beginning of 2018 — what we have found is there’s kind of a sweet spot.

I’m sure you do this — you’ve got a lot of sites, you think through this as well. You can overcompensate where you don’t need to. Meaning in word count and things like that, there’s a diminishing return at a certain point — you do too much, it starts to hurt you more than benefit you.

The same thing in press releases. What we’ve found is what I call the sweet spot for a press release is an article that’s somewhere around 600–750 words. That’s the sweet spot. Less than that, you’re not going to get as widely distributed; more than that, you get less distribution as well. So we target that 600–750.

Then, our general rule of thumb: we like to do — kind of the maximum — one link per 100 words. So if you’ve got a 600–word article, we generally stick to about six links in it. The more links you have, it tends to appear too spammy–looking to some of the news sites, so they won’t pick it up.

So if you have a 600–word article, I’d tell you: max, only put in six links. You don’t have to put in six links — you can put two in if you want — but that’s what we kind of cap it at.

Your images, and the link that you may link out off your images, do not count toward that, so that’s separate.

Then, when you start talking about anchors: I always do a branded anchor. I always tell people: you should always do a branded anchor. “Randy, The News Guy” — branded anchor — and send it to your homepage, because you want great branded links to your homepage.

Then it’s going to depend on what the objective of the press release is. Is this for a local business, and you’re trying to rank locally and your GMB locally? If that’s the case, your article — you want high geo–relevance and high geo–relevant terms sprinkled within that, and you’re probably going to link out, or I would recommend linking out, to a long–tail geo–relevant keyword phrase and link out to one of the various forms of your GMB — whether it’s the search URL, the share URL, or the CID URL.

We like to use those three. Not all at once, but if we’re doing multiple PRs for somebody, we kind of rotate between them.

James Dooley:
Have you ever tried doing the API URL?

Randy TheNewsGuy:
The API URL?

James Dooley:
Yeah. A lot of people try to use the share URL, and the only issue with doing the share URL on a GMB is that it’s dynamic and it can change. Whereas one of the only links that doesn’t — the CID obviously doesn’t change — but when you go into Share → Embed, and then you get the link from the embed, that’s the API. That never changes, so it’s always a constant, and that moves the needle pretty well.

I’d say that and then the main URL are the two we use. We used to do quite a lot with the CID URL, but we’ve changed it now to the URL. The only issue is sometimes it loads and it looks like there’s an error — but even though there’s an error on the link, it’s not an error, it just comes up saying, “This is the API URL.” It still passes the power; if you actually tested it, it still passes the power through and works really well. Worth testing anyway on there.

But yeah, the three that you mentioned — the share URL, the main URL, and the CID URL — are the good ones. Also, I think there’s a post URL as well which works pretty well.

Randy TheNewsGuy:
Yes. You can do image URLs in your GMB, which can work well — especially if you’re embedding an image in the PR that’s also an image from your GMB. You can link to that, which works very effectively.

Now, we don’t do this, but I know a lot of guys that do URL manipulation of your GMB — they’ll build out that URL. I don’t do that. I’m not going to say it’s good, bad, or otherwise — I just don’t do it.

But I know a lot of guys that do and they’ve had good success doing that.

Back to your anchors: we tend to go along like that. I also like to do — if it’s an individual, like the company president or somebody that’s also going to be mentioned — I like to go and link to their personal LinkedIn page. Because that person is connected and they’re giving a good signal to that, and in a lot of instances, especially on LinkedIn, you’re going to get a lot more traffic coming from the personal LinkedIn page than the company LinkedIn page.

So I like to link to that.

Then, depending on the purpose of the release, we do like to link to other branded foundational accounts. So if you have a YouTube channel, we like to go and link to a YouTube channel — “Go see this video,” boom, there it is. A Facebook page, anything like that, I think is great.

You’re trying to connect the dots of all the signals through that press release out to the search engines.

I try to advise people: don’t exact–match keywords. You don’t want, “best plumber in Cleveland” as an exact–match anchor to your Cleveland plumbing page. I try to do long–tail stuff. You don’t need to do exact–match in there.

However, we will write your article with the very specific keywords that you want, so that article’s got it in there and it’s being related in the context.

But yeah, no exact–match branding or exact–match keyword anchor in those PRs — we try not to do that.

However, some people still… I could tell them, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” I mean, we sell the GSA as a service. I’m not kidding — every day people are like, “Yeah, hit this thing right on my money page, right on my homepage.” I’m like, “You know, I have to tell you, I really wouldn’t advise that…”

“No, no, no, I’m good, go ahead.”

“All right…”

James Dooley:
To be fair, I bet you’ve done it a few times and it’s actually worked. It’s crazy. Sometimes people are too scared — I’m definitely not saying to do it, I definitely don’t recommend doing it — but there have been so many times where they’ve gone, “Oh, we’ll just throw the kitchen sink at it,” and it’s jumped up. The only thing is normally it does work, but the issue is: what’s going to happen at the next core algorithm update?

Normally that’s when it catches up with them — it works short–term, then it kind of catches up.

Randy TheNewsGuy:
It’s risky.

James Dooley:
There’s been lots of knowledge bombs shared, I appreciate it.

With regards to success stories, or is there anything that I’ve not mentioned, that you’ve not mentioned, that people are doing and using press releases well? Any other add–ons that you want to mention? Anything else working?

Randy TheNewsGuy:
One that I love — and we added this not quite a year ago — which is a way to get additional juice for your press release and additional links for your site: we have an add–on service we call Podcast Publishing.

We take your article and we create an evergreen podcast episode with it. Then the links within whatever you’re linking to in your press release, we take those and embed them into the show notes. Then we publish it out across The News Guy podcast.

So, you know, we’ll take your headline, boom, we’ll use that headline. Then when you go to publish — “Randy’s Plumbing Service in Cleveland” — not only am I going to get my press release article, generally I’m going to get Yahoo or Digital Journal or AP News or whatever showing that article, but then bam, right there is going to be that podcast episode as well.

From a client standpoint, it’s a great way to demonstrate to a client: “Look, with that one press release service, we just occupied spaces on the first page for you with your brand name.”

Those podcast links are really nice. They’re high–authoritative, do–follow links. Getting a do–follow from TuneIn on whatever it is that you want — that is just a great, great link. And we do that cheap on our site — I think it’s a cheap service.

James Dooley:
Plus, not only that — the outbound links on those types of sites, they’ve not been as abused as much as everything else, so that knowledge bomb alone is key. Like you said, the referring–domain counts and the outbound–link ratio is not that high, and the do–follow — it just works.

Randy TheNewsGuy:
It’s funny that you say about the outbound ratio there, because if you go and you look at show notes on podcasts — aside from the guys who are really doing it right, there are maybe a thousand really high–performing podcasts against the millions that are out there — 95% of the ones that are out there don’t put links in their show notes.

So that’s why you can do this and they’re like, “Wow, these are really good and juicy” — they’re not diluted.

James Dooley:
This is the exact reason why you should be getting the press releases from you, with all the little bolt–on extras that you get.

Randy TheNewsGuy:
Nice. TheNewsGuy, get them right there.

James Dooley:
So, anyone that wants to buy a press release from Randy — let’s wrap it up.

How do people get in touch with yourself, and how do people watching this place that first press release order with you?

Randy TheNewsGuy:
Yeah, easy, man. Just go to TheNewsGuy.com. On that site we’ve got all of our offerings, all of our different packages. We list several of the add–ons, but when you go and click “Order now” it’ll take you to our order page and we’ve got the full menu of everything that we add on and that you can do with your press releases there.

We also do a bunch of other link–building services as well that you can do separately. So yeah — TheNewsGuy.com.

James Dooley:
If someone’s looking to order from TheNewsGuy.com but they’re uncertain what topic to talk about or uncertain what to do, can they jump on a call with yourself or one of the team members?

Randy TheNewsGuy:
You bet. Actually, even on the homepage of TheNewsGuy.com you can book a free 15–minute consultation with me, and we’ll jump on a Google Meet and chew it up and figure out what you need, and work from there.

James Dooley:
Sounds good.

So if anyone’s watching this and they’re not yet ready to buy a press release, hopefully you now understand that building that referring–domain count, getting that diversity in your backlink profile, helping with reputation management, building your brand, getting that no–follow to do–follow ratio and diversifying your anchor–text profile as well — there are lots of benefits to doing it.

Randy, The News Guy, has got an amazing service. Check it out, and we hope you enjoyed the podcast.

Randy, it’s been a pleasure.

Randy TheNewsGuy:
Hey, thanks, man, appreciate it. Fun.

James Dooley:
All right. Cheers.