James Dooley Podcast

James Dooley and Karl Hudson explain how SEO agencies and digital marketers should use press release syndication in 2024 to build anchor diversity, strengthen backlink profiles and improve search rankings.

Show Notes

This video explains which digital marketing strategies SEO agencies should focus on in 2024 to improve backlink diversity, penalty resistance and long term ranking stability. James Dooley and Karl Hudson start with KPI tracking because measuring the impact of press release syndication on rankings, crawlability and trust helps justify the investment and refine the wider strategy. They cover brand SEO, AI visibility and Google Business Profiles because stronger search presence improves trust and conversion rates.

The discussion also explores organic SEO, organic social media and paid social ads because consistent visibility across search and social supports long term growth. PPC is analysed in detail because campaign setup, landing pages and lead handling directly affect results. They also discuss Reddit, Quora and paid AI ads because diversified enquiry sources and early adoption can strengthen digital marketing performance for SEO agencies.

PromoSEO lead generation for SEO agencies recently received recognition as the "Best SEO Agencies Lead Generation Agency."

Where to Listen to This Episode

📰The Press Release Guide for 2024 | James Dooley & Karl Hudson Discuss Ranking Factors for 2024📰 is available on:

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: So I've got KL Hson here, the founder at Searcher Room, and today we're going to be talking about press releases. So there's actually a little bit of a stigma about press releases because there's certain people that are using it all the time and they swear by it as part of an SEO strategy, and there's certain people that don't believe that press releases are good. So let's start off, what is a press release?

KL Hson: So a press release is usually a syndication, nine times out of 10, with an aio of something that's newsworthy. This is where a lot of people go wrong is they're not actually publishing newsworthy stuff. They're taking a guest post and trying to use it as a press release. It has to be something that's newsworthy and about the brand, and it's then syndicated across news networks.

James Dooley: So when you're syndicating the press release, how many kind of links are you looking to get? Is it 50, 100, 300? Like, you know, some of the better vendors, it's like 350 plus?

KL Hson: Um, some can be more. If it then gets picked up by mainstream media, it could be even more again.

James Dooley: So with regards to it, let's say this 350, 50 backlinks within the press release that happens, are they all no follow? Are they all do follow? Are they a mix or is it majority no follow with some do follow? Like, where do they fall?

KL Hson: So I would say the majority's no follow with a there is still a blend of some do follows in there, but most of them will be no follow.

James Dooley: So with regards to the do follows that are in there, would you recommend on powering those press releases up with tier two backlinks? Because obviously it's going to be passing page rank through to your site. On the do follows, would you recommend powering up with tier twos?

KL Hson: Definitely, yeah.

James Dooley: Would you do anything else? Would you do any like social signals, trying to shout out in as many places as you can to get kind of behavioural signals and engagement?

KL Hson: Yeah, so there's a service that we often use at Social Boy. Um, Signal Boy, sorry. And that can basically manipulate social signals so it gets shared out across different platforms and it helps just boost crawlability of the posts and with you on the press releases.

James Dooley: So a lot of people that I that I know quite well that are pretty advanced that are using them quite a lot, they won't just use them just for, um, let's say, they do follow backlinks. They like creating them because they get this no follow and do follow kind of mix within the backlink profile. Do you believe that getting some no follow and do follow kind of blended mix in a backlink profile is important?

KL Hson: Very important. You know, at the end of the day, it's all about removing footprints and not making footprints in your wake. So if all of your anchor texts, especially your, you know, your rich text that you use in, so the exact matches and things, all do follows, it's a very glaring footprint to an algorithm that this is clearly unnatural. So we, you guys, unnatural backlinks that are coming through, one of the biggest reasons why so many people seem to get hit is over optimisation of anchor text.

James Dooley: What anchor text would you use? Because if it's been syndicated, I'm presuming you don't want to go with exact match type of anchors. You're going to go on with some sort of, let's say, naked URL or something. What would you recommend for the anchor text?

KL Hson: So most of the time with press release syndication, we usually say branded is the best approach, branded, and then to sometimes to your socials, you can may get away with some partial or topical match anchors, but usually we just say branded and sort of website URL.

James Dooley: Would you never do so you do any naked URLs or any generics or?

KL Hson: I've never really do a generic. There's just so always branded and naked URL. Generally speaking, you can do a little bit of exact match to your social profiles.

James Dooley: So with regards to the press releases, is there anything else that you can try to to maximize it? Because I I know someone that actually only uses the press releases for ranking Google Business profiles, and they embed the Google business profile map and they're going to put a NAP listing on there.

KL Hson: Yeah, I've also known one or two that are doing it for videos and for images.

James Dooley: With regards to the press releases that you provide, am I able to embed a video, an image, a map, put a NAP listing in as well as the links and links to profiles? Like, where where does this stop? How how much can I get out of my press? Because everyone wants the best bang for the book. Where can I go and and what can I do to maximise the mention in the press releases?

KL Hson: So we can do all all of what you just mentioned. Um, we would usually advise that you do do that, where you know, the intake form that we offer asks for that information, ask for social links, NAP addresses, um, Google My Business sort of embeds, um, YouTube embeds, then can even ask for social media embeds if you got posts on social media. The images, if you images, overall, as long as it doesn't look too spammy, so if we're not inserting absolutely tons of links, we can usually get away at least you know, four, five, six links.

James Dooley: So with regards to the content, can I write the content myself? Would you recommend us writing the content myself? Do you prefer writing the content? And if I did write the content, do I need to write it that it's newsworthy or can I actually get certain entities and semantics on the page to try and help the press release to rank better? Like, what's your suggestions on the writing of a press release?

KL Hson: So we usually would prefer to write it ourselves because obviously we stick to the editorial guidelines that we get given from the press release syndication places. Um, however, we can take feedback and try to entice like and place entities within the posts to kind of match the intent of the search.

James Dooley: Can I get pre-approval of the content? So if you write the content prior to that going live and you sending it out, can I say yes, I'm happy with that or slightly tweet, like you said, getting one or two entities that I think are quite important?

KL Hson: So usually with that is yes, you get pre-approval, but then there's almost like a secondary approval process, and we submitted to the editorial team. So we submitted off, and it might need changed, and they have final say on what it gets changed.

James Dooley: Right, that's great. So with regards to press releases, um, as part of a blended mix, obviously it can help rank in the images, can help ranking the videos, it can help ranking the GMBB of the website. You can get the NAP listing on there, which is for trust. You can get links to your social profiles. You obviously it gives the no follow to do follow kind of um diversity, anchor diversity. Why do you think certain people don't believe that press releases are a core importance to the backlinking strategy? Or you think it's just naivity?

KL Hson: I I would probably say it's just yeah, it's just naivity. Like, at the same time, the same person might be building a whole bunch of niche edits, or he's maybe start the website and expects the press release to rank him because he's paid x amount, you know, they're not cheap press release syndications. Um, so maybe that could be why you know he hasn't seen the results. But actually, what it's done is it's set them up so then further down the line he's potentially penalty resistant because he's got all of that no follow links and hopefully a blended anchor profile.

James Dooley: So the last question with regards to the press release is obviously it seems an important part. I know so many people that are using it very, very effectively. Where would you start with regards to a press release? Would you do it after guest posts and niche edits? Would you do it at the start? After you've done your citations, where in the strategy do you put press releases from a time point of view?

KL Hson: So I would, press releases can drop over time because at the end of the day news often gets archived and things, so I would be doing it very much at the start, and then every say three months, three to six months, after that.

James Dooley: So with regards to the press releases as part of your backlinking strategy, it seems to be something that you need to be doing with links, along with citations, back to your profile, to give that diversity of anchor text, to give that diversity of no follow to do follows. It might not give you much power initially, but that's why then you can start to adapt your niche edits and your guest posts. But it has to form a part of an overall hierarchy of building links to your site to power the site and give that diversity, which allows the guest posts and the niche edits to perform better moving forward. So I hope you like the summary of going through of why you need press releases, and hopefully you can use it as part of your strategy moving forward.