Competitive Analysis With SEMRush and Summit Community Bank

  Summit Community Bank is a nearly $4 billion regional community bank. It provides banking, lending, and trust and wealth management services at 44 banking locations across three states. While primarily focused on maintaining its strong footprint in legacy locations, Summit Community Bank has used a successful merger and acquisition strategy to encourage steady growth over the last six years. As it continues to grow in new markets, new opportunities bring new, diverse challenges, including exploring new peers and competitors, expanding brand awareness, and capturing market share. In the digital landscape, competitive analysis is especially important when it comes to optimizing one of an organization’s most valuable online resources, its website.  Competitive analysis, as SEMrush notes, can help benchmark a business’ current SEO performance, identify areas of improvement in SEO strategy, reveal any competitor gaps or weaknesses, and discover competitors' winning strategies (Sl...
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Press Releases and Public Relations

 

Hello Class,

I saw that many of you discussed content and blogs, but no one brought up PR this week, except in passing. Press Releases and Public Relations are a very big part of off-page SEO.

They do not always have to be breaking news, but I agree, that is when we most often see them. Many organizations use them to announce events, promotions, highlight specific topics, and more. This is when they should really be tied to the website.

The beauty of press releases, in addition to driving traffic to your site (which is incredibly important), is that they often have staying power if they are also posted on the website of the issuing party. If press releases are put on your site first, they achieve the SEO impact for your organization’s site. (Remember that there is no penalty for duplication of content but only the first post is counted.)

They are almost a historical record and progression, and therefore somewhat evergreen. People who are researching the company will often comb through archived press releases, and they often give insights into how a particular event may have unfolded from the organization’s perspective. This also adds value to the site owner.

I do tend to agree that Public Relations is the aspect of the business that maintains consistency. In fact, Brigitte Lyons (2020) talks about the 5 ways that PR will enhance consistency. One of the 5 is that “you get better at it”. This one made me smile, but it is very true.

I have attached a PDF on the Announcement Board from Intrado that was written in 2019 that you might find helpful. This article specifically relates to SEO and provides a nice recap of “do’s and don’t” at the end as relates to SEO and press releases. The thoughts on developing keywords, where they should be used, and the use of anchor text and alt text tags is worth reading about.

Thoughts?

Prof. T

References:

Intrado. (2019). The Ultimate Guide to Press Release SEO. 2019 Edition. Retrieved from: https://insight.intrado.com/press-release-seo-ebook?ir-leader

Lyons, B. (2020). 5 WAYS CONSISTENCY IN YOUR PR PROGRAM PAYS OFF. Retrieved from: https://www.brigittelyons.com/consistency/

Photo was retrieved from: 

Kennedy, M. (2020, October 30). 10 Exceptional Press Release Examples to Model Your Press Release After. Retrieved from: https://www.business2community.com/public-relations/10-exceptional-press-release-examples-to-model-your-press-release-after-02358258


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