Grade Your Press Release

Press Release Grader HubSpot just announced the availability of PressRelease Grader. Based on the company’s Website Grader, the idea is to help companies optimize their releases for SEO purposes. I think PressRelease Grader will be a good tool for marketers and public relations professionals seeking to optimize releases for SEO purposes.

You just cut and paste the content of your release and it evaluates it on several points: general statistics, suggestions for content, and link analysis. There’s also a word cloud highlighting which words are used most in the release.

Things I like about the application:

- Education level of the release: Depending on the audience for the release, you have to write the release accordingly. Looks like my releases are graduate level. Thankfully I’m not a consumer facing company otherwise, this would be an issue.

- Gobbledygook Words: Based on David Meerman Scott’s book, this tells if you if you’re overusing certain words. Unfortunately scalable and robust are words that I constantly use in press releases!

- Link Analysis: This portion analyzes the words and links in your release. It provides recommendations to make the links stronger for SEO.

Recommendations for the release grade:

- Glossary of terms: I recommend hyperlinking industry terms and pointing to a glossary or definition. Though I’m not new to SEO per se, there are some terms that I may not use on a daily basis.

- URL to press release: I recognize that the tool is great for unpublished press releases. I would be interested in seeing an ability to put in an URL for a published release. This way, you can analyze additional points for the release, such as are the keywords, title and description consistent with the release.

I look forward to seeing how the Press Release Grader improves with feedback from fellow PR folks out there.

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All content copyright Cece Salomon-Lee, Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, with the attribution: By Cece Salomon-Lee, PR Meets Marketing, and a link to the post.

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5 Comments

csalomonlee June 13, 2008 at 23:39

@dharmeshs – thanks for stopping by. I look forward to seeing the updates when you include them.

@cparente – that’s so true! I do pay attention to them but over rule it if I’m going for “poetic” license =)

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cparente June 9, 2008 at 21:15

Thanks for the handy tool, Cece.

One basic tool a lot of PR folks don’t utilize enough is the Readability Stats in word, located under Spelling and Grammar. Obviously this doesn’t address specific 2.0 issues, but its very useful for id’ing long winded sentences, passive writing, reading ease and jargony acronyms.

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Marketing sussex June 9, 2008 at 09:40

Interesting subject

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Tools and Topics :: Latest Issues in PR Overall and PR Higher Ed | infOpinions? June 7, 2008 at 11:10

[...] Grade Your Press Release « PR Meets Marketing [...]

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dharmeshs June 4, 2008 at 03:31

Thanks for trying out Press Release Grader (I’m a founder of HubSpot, the company behind the tool).

Both of your ideas are good (the glossary and the ability to put in a URL). Will try to get those in sometime during the next few days.

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About

Cece Salomon-Lee is director of marketing for ACTIVE Network, Business Solutions division, and author of PR Meets Marketing, which explores the intersection of public relations, marketing, and social media.