I tried doing a Press Releases for SEO. It didn't work.

• Todd H. Gardner • seomarketingcertkitstartup

Let me save you $150 and some disappointment: press releases for SEO don’t work.

I recently launched the public beta for CertKit, my certificate management platform. Like any founder trying to bootstrap growth, I’ve been grinding on SEO, specifically trying to rank for “certificate management” and “47 day certificates.”

The internet’s SEO gurus whisper about press releases being a secret weapon. Not for the direct follow links (those days are long gone), but supposedly the sheer volume of nofollow links from dozens of domains can give your site a rankings boost.

Sure. Let’s test that hypothesis.

The Press Release Marketplace is Wild

The press release industry is basically three tiers of questionable value:

Bottom Tier ($50-100): Fly-by-night operations that blast your “news” to sites that look like they were built in 2003 and forgotten. Nobody reads these. Google definitely doesn’t care.

Top Tier ($1,000+): Business Wire (owned by Berkshire Hathaway, because of course it is) and PR Newswire. Fortune 500 companies use these to announce executive changes and quarterly earnings.

Middle Tier ($150-500): The “reputable” options like EINPresswire, PRWeb, and others. They promise distribution to “hundreds of news sites” and have enough testimonials to seem legitimate.

I went with EINPresswire for $150. Multiple SEO blogs vouched for it, and compared to the bottomless pit that is Google Ads, $150 seemed like a reasonable experiment.

Writing Something That Doesn’t Suck

Even though I suspected nobody would actually read this thing, I couldn’t bring myself to write marketing drivel. I spent a few hours crafting something that followed the press release format but actually contained useful information about the upcoming 47-day certificate requirements and how CertKit solves that problem.

The press release went live on October 15.

EINPresswire proudly reported it was picked up by 165 “news” sites. Impressive, right?

The “News” Sites That Picked It Up

Here’s a sampling of the prestigious publications that ran my press release:

You’ve never heard of any of these because they’re not real news sites. They’re content farms that automatically republish press releases to create the illusion of news coverage. It’s SEO theater all the way down.

The Actual Results

Let’s look at the data from October 15 to November 4:

Traffic: 65 total clicks to our website. That’s less than one click per site that “published” the story. And honestly, some of those were probably me obsessively checking if anyone was reading it.

Link Building: According to Ahrefs:

We gained 7 referring domains. The rest either dropped off or were so low-quality that Ahrefs ignored them entirely.

Search Rankings: Zero movement for “certificate management” or “47 day certificates.”

ROI: Approximately negative infinity.

Why Press Releases Don’t Work Anymore

The press release industrial complex exists to extract money from hopeful founders, not to actually promote your product. Here’s why they’re useless in 2024:

  1. Nobody reads them. Real journalists don’t trawl EINPresswire for stories. The only “readers” are bots and other founders checking if their own releases got picked up.

  2. Google knows they’re garbage. All those nofollow links from content farms? Google has been wise to this game for years. They provide zero SEO value.

  3. It’s pay-to-play spam. You’re literally paying to spam the internet with corporate announcements. It feels gross because it is gross.

What Actually Works

In the two months I’ve been seriously working on CertKit’s SEO, here’s what has actually moved the needle:

Our Domain Rating went from 0 to 48 in two months without a single press release. The $150 I wasted on this experiment isn’t really a big deal, but the time I spent I could have written something interesting for the blog instead.

The Bottom Line

Press releases are zombie marketing. They shamble along, sustained by the hopes of founders and the promises of SEO “experts” who haven’t updated their playbooks since 2010.

Save your money. Write something useful instead. Build something people actually want to talk about. And whatever you do, don’t fall for the press release scam.