Using press releases for NAP backlinks: is it worth it?
What is on this page
Short answer: yes, but only as a supplement, and only if you pay for local syndication rather than a big national wire.
A press release doesn't build a structured citation. It builds a mention — your business name, address and phone inside an article that gets copied to dozens of news and syndication sites. Google reads those too.
What a release actually gets you
- Twenty to two hundred unstructured mentions within about a week
- A few genuinely indexed pages, and a long tail of pages that never get crawled
- Mostly nofollowed links, which is fine for trust signals
- Speed — far faster than manual directory submission
What it doesn't get you is durability. Syndicated copies get pruned. Assume half will be gone in eighteen months, and don't build your foundation on them. Your foundation is directory backlinks and map data.
When it's worth the money
It's worth it when you have a real event: a new location, a rebrand, a phone number change, an award, a new practitioner joining a clinic. Those give the release a reason to exist and let you restate the correct NAP everywhere at once.
A release is the fastest way to push a corrected address into the ecosystem after a move. It is a terrible way to fake newsworthiness.
It's not worth it if you're a single-location business with no news and no budget left after the basics. Spend that money on review backlinks instead.
Paid services worth using
Prices vary wildly for the same outcome. The big legacy wires charge four figures. You can get comparable local syndication for a fraction of that from an affordable distribution service with a wide outlet list, which matters because you want to pick outlets by location rather than blasting nationally.
For US-only local coverage, US Newswire is a straightforward option — it distributes releases for United States businesses and lets you keep the release focused on one metro rather than the whole country. Location targeting is the whole point: a Phoenix HVAC company gains nothing from a placement on a New York finance site. If budget isn't the constraint, PR Newswire is probably the biggest wire in the industry and the one large brands default to — expect to pay several times more for it.
Free newswire options
Free wires exist and they're worth twenty minutes of your time. OpenPR, PR.com, FreePressRelease.io and PressLatest.com all publish free submissions. Expect a slower review, a lower-quality index rate and no control over which sites pick it up.
Use free wires to test your copy. If a release gets picked up nowhere, the problem is usually the angle, not the wire.
How to write one that carries your NAP
- Put the full NAP in a boilerplate block at the bottom, exactly as it appears on your site
- Use the city name in the headline — syndication sites keep headlines intact
- Link once to your homepage and once to the relevant location page
- Skip the adjectives; editors cut them and syndication copies keep the cuts
- Include a real contact name and a working phone
One release per quarter is plenty. If you want the mentions without the writing, our all-in-one package covers the structured side and you can bolt a release on top when you actually have news.
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