SEO PR TIPS

There’s no point in doing work for clients if you can’t prove that you are doing it.

We’re constantly reviewing our tracking and reporting processes, to keep up with developments in SEO – and satisfy our very demanding clients (and quite right that they are demanding).

Especially with the credit crunch, value for money is incredibly important, so how do we prove that we are worth it.

If only we could add tracking code to every story that is distributed, but that is never going to happen and our clients know that they are never going to get neat statistics on conversions for PR campaigns, as they do for PPC. But, we can provide a lot of information on keyword rankings for our press releases on the different sites that they appear.

We use Advanced Web Ranking reports, customising them to track a set of important keywords in the releases.

How do we know which sites to track? Well, there are loads of tools out there Google Alerts being the most famous, that promise to send you notification of results for any search you want. You can set it to search for the exact wording of an extract of a story.

Sadly I’ve not been impressed with these automated results – they often miss blog posts and are not very friendly to languages other than English…

So, back to square one, we manually search for unique phrases in the release on the main search engines and record the domains.

Some of our clients are only interested in the number of links published on the release and so we can provide them with that. This isn’t necessarily the best way to judge a release’s success. If you are lucky enough to get your story on the BBC (yeah, good luck with that), then there will 0 (zero) links included – and your company name may well even be removed!

I’m currently checking out Trackur – hoping this might add an extra dimension to our reporting.

What would you like to see in an SEO-PR report?

…and “buzz marketing”, the new name for viral marketing for those at the bleeding edge, was one of the buzzwords of 2008…

Even though it’s one of the trends of the moment, the advice offered by ClickZ back in 2001 still stands.

In summary: -

1. Offer an incentive.
2. Don’t consider the referral an opt-in
3. Personalize the referral email
4. Track and analyze the results
5. Continually promote friendly referrals

Get the full lowdown on viral marketing from ClickZ

A colleague was asking me for some statistics on PR campaigns we have been doing for a client yesterday. I mentioned that we had been doing a lot of E-Shots (email flyers) for them recently and he replied:

“No link juice with E-Shots is there though?”

This got me thinking (Carrie Bradshaw-style) and so I wondered, can you generate link juice from email marketing campaigns?

Firstly, link juice is never going to be the prime mover in email marketing. As with other online PR strategies, the priorities are building brand awareness, relationship management and generating immediate site visits.

However, there are ways to exploit email campaigns and gain SEO benefits.
1. Host your email newsletters on a stand-alone domain. Optimise this site so it ranks – identifying it as a news site. This is an effective way to increase top level search engine visibility for your brand, products and services. (Part of the Ring of Fire)

2. Use your site CMS to build content pages for your e-newsletters and e-shots, the back pages, rather than the front page which appear in your readers’ inboxes. This is all good, relevant content that can be indexed by the search engines.

3. Do you send out messages with a strong visual impact? If you have designs that are genuinely interesting, it might be worth putting them on FlickR and other image directories.

4. Make a feature of the newsletter sign-up function on your website and make sure it is also included on any corporate blogs and forums. If you produce a well-rounded newsletter that isn’t just a list of points-of-sale, there is the opportunity to promote this as feature of your company / website in a PR campaign – thus, generating links!

I’m sure there are lots of other things, I’ll add them when I think of them. Have you got any tips to add?