SEO PR TIPS

Finding your community is part of the strategic process and is fundamental to brand development, not just for online PR but every aspect of your business depends on knowing who your community is, otherwise how do you build a product or service in the right way?
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Public Relations or PR helps build a profile or image which is maintained in public through various forms of communication and is otherwise known as communications, or reputation management. The aim is to promote / provide exposure of your business to various audiences and to build relationships to enhance the brand.
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Just look at that tag cloud…

When my then-colleague, Mademoiselle Mondon and I started this blog last year, Twitter was just one of the crowd of social networking sites that we paid cursory attention to.

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Internet PR and Marketing investment continually rises, while offline spend is in decline, marketers are continually looking for new methods and approaches to suit business needs. The current climate of the economy has forced many companies to re-strategise in many areas, where spend is minimalistic and productivity potentially maximised.

With virtual social networking taking the world by storm it’s no wonder marketers have already jumped on the band wagon promoting their businesses and colleagues, for example, the use of Twitter has totally entranced our colleagues here @ WebCertain, follow: @globalppc @starbuck8 @jennysimpson @davidsegal @davidecorradi @ballueder @WebCertain @J__9 @YorkSEO @globalseo @andyatkinskruge @seoprtips @newscertain @WebCertain_DE @AnaVLeckenby @oscarcarreras, for updated information on specialised areas of multilingual search!

Promoting the latest international search summit, general information about PR, SEO, link building, PPC etc… has developed a wider knowledge on each subject, by sharing and re-tweeting relevant data to enhance the specialised knowledge arena WebCertain hold.

Many businesses and organisations are using online facilities and companies such as WebCertain not only for English articles, as we are multilingual; multiple languages from across the globe play a large part in how they operate, especially for clients. Online PR is a great way of getting your company, news / press releases / data, relayed around the world, especially using press release sites with an overseas domain, rather than the traditional offline methods. This however, does vary upon client needs; everyone wants something different and to be unique, so be adaptable and knowledgeable on your subject arena to create the best possible service for your company and your clients!

We have spoken here about PR reporting before – it’s just as important as any other aspect of online PR campaign management – after all, what’s the point if you can’t prove the worth of your efforts.

Compared with Paid search, online PR is limited in its tracking capabilities, simply because you cannot publish tracking code in your press releases in order to view visitor paths and conversions. Nonetheless, there are still some ways of getting around that – and many of them will be familiar to PR professionals who have long experience running offline PR campaigns.

Brand tracking
Hopefully you have a unique or unusual brand name for your business, or for some of your products. Track the number of people searching for these brand names through Google Trends, or Twitterholic.

Create unique landing pages to track visitors
There are lots of benefits to this. Firstly you have the opportunity to tailor a landing page with the most appeal for new visitors. If the landing page is only accessible to readers of your PR content, you have a clear view of the impact of your PR campaigns.

Unique paths for calls-to-action
If you have the capability to create unique telephone numbers, email addresses and other contact details, this is one of the most tried-and-tested ways of assessing the success of PR campaigns.

This can include custom coupon codes that relate to specific news – and with the large number of consumer forums that share information on coupons and discounts, this is another effective way to spread your news.

Oscar Carreras, Sales Strategist at WebCertain kept us up-to-date throughout the Search Engine Strategies Conference in London via Twitter and has now most helpfully provided us with a round-up of the key messages.  Interestingly, all of his points relate to SEO-PR…

•    Video is the future

Not only there were several sessions about video but it was mentioned in at least 3 non related sessions. YouTube is already the second biggest search engine in the world and internet users across the world spend 30 min at least by average watching videos, not to mention the rising appearance of videos in blended or Universal search.

•    Online PR = Strategic Link Building Strategy

Online PR seems to be utilized by most of agencies as their main tool for strategic link building. In addition, blogging, social media, etc are all supported by online PR teams. Content creation should be a must.

(Jenny – my italics.  As I mentioned in my post yesterday about the boom in social media, the role for PRs to play is to create original content to support these activities)

•   The challenges and opportunities of Social Media

Social media pervaded all the sesssions at SES London, but it seems to be difficult to build a business model around it.

The way most of the agencies are approaching it is by leading by example and make it an integral part of their marketing toolset for lead generation and then show off that knowledge and results to provide with consultancy to clients or support in the way of apps generation, widgets, video creation, etc.

They don’t seem to offer to create profiles and handle them on behalf of their clients since it is not cost effective and not very useful since clients know more about their products that an agency will never do. Conclusion: walk the walk and don’t talk the talk.

(Jenny – yes, this is the major issue with these types of campaigns – who does what?  It’s all about user-generated content, but it needs a push – and imagination combined with technical / web know-how)
•   Reporting and analytics

Automation, analytics driven processes, etc seem to be the ways for agencies to scale services. The most important skill for both SEO and PPC, and maybe Social Media too, should be analytics expertise to reach conclusion out of empiric data.

(Jenny – and analytics is the main focus for the technology team at WebCertain)

Any more thoughts on SES London?

Here’s a recent quote from Daryl Willcox, chairman of DWPub: “There are tons of people out there blogging about how important online PR is, but there is very little in terms of actual guidance – especially for those who have limited online PR experience.   (Source)

Mr Willcox is promoting a white paper he has written about online PR – and this campaign is pretty successful.  I’ve come across references to it several times accidentally – and the quote above annoyed me enough to repeat it!  Great campaign management…

SEO-PR-Tips Absence of advice about online PR?

We are trying to offer practical advice, along with adding our own personal spin on what’s happening right now. 

I’m sure the DWPub is full of great advice (they are a good company and we use their press wires), but you will get widely differing views on this subject from people, depending on their background.

Daryl Willcox is from a PR background and understands the value of targeted campaign management, use of key contacts, the human reaction to content.

I’m constantly dealing with people who view our work from an SEO perspective only – they see the “link farm potential” in our international news network, or they are only interested in reports that can prove direct referrals.

The boom in social media (and it seems to be all that clients and the search industry alike are talking about at the moment!) is actually proving to be a good thing for the way PR is perceived.  Creating a buzz, trying to build up word-of-mouth interest, devising events / issues that will make people care – suddenly these are becoming important again – almost as important as keyword density…

I’m watching this space with interest…please share your thoughts on the latest online PR developments

EDIT – Please note the clarification in the comments.  Thanks for the feedback Andrew.

One thing that all professional writers are taught when they are starting out is to know your audience – visualise them in your head when you sit down and write and it will make it easier to pick the right words.

This is one of the cornerstones of writing press releases and remains unchanged. You imagine the grumpy sub-editor who has a chip on his shoulder about supposedly overpaid PR types, looking for grammatical mistakes as an excuse to spike your story. You imagine the stressed out young reporter who has a target of x stories per day to write and might just be tempted to overlook the fact that this is a bloody press release, because it won’t need much re-writing and it just about comes across as a kosher news story (not that working in the media has made me cynical. Oh no…)

But now if you work in online PR, you are more than likely writing on social networking sites and imagining your audience is a much more complicated affair (ignore the hecklers shouting, “it’s easy, they’re all geeks!”).

For example:
On Facebook, my boyfriend updated his status with the esoteric statement “…is baking in the boulangerie of the mind”, which was understandable to precisely one person (me, it’s a long story).

Again on Facebook, a friend posted “…thinks 5-0 will do very nicely, thanks.” This is understandable to everyone that knows that he is a Man Utd fan.

Meanwhile on Twitter, Laure is wondering where John is (and appropriately enough in this mixed up, muddled up world, this is a reference to said John’s unexplained disappearance from Facebook). Meanwhile I’m confusing people with an oblique reply to Oscar about the mayor of London (“who’s Boris?” I’m asked by a third party).

My point is that on social networking sites you are often addressing different overlapping audiences, with different interests, and with different levels of knowledge about your subject matter. Confusing things even further is the presence of friends-of-friends who don’t actually know you at all.

It’s obvious that if your boss or clients might be reading, this isn’t the place for letting off steam at the end of a bad day at work. Correction, it should be obvious.

If you are planning on using social networks for marketing or online PR, you need to go back to basics and define who you are and who you want your audience to be.

You have the choice to be an online mate, a handy bite-sized news source, the straightforward corporate face of your company, or the knowledgeable (but human! I am human, look what I had for my lunch while I was finding you that link to the latest data on web usage in Uzbekistan!) SEO-expert networker – the latter accounting for approximately 50% of people on Twitter by my reckoning.

NB – Imagining my audience for this blog is super-easy – it’s the most intelligent and beautiful group of humans known to man – aren’t you! Do leave a comment if you have any thoughts on this.

In a post yesterday I mentioned that clients are even more concerned than usual about getting value from money from online PR

The Econsultancy Online PR Trends Briefing says that the metric of measurement are crucial for online PR in 2009.

From ClickThrough Marketing: “Metrics such as improvements in search can be an effective way to benchmark online PR, but such measures neglect the wider value of company reputation…”

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?