SEO PR TIPS

Trackur is pretty simple to use. You enter in your search term, fill out a couple of other criteria (exclude domains, text results, videos or images results) and here you go with a list of the sources that quote your brand name!

I try it for our agency WebCertain and filter the search asking it not to include results with the main company URL and unfortunately I am a bit disappointed with the results as it looks really messy…

I could not see some of the sources I get while doing a basic search on Google Web such as our own PR resource http://www.newscertain.com or on Twitter or LinkedIn in which the company is registered.

I also noticed that most of the links appearing on the listing do not lead you directly to the main article page speaking about your brand but, to a link to a page that has just a link on your brand name.

I explain myself more precisely with the example below:

The result underlined in red is a PR we wrote for a client and that has been published in one of the well known news service wires einnews.com. The link drives you directly to the article.

However, the result underlined in green directs you to a total different article not in relation with the one you are looking for – this because the page of this article just contains a link to the brand name. And then it’s not easy to see it when you don’t have a view of the cached page that you get from a Google search.

Briefly, you have to play around and check the listing to get at the end what you really want – but does that save you more time than playing around the web using Google search?

The good thing about Trackur is that you can share a result with a friend via email so that you can make him aware of a bad or a really good comment that appeared on a certain blog or site. Another good point is that Trackur gives you some notes on the influence of each website (views numbers, top discussion, traffic rank of the site) where your brand or article has been quoted to see the benefits of it. But I have to say I am not sure how this ranking worked… I assume that a higher number indicated more influence??? Also, I wonder if clients will understand or rate a Trackur rank, compared to Google Page Rank, or Alexa.

Unfortunately, it is a shame you can’t select the results you want to make appearing on the listing and share the whole listing of it with your company or clients (or is this option available in the paid version??) – I am thinking notably of yahoo search explorer that offers you the possibility to save your links listing results in an excel format…

A good thing nevertheless is that you can save your all searches within the site and set it up as a RSS feed and start monitoring what’s being said about your company.

Working for a multilingual company, I have to say as well Trackur is not the best tools to track results in any other languages than English. I try to assess the results for a French PR campaign I managed but none of the sources I can find while tracking through Google come up with Trackur…is Trackur supposed to be multilingual?

Conclusions and suggestions

I think that charging up to $197 a month (that is actually the price for the enterprise option) for the tool that doesn’t offer substantially greater benefit than Google Alerts is a bit too much…

The pricing model definitely seems aimed at businesses. I can somewhat understand this because I am sure the tool is a good resource, but need to some extent to develop more options to be perfectly well respected in my opnion…(dealing with more languages, keeping preferences for viewing search results, having the possibility to add notes to specific items, or the possibility to view results in summary or excel form…etc.)

I am looking forward how this tool will grow and see what can be the differences among the many other e-reputation metrics tools across the web…

I was also quoting in my last post the site Brandseye and Jenny just came up with some news about it thanks to her Twitter connections!!! Apparently this one would be multilingual…

I follow Jenny’s article (or you could say I “Twitt” her in a proper geek language) to speak about tracking and monitoring online PR.

As she mentioned with the ClickThrough Marketing article example, there are many PR professionals who still do not know how to best measure the effectiveness of their social media campaigns. And this is more than understanding when we know the amounts of new blogs, social networks and plethora of online communities, created and interfering in today’s online space!

Nevertheless, there are many tools online that already allow you to keep records on the buzz created through your campaigns while assessing bloggers’ feelings, number of links, bookmark views…etc.

According to Lee Odden, the following software tools can help make things easier for Online PR professionals:

Google Alerts for brand monitoring
TweetBeep – twitter tracking tool!
Small biz: Trackur
Enterprise: RADIAN6, Buzzlogic

Some others that are worth looking at are:

Collective Intellect
Keotag
Crimsonhexagon
Vibemetrix

Brandseye
Reputation.distilled
Reputationdefender.com
Sentimentmetrics.com
Reputrace.com

We are looking at the moment at Trackur which is an online reputation monitoring tool that has been developed for companies who take a serious look at what is being said about them in the blogosphere so that you can take action when need be, and prevent a storm of bad e-press whenever possible (as we know how easy a business can live and die by online referrals and word of mouth!!)

The best way to get a handle on Trackur is probably to give it a try while signing up for the free 14 day trial (what we do at the moment and for which we will come with thoughts really soon), but any good comments by those who had already experienced it by the past are always welcome!!!

However and according to the Demo video that I have already watched, Trackur seems to have a much more integrated package as, compared to Google News Alert, it allows you to monitor what is being said about you and your company in the blogosphere.

What Trackur does exactly is to search blogs, forums and other online publications in order to track items that are pertinent to you.

According to Andy Beal, users can be up and running with Trackur in just 5 minutes which “removes the hassle out of maintaining dozens of manual reputation searches.”

He explains: “We take the hard work out of monitoring social media. We monitor news, blog posts, images, videos – even Twitter! Users can set up multiple searches, use sophisticated filtering to remove items that are not relevant to them, bookmark items, share items, sort items, then subscribe by email or RSS – or just use our beautiful AJAX interface”.

So far, Trackur appears a bit more sophisticated than Google Alerts with some obvious advantages such like the management platform or the fact it covers data sources outside of Google’s Index, but for this extra advantages you will have to consider an extra price of $18 – $88 while Google remains free…

Let’s see…

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?