Online Marketing Blog

How agile is your marketing?  Do you have layer upon layer of approval processes, committees, lawyers, and executives who need to sign off on every piece of external communication before it goes out?

If yes, your business is structured for a pre-Internet world, and unfortunately this means you will always be at a disadvantage compared to agile competitors designed to take advantage of a connected society.  An inescapable truth is the web rewards companies (and people) that are nimble.

People interact deepest with thoughts and ideas that have character and personality.  And if there is one thing that removes this, it is the superfluous layers that design by committee creates.  It rips the personality from content piece by piece as it passes though each filter, and is the antithesis of agility and what makes for compelling communications.

Over the next 2 weeks several staff from TopRank be hitting the road for multiple SEO/Social Media/PR speaking and training events. We invite you to attend and would love to meet up with readers of Online Marketing Blog.  

Topics during these events will emphasize the practice areas of our agency: Search Marketing, Online Public Relations and Social Media Marketing. Locations will range from New York to San Francisco to Minneapolis.

May 19: Media Relations Summit, Crowne Plaze Hotel in NYC (event info)

4:30 pm: Mastering SEO, Google AdWords and Other Search Tools to Increase Visibility
If you’re ready to vault your website, landing pages, corporate videos, blogs, press releases, and online newsroom into the top of the search rankings, take in this one-hour bootcamp. You’ll learn all the latest tools, tips and tricks for making Google and Yahoo love you.

Measuring the effect of online marketing and PR efforts is essential for both understanding the return on investment but also for feedback that will improve subsequent efforts.  

Measuring the effect of SEO for Public Relations benefits should start with well defined outcomes. To get a good handle on SEO effectiveness, it’s important to match the purpose for the effort with specific metrics.  For example, if improving brand visibility is a goal, then documenting brand mentions in connection with news & PR content at regular intervals can demonstrate the effect of content promotion and link building. 

Online PR metrics and tools often include:

• News wire service metrics (see screen capture below)
• Web analytics for landing pages and web site
• Google and Yahoo alerts

Changes in consumer preferences towards news consumption and sharing habits via the social web present both challenges and opportunities for PR agencies.  Searchers increasingly expect to interact with what they find via search. 

The opportunity for Public Relations is to understand that leveraging social media as a distribution channel to attract buzz and earn links is as important as keyword optimization of social media content to improve visibility on standard search engines.  Simply put: SEO and Social Media go together like peas and carrots.

The nature of the social web encourages participation: sharing, voting, commenting and linking. Popular social content gets exposure, traffic and can result in a substantial number of relevant inbound links.  Keyword relevancy plus aboundant inbound links to content equals improved search engine visibility. Whatever keywords that are used to describe optimized news content that becomes popular within social channels like news, bookmarking and media sharing are what that content will tend to rank highly on in standard search engines.

For those readers just joining us, this is post #8 in a series of 10 on the intersection of search engine optimization and public relations, “Top Ten SEO Tips for PR Professionals“.

Besides content optimization and making sure a site’s news pages and digital assets can be found and indexed, attracting relevant inbound links is the next most important tactic for improving search engine performance of Public Relations related content.

There are literally hundreds of ways to acquire good links. There are even more ways to acquire bad links, so knowing the difference can be important. Read more about that below. But first, we’ll describe some general guidelines for news content link building.

 Most web sites with active media relations programs host an online newsroom. Analysts, journalists and even some bloggers find newsrooms a useful resource for finding past media coverage, press releases, image assets, executive bios, company history, webinars, white papers, case studies and other information helpful for researching stories.

Any content that is published to the web can be optimzed for search and that includes online newsrooms. We prefer to implement online newsrooms with blog software, because of the content management features and inherent search engine benefifts. Automatic RSS feed creation is also a benefit.

Newsrooms should offer easy to find contact information as well as a content categorization scheme that considers keywords as part of the taxonomy. Organizing press releases by date isn’t very useful for searchers. Archiving press releases and other content within the newsroom by categories, chronologically as well as by keyword tag (as in folksonomy, not meta keyword tag) can be quite useful to readers as well as search engines.

One of the most popular keyword optimization content types for SEOs and Public Relations professionals alike are press releases. As a news communication tool, the value of press releases has undergone changes.  However, press releases provide a substantial amount of content to news search engines and can rank well in standard search engines like Google or Yahoo. 

Multiple studies have documented that consumers and journalists are searching for and reading press releases. Optimizing press releases for a specific audience makes them easier to find and therefore, more of an asset for communicating news and attracting traffic to the company web site.  As a result, it makes sense for marketing and PR practitioners alike to understand how to make press release content easier to find.

This is post #5 in a series of 10 on the intersection of PR and SEO.  We’ll discuss a few best practices content SEO tactics as well as a few things to avoid.

While there is much to understand about successfully implementing and maintaining search engine optimization efforts, there are a few  fundamental concepts worth starting with, including the notion of quantity, quality and time as appropriate to content and links.  For the most part, the more web pages, digital assets and inbound links, the better the search visibility.  Each link is a conduit and each page is a potential entry point into the web site.

As a general guideline, the same is true with quality. The higher quality content and link sources, the more competitive advantage for better search results. 

The core of search marketing  is the mix of keyword phrases that people use to search for  information on the web. Part of the value of Search Engine Optimization is to identify what searchers actually enter in the search box. If optimization efforts can focus on the phrases that are equally relevant and in demand, there’s a resonable expectation that the optimized news content will attract more visitors of the right kind: journalists, reporters, analysts, bloggers and even end consumers. 

Choosing the best keywords for news content starts with brainstorming using a mix of sources including the main topic of the content, talking to customers, analyzing competitor news content and topically relevant news that already rank wells. Effective keyword research generates a seed list of concepts from the brainstorming exercise and then proceeds to use keyword research tools to determine the popularity of those phrases as well as discovering related phrases in use.

When search engine marketing enters the conversation in PR circles and vice versa, it’s usually search engine optimization, not pay per click that gets attention. However, there are numerous opportunities to use the on-demand visibility of Pay Per Click as a method to attract visitors to news related content.

Publishers of online news and media use Pay Per Click to create instant search visibility for hot and trending news stories. Here’s an example of the NY Times using AdWords to promote a story about Twitter.  You can also see from this screenshot via Spyfu, some of the topical and time sensitive keyword phrases they’ve bid on to drive traffic to news stories.

Within the realm of Public Relations, there are many types of digital content that get created and often promoted. Content that can be searched on can be optimized, and that spells opportunity for extending the reach of PR and media relations efforts. Journalists and consumers alike are searching, why not make sure the content published to the web as part of PR efforts is easy to find via search?

Examples of PR content that can be optimized include:

• Press releases
• Letters to the editor
• Online newsrooms
• Media kits
• Corporate blogs
• White papers
• Webinars/demos
• Newsletters
• Real world interviews published digitally

“If Ihad to pick only one thing to do with my web site to improve it’s search engine visibility, what would it be?”

It’s a question that comes up often and most people asking it expect that there’s one right answer. The trouble is, as web sites and situations are different, so is the “just one thing” answer. It really depends on the situation.

Picture this: A web site with 10,000 pages, 6 years old, 25,000 inbound links and publishes new content daily. Yet the site gets less than 5% of all traffic via organic search. Why might that be?