The panel at Brighton SEO, April 2012

Despite the words “search engine optimisation” (SEO) having been in circulation for several years within PR circles, I would really like to know whether or not PR and digital/social media agencies and practitioners are a) proficient in SEO and b) actively exploiting search strategies for their clients and would be grateful for you as a PR practitioner to take part. Visit the SEO and PR in 2012 Status Report Survey here.

I recently posted about the absence of PR agency presence at Brighton SEO, which prompted me to question how much interest the PR industry had in cutting into the £500 million per annum (and rising) UK SEO spend.

Organic SEO is an area I – and many others in digital – believe PR should own due to its key tenets of building authoritative and diverse inbound links, creating and seeding optimised content, and the managing the increasingly important social media influencer factors.

Please do take a couple of moments to take part in the SEO and PR in 2012 Status Report Survey (just six quick-fire questions and the chance to add any comments you’d like) and I’ll be collating the results into a post the following week. Unfortunately, there are no prizes or incentives other than we can all get a perspective of where we’re at regarding SEO and PR, and – as is the zeitgeist – I’m sure there’ll be a lovely infographic to accompany it.

Many thanks in advance and do please share using the hashtag #SEOPR2012

Related content:

Podcast with Leapfrogg’s Lucy Freeborn on SEO and PR

Blog post: PR, social media and SEO: An inseparable trinity

Credit: ShellShockUK.com

I’ve just spent the last two days in Brighton at the excellent Brighton SEO conference, attending the event itself and also running a workshop on SEO and PR. PR has a massive role to play in SEO for building diverse and authoritative inbound links and I cannot believe it is even still a talking point, but I was very surprised by the reaction of some (on Twitter) to the excellent, common sense-driven presentation by Lexi Mills of digital consultancy Distilled.

Mills’ presentation on PR and SEO echoed closely the sentiment behind my SEO and PR workshop of the day before into how brands need to amend their PR outreach and content creation to focus on keywords. Take a look at the below graph (courtesy of SEOmoz) and see how much of the entire sphere of influence PR (red – my additions) actually should be leading in its own right. It’s three quarters of the entire (estimated) influence of the Google algorithm for top ranking, which makes the absence of a lot of the leading London digital agencies at the Brighton SEO conference all the more conspicuous.

Yet all too many PRs do not appreciate this opportunity, even when the UK SEO market topped £500 million in 2011, according to research from econsultancy.  SEO practitioners likewise may well be uncomfortable with the reality that to build quality inbound links from diverse and authoritative websites, as well as address the increasingly relevant ‘social signals’ from Twitter and Facebook, they’re going to have to think and act more like PR people. But the reality is, as I’ve banged on and on about, SEO and PR must align.

So, what should “inbound marketers”, the adjective du jour of PR and SEO, actually be doing? Here are a few top tips – and they’re all common sense.

• Create relevant content, seed it  and make it sharable
• Ask influencers (journalists and bloggers) for followed links and embed a limited amount of relevant links in the text (e.g. a press release) that you send them
• Make sure your content that you send is optimised in the title, subhead and text

It’s all really simply stuff, but so many PRs focus on the hit (coverage) without the secondary benefit of a link back. PRs create a shed load of relevant, quality content and outreach to influencers, so they should definitely factor in the SEO benefits which, unlike coverage reports, have measurable results.

It’s not a case of the worlds of SEO and PR coming together – they have already been for some time, it’s just that most of the industry hasn’t woken up to the fact yet. That’s where online PR professionals come into play.

Social signals are increasingly relevant

Social media is an increasingly important factor in search engines’ evaluation of content relevance and working out where to rank it in SERPs (search engine results pages). This is what the experts told delegates at Brighton SEO:

“It’s a balancing act, what does it say on aggregate?” said Pierre Far, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst, when describing how pages can rank better via social signals. “What does the user want and did they get it? Every page you have has to answer these questions. It’s all about content, it’s not about text on the page it’s about video, reviews, apps, all of the decisions you make are answering these questions. SEO is not a checklist; the signals will come naturally if you have the right content.”

Bing’s Dave Coplin said that the search engine currently considered Facebook and Twitter for its social signal algorithm.

“Social is the big new kid on the block,” he said. “The advice on social is to be really bloody good at social. The more engaged they are and the bigger the following the better they’ll rank. A good social signal is one that’s being shared and pushed around. The number of fans or followers is a factor but not as important, it’s more about how quickly content is being shared.”

Independent search marketer Rishi Lakhani added: “I’m glad social signals are a part of it. Good content is relevant to the query, will they want to pass it on to someone else and are you making it easy to let them do that? Is it relevant, is it updated? The more people share these resources, the better you’re going to rank.”

PR consultant Philip Sheldrake concluded his presentation that when organisations finally establish the value of organic search to their business; “Boy, your day rates are going to go up!”

Thank again to Kelvin Newman of Site Visibility for his extraordinary work in constantly improving Brighton SEO and raising awareness of the industry, and giving us the opportunity to meet and exchange knowledge. It’s come a long way from a room above a pub in two and a half years to an auditorium of 1,000 guests.

Firstly, it’s written by two guys who have been not only on both the journalist and PR side of the media fence, but secondly the authors – Stephen Waddington and Steve Earl of Speed Communications – have been at the coal face of social media campaigns and are extremely well connected in the online PR scene.

I’m extremely selective on social media business books. Many are written by passive observers – e.g. journalists – who have never actually run a social media campaign and therefore dealt with the client aspects and audience engagement issues directly. Many others are written by theorists who, again, may have lost touch of the day-to-day minutiae of social media campaign management. That’s why reading books about social media best practice written by agency owners or campaign managers are the most relevant.

The book is very much a handbook. The main premise being that brands have never truly owned their reputations, less so now than ever, so what can they actually do about it?

I quizzed co-author Steve Earl for an upcoming feature I’m writing on the book for New Media Knowledge about why – despite us being in 2012 and this subject of brands failing to get to grips with social media not being a new one – it is still relevant.

“Brands haven’t had to face this level of scrutiny because while it may have felt uncomfortable at times, the established media largely kept the audience at arm’s length,” he told me. “So communicators have grown comfortable with the process of managing communication rather than having to stand up and be counted more frequently. But it’s good that we’re talking about it, as without that things will never change. What matters now is not the talk, it’s the action.”

Indeed many brands are still trapped in inertia on social media and engagement. Those brands should read Brand Anarchy and act upon their learnings.

Enjoy!

These links need to be seen to be believed

I’m not alone in being absolutely stumped by some horrendous poor taste from brands of late which has had them all scurrying to limit damage control. (I must apologise in advance, this post contains links to the Daily Mail…)

This Saturday is St. Patrick’s Day, so what better faux pas to make than for Nike to launch a trainer dubbed “Black and Tan”. Those not familiar with Irish history should probably read the article to see what I’m getting at.

This hot on the heels of a Madhouse chino washing label suggesting the owner should “give it to your woman – it’s her job”.

These things must go through some kind of approval process. SERIOUSLY?! What were they all thinking? Actually, don’t answer that, I don’t think you can!

They concern how consumers want to interact with brands and brand content over social media, plus how Facebook’s new timeline for brands will impact company pages.

What consumers want from brands on social media

Firstly, thanks to Roger and the folks at Content and Motion for their fantastic survey on what consumers want from brands on social media channels. If you’re a social media specialist I recommend you read this report and tally the findings with the recent CMO Council study, which also looked at how consumers interact with brands and want exclusive content and offers from following/liking them.

Content and Motion’s study concluded that:

-          Brands need to find the right home for social in the wider marketing mix

-          Handle social with care. Set people-led expectations

-          A lack of sanity and natural charisma can be fatal

-          Get on board. Consumers are waiting for you…but on their terms…

Facebook timeline for brands

The new look Facebook timeline for my beer blog

I’m sure you heard this already, but Facebook is making its timeline feature obligatory for all brands by 30 March 2012. This will piss off a lot of brands who have invested heavily in designing a welcome page or more than two apps as the former will be obsolete and only two apps can be displayed (without a dropdown menu) on the new header. There are also a stash of rules about what can and can’t be displayed on the massive ‘cover’ image which brands will show at the top of their pages.

It’s going to force community managers to be a lot more creative in their interactions, but at least fans can message the page admins now, which is great for community management.

The social media experts who have best articulated the true implications of Facebook timeline for brands and what social media marketers should do about it, are the guys at Fresh Egg. Fresh Egg produced a free e-book on Facebook timeline for brands and it’s a really useful, practical guide that covers the bases without over-simplifying or over-complicating.

Thanks to Content and Motion and Fresh Egg for their insight this week. My personal view on timeline and also marketing on Facebook in general is that a lot of brands who aren’t (or can’t) “do it right” and will have been stung by yet more changes foisted on them by Facebook will start drifting away, taking their ad money with them. Where do you stand?

I’ll be running a workshop at the Brighton SEO digital marketing forum on 12 April 2012 about how search engine optimisation (SEO) and PR can complement each other to make a bigger impact for business. SEO specialists are excellent at on-page optimisation of websites, while PR professionals fulfil the other half of search marketing – whether they’re aware of it or not – by generating in-bound links from authoritative sites.

“SEO and PR are the perfect marriage,” according to Lucy Freeborn of digital consultancy Leapfrogg in our SEO and PR podcast recorded last summer, but how should the two interact? Do PR people understand SEO? Do SEO specialists understand PR? What’s the business opportunity for consultants who can offer both services?

PR and SEO workshop

In the workshop, I’ll be covering:

- What is PR in 2012?

- Mapping PR within Social Media

- Where does SEO fit in?

- Business-to-business (B2B) versus business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing

- Media, blogger relations and link building

- Social CRM

- Practical strategy exercise

This is a really important area of debate for bother PR and SEO professionals and I’m delighted that Kelvin Newman at Site Visibility, who’s always done a great job putting on Brighton SEO, has invited me to run this workshop.

To read more about the workshop please visit the PR and SEO workshop page or to book click here.

Hopefully see you on 12 April at Brighton SEO!

So what will 2012 bring?

A recent joint survey from Booz Allen and Buddy Media found that almost two thirds (57 per cent) of businesses surveyed will up their social media spend in 2012, while 38 percent of CEOs say they view social media as a high priority.

I’ll say a few obvious things up front: tumblr will continue to grow in numbers and bloggers will continue to become more important for brands, although they should always properly verify the authority of those bloggers to derive true value from building relations with them. Bloggers know what cards they hold.

I predict that in 2012 the smart PR firms will continue to encroach on the territory currently occupied mostly by search marketing firms and offer optimised content services to clients. This is something which I know search marketers fear – PR controlling SEO (search engine optimisation) – possibly because they could do it better.

Video will continue to be the key content pull. Text and photos are good, but online video improves sales. Fact. It’s not even expensive to create and seed video any more, plus video is great for SEO, so why aren’t more brands – particularly those whose products need more explanation – using video more?

Geotargeting will continue to slowly pick up but better offers are required if brands expect to get significant value from Foursquare and the like.

People will continue to disagree over how to measure ‘influence’. Klout serves a purpose but often surprises users on what subjects it claims they are influential on, plus some of us are too busy actually DOING strategic social media campaigns that we don’t have time to piss about on Twitter, thus not helping our own ‘influencer’ status, however much real change we’re affecting to our online communities and beyond. Rant over.

Q&A site Quora still fails to excite me and, judging by its traffic (see graph, source Alexa.com) this year it has stabilised and found its niche.

My big question for 2012 is whether Facebook finally reaches its tipping point. With all its changes and uncertainty over privacy, plus older adopters appearing to drift away or at least use it less, could there be a gradual migration towards the more segregated world of Google Plus? Time will tell.

What are your predictions for 2012?

PR Week Awards 2011

Last night was the PR Week Awards and there was a refreshing winner for straight talking in the form of Blackpool FC manager, Ian Holloway, as “Communicator of the Year”. I’ve always loved straight-talking managers, people like Brian Clough, for whom there was no fluff, no carefully-rehearsed clichés, no nonsense, just tell it how it is. As a Queens Park Rangers fan, I’ve always had respect for former manager Holloway. Below is classic Holloway in action. We need more of it in business and life in general.

Thanks again for a great night from PR Week. Tim Minchin was genius entertainment, although the choice of Alastair Campbell to hand out awards split opinions.

There are a million and one viewpoints about the media and the acquittal of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito. I’m not blogging about the about the inevitable media cock ups or Twitter gun-jumping (why MUST people be first on Twitter?), most entertainingly the Daily Mail, but more about the emphasis throughout on Knox, not Sollecito, or even the guy who’s actually serving time. Do you even know his name?

Here’s the rub in this whole sorry Keystone Kops-like affair. Had Knox not been physically attractive, young and female, then this whole media circus would have been more of a one-man juggling act. Why wasn’t Sollecito more interesting? Nah, no media fodder there.

You get these cases every so often. Remember Joanna Lees of the Falconio case? Young woman accused of murder and her private life dragged out in public. Storytellers throughout history have loved the angle of the (apparently) fallen woman, right from Eve through Salome to, well, Knox. She’s the latest in this line.

Unlike many others though, Knox is now free to make a fortune. Opportunity Knox.