I’m trying to avoid making this one of those “PRs don’t get social media” or “PR versus SEO” blogs that we’ve seen of late and focus instead on the skills and tools that online PR professionals need to do a good all-round job in social media marketing. While all the talk is of PR and social media, I’m going to share some fairly sensitive SEO data with you during the course of this post which underlines why it should be something everyone has front of mind.
Creative agencies will tell you PRs don’t understand social media (and many do not, although they might think they do), search agencies will tell you PRs don’t understand search – why? Because they know that PR owns social media. That’s one of the stand-out facts that is clear from the companies I meet while running social media training courses – PR owns social media. That’s to be expected, because it’s all about communication, right? Wrong. It’s about more than that. It’s a new and inseparable marketing trilogy: online PR, social media marketing and search engine optimisation.
Online and traditional PR: To understand messaging, communicating with the media and bloggers who can provide valuable exposure, links and retweets to our stories.
Social media marketing: To understand people, how they think and behave over social networks. Social media marketing is as much about sociology and anthropology as it is marketing. Remember that “selling is repelling” on social networks.
I just filed a story for New Media Knowledge (to appear soon) on PRs and social media and I love this quote I include from Content and Motion’s Roger Warner: “Ad agencies do creative, traditional PR agencies do distribution. Put them together and you get a half-arsed social media strategy: nice ideas built for different media that are pumped without a great deal of thought into the world.”
SEO: This is where online PR consultants really earn their money, as online PRs want to eat SEO’s lunch. Not only do you need to create coverage and buzz for your clients but you also need to build their search engine presence for keywords. This is often the differentiator between good online PR agencies and bad PR online PR agencies, because – contrary to what you may believe – it’s not that hard.
A single blog post can make all the difference as I demonstrate below.
Simple keyword performance improvement
I’m mindful I’m giving away some IP here, but below you’ll see a graph of my keywords (which I’ve obviously omitted for competitive reasons) as they have performed over recent weeks according to keyword analytics tool, Searchmetrics [client]. Number represents the number on Google that your domain appears for that particular week (data is recorded on a Monday) and 0-10 represents page one, the only place that really matters.
Some weeks back after doing some basic keyword analytics I decided to double my efforts on some keywords for which I was not performing as well as perform some internal restructuring. You’ll see in the second graph that a grey-brown line suddenly appears mid-late March at no.7 in Google and has stayed on page one ever since. This was a single, deliberately-crafted blog post which followed SEO best practice that was written – as all blog posts should be, although we don’t often have time to be as careful as we’d like – to please search engines in particular but also be legible and intelligible for human readers too to get some important comments, linkbacks and tweets. Clearly it worked, as it did also for the burgundy line (top graph) that entered straight at number one recently.
It’s quite clear that Google’s Panda update impacts online PRs, as you can see that after 12 April, Google’s start date in English-speaking domains outside the US, some search terms have shot up. As a result, according to my Google Analytics, visitors to PlanetContent.co.uk arriving via search engines have doubled in the last month. A lot of work remains to be done, as you can see, as having keywords stagnating on pages 8-10 of Google is no good for anyone!
PR, Social media and SEO
Unlike PR, SEO gives us tangible figures which can impress (or depress, if we’re not doing a good job) our clients. It’s a critical part of the online PR arsenal which should never be overlooked or casually glanced over: SEO takes discipline, but when one single piece of content can make all the difference and project your client’s brand right onto page one of Google, why would you want to compromise?
