Blog

Ok, I am not going to bother touching on the obvious questions like whether PR agencies have a place in search engine optimisation, or have a place at the marketing table at all anymore? Given my recent ‘29 not-very-technical things that every PR person should know‘ post, I thought a quick post on search engine optimisation and public relations may be called for. I am going to keep this really simple and focus on the press release.

First of all, lets talk about key words. Key words are the words that people would use to find your web page. So if you were looking for this blog key words could be “Ged Carroll” and “renaissance chambara”. From a client perspective, web links and key words are the two best ways to improve a clients search results and to help develop their online reputation. Search optimised press releases are the single easiest way to provide fresh, relevant content that can generate links. There is a number of tools available to help work out what these need to be for a given media release.

Google AdWords keyword tool
Google Suggest
Google Trends
Microsoft’s adCenter Labs keyword forecast
Trellian’s free search term suggestion tool
Wordtracker’s free keyword suggestion tool
I’d also recommend that you have a read around some content that Tim Hoang produced as a good SEO keywords for PRs primer.

Creating a successful search optimised release breaks down into three steps:

Create the press release – write for the media and influencers that the release was designed to influence, as well as the search engines, ok let’s be honest here: Google. Thinking about the headline: include at least one relevant key word phrase that people search for. Mention the keywords of focus for the release within the first paragraph, so none of the ‘Acme Inc. a leading end-to-end solutions provider of blah blah blah.’

Distribute it in search friendly places. From a linking perspective, many press release distribution companies allow you to include keyword-rich anchor text in links. These links should be directed to specific URIs within the client web site that have content that supports this keyword phrase. Many distribution services allow you to tag (label) a press release with keywords that you’d like to have this release associated with.

Many companies offer varying levels of service for distribution and all of them have their different strengths and weaknesses:

• Business Wire
• webitpr
• PRNewswire
• PRWeb
• M2 Presswire
• PRLeap

Publish the release on the client web site. I know it seems obvious, but don’t forget to publish all these on your clients’ own web site. You have just gone and created some fresh relevant content and it would be a shame not to use it.

What’s next? How about talking to your client about social media releases or for sufficiently important releases running a short-term search engine marketing (SEM) campaign to support a release until Google has a chance to index it?

Stephen Waddington wrote up his predictions for 2009 in PR. He felt that digital campaigns, government spending and marketing directors looking for a cost effective alternative to ther marketing techniques would be the three most likely bright spots in a challenging economic climate.

My view of 2009 in PR is sober by contrast. I think that digital is substitutive rather than additive: that is clients will be transferring spend online, and this will follow the direction that the media have been going. I don’t necessarily think that new money will enter the arena, but I think new players will.

Search has got  a lot harder as a business: Yahoo! and Google have cut commission to agencies, key words have become more expensive, and a lot of the low hanging fruit from a search engine optimisation (SEO) point-of-view has been picked leaving off-network measures ie: online PR and link exchange. I think that digital agencies will fight a lot harder to get the 50 per cent of online PR programmes that they don’t already manage. Some of them have a lot of smarts, an attractive engagement model and really understand measurement – three points of the PR profession’s Achille’s heel.

On the plus side, I think that PR agencies are in a lot better position to fight their corner by providing tightly integrated offline and online programmes (or what James Warren would call inline.) I believe that both quantative research and qualitative audience insight to better understand their emotional connection with a brand (yes even B2B brands, since the elicit reactions like trust or apathy) are areas that PR agencies can gain an advantage over digital agencies. The days of basing a campaign on a journalist audit and or, desk research should be long gone.

Stephen also talks about mobile being on the cusp of being the next frontier after social media for PRs, and this is probably true for pioneer clients that are willing to take risks. I think that there are two things driving this, firstly mobile devices are becoming much much more capable, not only in computing power, but in screen size, the iPhone provides people with a good facsimile of  a desktop browsing experience but optimised for the form factor. Even though the iPhone is a small percentage of overall phone sales its influence on marketers has been phenomenal.

The second item is the QRcode. A way for a mobile phone to take down an email, web address or phone number from printed media or a computer screen. Pepsi are already championing them using Kelly Brook to educate the great unwashed and both Ford  (for the Ka) and BMW (for the Mini in Germany) have been using these codes to allow customers to interact with digital artifacts (the web-of-no-web phenonena – where digital content is all around us from the Wii to 48-sheet hoardings). Whilst I think that mobile PR could be big, I think that there is a bigger role for digital agencies to create the digital artifacts that PRs can wrap a narrative around.

This all means that the agency that has the client’s trust and the smartest ideas can be in the driving seat for some very interesting campaigns. A smart, well-connected and well-regarded PR agency has just as much chance being in the driving seat as a digital hot-shop and conversely 2009 in PR may be activated by an agency that does earned media alongside paid media.

Whilst it won’t happen in 2009, we are gradually moving to a marketing singularity where boundaries between disciplines are increasingly blurred and more likely to be defined by in-house relationships, trust, budgets and responsibilities rather than agency capabilities.