» Greg Jarboe

Search and PR: Insights from SEO Experts (Part II)

Dan Greenfield — Fri, 29 May 2009 14:17:35 +0000

This post continues the discussion I began yesterday with SEO experts. Today’s insights come from:

Andy Edmonds, Allison Fabella, David Felfoldi, Greg Jarboe, Charles Lumpkin , Jill Whalen, and Stacy Williams.

Whalen: What PR brings to the table is help in crafting a message for their client that is unique and that sets them apart from other companies. For SEO to be successful in today’s highly competitive marketplace, you have to have a company and website that stands out from the pack in some way. After all, why would Google show a company’s website in the top 10 of the search results if they’re not truly one of the top 10 companies in their niche? And isn’t that the job of PR?

The PR team should work closely with the SEO team to understand the keyword phrases that are valuable to their client so that they can use them in their messaging. This in turn can create links back that are also using the correct wording, and ultimately bring more targeted traffic to the client’s website.

Jarboe: Ironically, what you need to learn isn’t technical. So, PR people can learn SEO without learning HTML because they still won’t be optimizing web pages. They’ll be optimizing press releases — which require the ability to do keyword research, copywriting, link building.

In other words, you should use SEO because it generates measurable results for your organization or clients — something the CEO and CMO have wanted from their PR people for years. That’s especially important in a recession, but it will continue to be critical even when the economy recovers. This trend started in September 2002 — well before the current downturn. And it will continue — because the shift from offline media to online media isn’t temporary.

Felfoldi: My suggestion is that PR should invest in basic SEO training, which can often be done online for free. Once they learn how to write for humans & robots (search engines), they need to ensure their online publishing tool is search-friendly such as a blog.

Lumpkin: SEO goals need to be a cohesive piece of a PR campaign. As a PR person you can help provide lasting traffic value through SEO. While many PR campaigns can provide a temporary jolt of traffic and sales you should be working on helping to build a solid base of traffic. SEO can be a formidable ally in this effort.

Why is PR important to SEO? I explain the basics of SEO as a two-pronged fork. On one side you’ve got to make sure that your site talks about the things that people are searching for. On the other side you’ve got to make sure that other similiar sites talk about your site.

In the truest sense it is really that simple. PR folks are renowned for getting others to talk about them. It’s not the only way that and SEO can gain that valuable link juice, but it certainly helps – much more than other techniques. As a PR person you need to concentrate on getting really highly valuable in-industry references to your client’s site.

Fabella: With the democratization of the Internet, everyone (not only newspapers) must closely monitor their online reputation. They should also be aware that SEO and SEM can help define their brand and just as importantly, reshape their message if it gets knocked off track by competitors, customers, or even their own employees (inadvertently or otherwise). Here’s where Search can go beyond just getting a favorite keyword to rank #1. It can play a key role in one’s PR efforts.

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Based on these insights, it is clear to me that messaging – the cornerstone of good PR – remains as important as ever. And PR is best equipped to lead those efforts given our backgrounds in journalism and relationship building.

But it is also clear that nicely crafted sound bites are no longer enough. Messaging needs to be distilled into key words and links. Those words and links are currency for users to more easily find information about your company. This distillation in turn makes it easier to measure and track results which increases PR’s value for clients.

Fortunately, PR SEO does not involve extensive technical knowledge, but it does require an appreciation for the way people look for information and how information is valued. It’s no longer than just the words of journalists that matter; it’s the number of people linking to that story and how relevant those people are to you.

Let me get back to you.

Search and PR: Insights from SEO Experts (Part I)

Dan Greenfield — Wed, 27 May 2009 15:09:44 +0000

Based on a previous post on why PR tends to focus on placement over search, I reached out to the following national and Atlanta-based SEO experts for their advice (from left to right, top row first)

Andy Edmonds, one of four instructors for Stomping the Search Engines
Allison Fabella, SEO manager at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and holds regular training courses for the paper’s vital personnel including journalists, Web developers and designers, and management
David Felfoldi, chief experience officer at Sherpa Web! Studios, a search engine optimization firm in Atlanta (He answered while on his honeymoon assuring me he only typed on his iPhone while waiting in line.)
Greg Jarboe, president and co-founder of SEO-PR
Charles Lumpkin, Paid Search and SEO at Benchmark Brands
David Meerman Scott, bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR
Jill Whalen, CEO and founder of High Rankings
Stacy Williams, president at Prominent Placement, Inc., Strategic Search Marketing

In talking to these experts, I wanted their perspective on whether PR has successfully embraced SEO and whether they should. Here is what they had to say.

Whalen: I don’t think too many PR people truly understand what SEO is and how PR can impact it. In fact, I think PR is so important to any successful SEO campaign that it is my recommended choice as a way of indirectly gaining links for a website (which in turn increases search engine rankings).

Felfoldi: SEO started with technology, and thus technologist were the first to embrace it. PR tends to attract individuals with journalistic backgrounds. So it makes sense that PR has been slower to adopt SEO as an effective communication channel.

That slower adoption, however, is no longer necessary. Online publishing tools –such as blogs — are not only inherently compliant with search engine requirements (“search-friendly”), but are actually preferred by search engines over mainstream online channels, such as the corporate website. In fact, many web developers & marketers are embracing blog platforms as the content management systems powering the websites. Search compliance is now a core part of the tool, rather than an added feature.

Technology aside, PR relies heavily on source/brand credibility — a story in the NY Times is invaluable to spreading a message. SEO does care about source (hence google’s infamous pagerank) but that is just one of many factors that goes into search, & most often not the most important. In search, content is king.

Finally, PR has an ethic of controlling the message. The problem is a searcher may never search for what PR is communicating. Instead of fighting SEO, PR should embrace it and ensure their message is well saturated in the search engines. Depending on the message, the first result in a search results page can be more effective than a quote on the front-page of a national periodical.

Jarboe: Some PR people are picking up SEO, but they are the exceptions to the rule. Why aren’t they effectively embracing SEO? Because they think it’s someone else’s job. And SEO is someone else’s job — if you are talking about optimizing pages on a website. But what most SEO specialists aren’t doing is optimizing press releases for news search engines like Google News or Yahoo! News. And that’s why the opportunity that falls between the cracks.

Now, to be fair, you couldn’t optimize press releases for news search engines before September 2002, when Google News was launched (in beta). A couple years later, I asked some of the people at Yahoo! News why they included press release distribution services in the 7,000 news sources aggregated by their news search engine. And they said that for new product launches, a press release was often the only source for a story, because the traditional trade press had imploded. And daily newspapers have imploded, too. So, if PR people don’t learn to optimize their press releases for the millions of news search engine users, then it is worth asking who are they writing them for?

Lumpkin: I don’t know that I totally agree with your [my] statement. I know many PR firms that are very forward leaning. The best SEO campaigns need some of the structured relationship building that a PR firm can provide.

Williams: “I’ve been surprised that the public relations industry hasn’t embraced search engine optimization more than they have. Don’t get me wrong – some PR “early adopters” are certainly utilizing SEO, social media, and other, newer Internet marketing vehicles. But many folks seem to still be doing PR the same way they always have. Perhaps SEO pushes them out of their comfort zone – perhaps it seems too technical, or too difficult. Search engine optimization certainly can get technical and difficult, but it doesn’t have to be, especially when it’s used in conjunction with PR.

Edmonds: While it wasn’t true 5 years ago, search engine optimization is a robust discipline and dialogue between search provider and content producer. With the increasing connection between the internet and everyday life with web 2.0 and social networking, the potential interplay between PR and SEO is greater now than ever before. “Universal search” provides real time indexing of news and it’s very easy for interested parties to locate a business given a few key words.

Meerman Scott: “The truth is that your potential customers AND reporters are searching for you right now. The days when reporters passively waited for press releases and pitches to figure out what to write are over. Now they find interesting companies to talk up. If you’re not visible in the search engines, you don’t exist — for reporters or your buyers.”

Fabella: We are at a tipping point from never heard of SEO, to heard of it but don’t know what to do, to my boss has heard of it and now to I am actively seeking to understand it.

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The general consensus seems to support my belief that we PR professionals have a ways to go in establishing a search expertise despite our making some initial progress. It may not be completely our fault, but we may be running out of excuses given where journalism is heading, how technology has evolved and how people get information online. And with the advent of Twitter and the growing importance of real time results, the pressure is on to make search a core competency. Those who fail to embrace SEO not only have the potential of being left behind; they are failing to represent their clients’ best interests.

In my next post, these experts discuss how PR can effectively use SEO.

Let me get back to you.