Seo Consultant
Pretty much everyone who runs a site knows that a good SEO strategy is the best way to drive targeted traffic to your site. However, what is less well-known is how a good SEO campaign can help you with your public relations.
The secret is that virtually everyone uses Google. Doctors use Google to diagnose patients, car mechanics Google car problems and news reporters use Google to find information and potential sources for their stories.
In fact, for the purpose of getting attention from the press, there are many cases where Google is a better tool than a traditional PR campaign. Google’s rankings come with a high degree of trust among most Web users, including reporters, and they are more likely to be taken seriously than press releases or even visits from a PR staffer.
This works because Google is seen as being an impartial third party and not a paid mouthpiece. So, if your site ranks well in the search engines, reporters who are Googling a story for information, which they do for almost every story, will be very likely to trust you, if you are ranked high for relevant keywords, and will include you as a source in the article they are writing.
However, this technique can only be successful if you manage to rank well for search terms that a reporter might be looking for. This can be very problematic as it is nearly impossible to predict what exact news stories the media might be looking into next month or next week.
Still, there are several things you can and should do to help turn your solid SEO into a powerful PR tool:
All in all, most of the secrets to using SEO as a PR strategy are basically just good SEO practices such as having an indexable site, minimizing duplicate content and attracting high-quality inbound links.
Since Google is a near-universal tool, ranking well within it will attract people from all over the world and all professions, including reporters who may be interested in giving you and your site some free publicity.
The secret is that virtually everyone uses Google. Doctors use Google to diagnose patients, car mechanics Google car problems and news reporters use Google to find information and potential sources for their stories.
In fact, for the purpose of getting attention from the press, there are many cases where Google is a better tool than a traditional PR campaign. Google’s rankings come with a high degree of trust among most Web users, including reporters, and they are more likely to be taken seriously than press releases or even visits from a PR staffer.
This works because Google is seen as being an impartial third party and not a paid mouthpiece. So, if your site ranks well in the search engines, reporters who are Googling a story for information, which they do for almost every story, will be very likely to trust you, if you are ranked high for relevant keywords, and will include you as a source in the article they are writing.
However, this technique can only be successful if you manage to rank well for search terms that a reporter might be looking for. This can be very problematic as it is nearly impossible to predict what exact news stories the media might be looking into next month or next week.
Still, there are several things you can and should do to help turn your solid SEO into a powerful PR tool:
- Include “Layperson” Terms: Remember that most reporters and editors are not experts in your field and would use the same terminology a layperson would. Though industry-specific keywords may be the best for business, including some more common terms is useful for attracting good publicity.
- Have a Clear Press Page: Not only does a press page give a reporter a clear way to contact you and highlight previous coverage, but it also helps you rank for terms such as “press contact” that may further attract a reporter’s attention while searching.
- Make Logos and Images Available: Don’t forget about the power of image search when using SEO as a PR tool, many reporters use Image Search to find relevant images for their articles and by providing SEO-optimized logos and stock images for this kind of use, you can attract a lot of reporters to your site and often get credit links even if they don’t interview you.
- Have Press Releases Readily Available: If a news story breaks that’s relevant, create a press release (or at least a blog post) regarding it as soon as possible. Journalists, especially under deadlines, often just quote such pieces rather than performing a full interview. Furthermore, this content is usually great for SEO.
- Try to Break News: Google and other SEs tend to rank sites higher that are first to stories so, if you can be the one to break news a reporter might be interested in, the odds of you getting at the top and getting the call go up drastically.
All in all, most of the secrets to using SEO as a PR strategy are basically just good SEO practices such as having an indexable site, minimizing duplicate content and attracting high-quality inbound links.
Since Google is a near-universal tool, ranking well within it will attract people from all over the world and all professions, including reporters who may be interested in giving you and your site some free publicity.
This blog post was written by Lior who is an advisor for an online task management start-up and also consults to a site that sells silk tallit
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