On 8th March Search Laboratory attended eConsultancy’s Digital Cream event in London. We sponsored the online PR forum and spoke to many major brands during the day about their issues around online PR and its application to SEO.
Below are the top five common themes that delegates were discussing:
1. The most common issue for most people was that they are producing PR, but don’t know quite how to maximise the SEO potential. They had a disconnect between the PR team and online marketing. Moving from this position to rung 1 of the ‘PR meets SEO’ ladder is actually quite straightforward and involves ‘SEOing’ the PR and syndicating on a wire service that allows links. If you need any more details on how to do this, please contact us.
2. Good press releases need a good story. Your news won’t get heavily picked up if you are just reporting the mundane.
3. For maximum effectiveness, you need to get into your online community. Identify influential bloggers and journalists and give them exclusives or other special treatment if you want to truly maximise the potential (including the SEO potential) of your PR. This is the next step up from simply syndicating over the wire services.
4. PR is not just about news and press. There was lots of discussion about online reputation and therefore communication online in all its forms (twitter, facebook, review sites, forums, blogs etc.). There are some good systems that enable you to monitor this. Michelle had lots of insight into this area and helps companies do this effectively.
5. Some useful tools that people were using to help them with their online PR are:
Peerindex – aggregates influence in social channels/social capital of individuals
Klout – Twitter influence tool
Mbuzz – Meltwater’s buzz monitoring product
Brandwatch – Buzz monitoring software
Socialmention – Free social media monitoring tool
Google Alerts – web monitoring alerts
Tweetdeck – track brand/org keywords and categorise those you follow
Bitly – link shortener
Addictomatic – simple monitoring dashboard
Websitegrader – SEO tool
Majesticseo.com – competitor link intelligence
SEOMoz – All-round SEO stats and intelligence.
Insights
