From list building to engaging with influencers to secure coverage for your client's stories, there are striking similarities between many aspects of SEO and mainstream PR work. At Vitis PR we use specialist SEO tools like Open Site Explorer and MajesticSEO as well as our own proprietary tools when providing SEO agency services. While many of the tools we use for SEO would not be appropriate or accessible to the PR community, here's a simple tool that can help when building media lists.
Using search metrics for media list building
When building lists, the influence of a website (for website you could substitute blogger/news outlet and so on) is important when prioritising targets for your client’s news. Now, any PR agency worth its salt will have put together solid media lists for its clients and will have a handle on the top tier targets in a given industry, but there will be situations where a lot of new or secondary targets need to be evaluated – that is one of the situations where SEO tools can help.
Say you had a list of 50 websites that are all in some way relevant to your client – how do you prioritise them? A first cut prioritisation could be carried out by using a measure of how influential Google considers each site to be. For this prioritisation, we’ll use Google toolbar PageRank. (Note, toolbar PageRank is actually not a very reliable measure, isn’t used much in SEO circles and is only updated a couple of times each year, but for this article we’ll use it because it is familiar to many people and interrogating more reliable measures is beyond the scope of this introductory article.)
SEO tool to help prioritise the media list
To get started using the tool simply create your own copy of the Google doc (which you can find here)
- When you’ve got your copy the first step is to have a list of URLs that you want to prioritise, you can do that by entering the keywords you want to search in the keyword field (the sample lists sites that are related to nanotechnology blogs)
- Put an ‘x’ in the column ‘check PageRank?’ next to the urls you want to prioritise and sit back as the magic of Google docs and Josh Fowler’s brilliant PageRank checker list the Page Rank of the URLs you selected (note if you use the checker too much you’ll get blocked – try again in an hour or so)
- Simply sort by PageRank to get a prioritised list of target sites! (If you see negative numbers in the PageRank column check Josh’s page for an explanation of what the number means, e.g. -1 means Google isn’t reporting a PageRank.)
There are many ways the usefulness of this tool can be expanded, for example:
- Ranking by other measures of site influence instead of PageRank
- Automating and setting up an alert so that you get emailed whenever a new potential target appears on the interwebs
- Reporting the PageRank (or your chosen measure) of online sites in which you secure coverage for your client
I hope this short article gives you a feel for some of the ways that public relations (and in particular media list building) can benefit from the application of SEO tools.
In the next week or so I’ll write another article that shows you how you can use SEO tools to report social metrics.
If you need any help with the tools or have any queries, drop me a line in the comments.
