While large firms employ both PR agencies and SEO (search engine optimisation) consultancies, a lot of SMEs can't stretch to employing both. I am a director at Vitis PR and we've been looking at how we could improve our search engine visibility without having to hire an SEO consultancy. It would be interesting to hear how other companies have done the same.
A little about where we are with SEO at the moment - we rank on page one on Google for our key search terms - PR agency, PR company, technology PR agency, technology PR and Midlands PR agency. We rank highly for other related terms too. We are not an SEO consultancy. In fact, Vitis PR is a small PR consultancy whose core offerings are public relations services for technology companies, which include media and analyst relations, social media relations, event support, copywriting and strategic PR counsel. We have however taken the basic principles of PR and merged them with what we understand of SEO (not very scientific, but it works).
Here are some of the things we have done.
SEO consultancies are definitely reaping the benefits of companies wanting to rank highly on Google and I don't blame them. I have however talked to a few when first investigating how we could improve our rankings. They did bamboozle me with phrases and terminology that I just didn't understand and it is hard for me to buy what I don't understand, so I didn't go any further, but decided to investigate SEO myself. Firstly, I went on an SEO training day run by Susan Hallam and got her to do a one hour website review. Then Nadine and I worked through the information on lots of SEO help websites and put in place the basics, eg optimising our website pages - ensuring that our key words were mentioned naturally was one activity on our list and also sorting out our title tags. Our site was in okay shape as we'd had National B2B Centre help us out with it when it first went up, but it definitely wasn't optimised. I guess the key here is that as a PR consultant, I write for a living and SEO is in a great part about managing and disseminating information, like public relations, so there is definitely cross over.
We have worked with software companies that describe English as their second language and are much happier with C++, so this isn't necessarily as easy for everyone. We then started to add more content to the website and what better way than adding press releases and articles. Press releases are a staple PR tool, which we write on our own behalf and for our clients on quite literally a daily basis. Our aim used to be securing media interest so that they publish our stories, so providing third party credibility and sometimes if we are lucky - backlinks. We have to admit though, that some of our own press releases about our agency are not really earth shattering news, BUT our clients, partners and prospects would still like to hear our news. So we are no longer only focused on securing media coverage only. We tier news, by sorting out the best news from news that isn't going to get into a key publication....... and distribute the news through appropriate news distribution services or social media. This helps us get onto Google News. We ensure that our key search terms include back links and we send out news consistently. It's working.
Building back links is a process which can be time consuming and some SEO agencies will have people in place who do this all day. We added ourselves to relevant online locations which gave us backlinks and then the hard work began. We have worked on gaining links naturally and gradually. It is actually time intensive, so we have given ourselves a reasonable target and stuck to it. Something that is really working for us is following the news agenda and commenting on news articles, blogs and social media. This is actually a PR technique we use when tracking what the media are saying, so it's not really new to us. I think that SEO agencies may not target sites that won't give their clients backlinks. On the other hand, we're not put off by blog owners not linking back to us, especially if they have a lot of readers. It helps us to establish credibility (which is what we are about). We also aim to put out well written content on a regular basis. I know a company that uses an SEO consultancy that is, in my opinion, pumping out poorly written content which reads like brochure-ware just to gain a link.
As PR consultants, we are taught that reputation is key.
I guess if it gains a link, does it matter? I would say it does. Who wants poor English and a badly articulated argument associated with them? Our PR activities tie in very closely to our SEO activity. Another company I know of is using both SEO and PR agencies. The SEO agency is asking the PR agency to stall on sending out the news on a wire for two days after it goes on the website. As I said, I am not an SEO expert, so don't understand this, but the whole point of news is to make it public to everyone at the same time especially since the internet is immediate. For high profile online news websites, a story that has been available on the public domain for a couple of days may be old news, especially if you have invested in gaining a media profile and asking journalists to follow what you're up to. That example needs the two agencies to work together rather than against each other.
I think that PR agencies tend to be good at spotting stories, so the content we create is more likely to be re-used by third parties, which helps them to spread the good word about us online. We measure like crazy - what works, which sites help us to rank highly. We compare progress every month and have become laser focused on which keywords we want to rank highly for. We don't have too many fancy tools in place but have the basics and access many useful free tools. I don't know how long it would take for an SEO company to achieve page one rankings, but we noticed fairly quickly, within 3 weeks that we moved from nowhere (not on the top 15 pages) to seventh page, then after a few more weeks, we went to page 4, then 3 and it actually took around 2 months to get onto page 1.
You can see how well we're doing now if you run a search like: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=tech+pr+agency or http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=technology+pr+agency.
Our main priority is servicing our clients, so we couldn't dedicate all our time to driving our rankings, but I guess if we did, it would have been much faster. Indeed for a PR client, who we also provided web copy for, we started ranking for their key terms within 2 days as we issued press releases which were used by key trade publications. I think by continuing what we've been doing we have maintained our position till today and hopefully will stay on page 1 for our top keywords.
Of course, we will continue to keep abreast of what is going on in the SEO world, but know now that PR is a great driver for search engine rankings and it's still going to be the key part of our SEO strategy. It would be interesting to hear what others are doing in relation to using PR to drive their SEO.
