SEO — A Success Story

How to empirically measure the value of public relations is a challenge as old as the profession itself. The rise of social media offers exciting new opportunities on this front. Last week one of my clients achieved validation of our hard work over the past few months. They now show up as the #2 organic return when searching on Google.

Let me give some context. Earlier this year we helped launch and support a blog for TANDBERG Public Service. TANDBERG is the market leader for video conferencing, particularly in the public sector. But Cisco and Polycom have better known brands. TANDBERG engaged with Strategic Communications Group to build awareness and eventually support revenue growth via social media channels.

Week in and week out, we make sure that good, fresh content is published twice a month on the blog. As any writer will tell you, this takes discipline. There are always urgent PR issues that can trump a blog calendar, but TANDBERG kept its eye on the ball and stuck to the plan. They also gave us clear instruction to tag the content with the acronym VTC for video teleconferencing, since it was best known to their customers and prospects.

So today, when you search “VTC and government” on Google, you get this result, with the TANDBERG PS blog being the second organic listing on the search engine response page (naturally, another acronym, SERP). And as important, not a sign of any competitor:

Now there are some “black hat” consultants who promise to tinker with algorithms and game the system to achieve this kind of result. In my experience, there is no substitute for old fashioned hard work. Months of quality content and consistent tagging and promotion resulted in this placement. Plus, online shoppers and researchers put more trust in the organic results as opposed to the sponsored links.

This kind of placement can be priceless. First, your content being highlighted to any online visitor who searches on the terms you’ve identified as most important to your service. Second, this kind of organic listing can remove the need for funds dedicated to sponsored Adwords. We’ve got clients who spend into the six figures on such campaigns — how much could they save with this kind of organic performance?

So what are the lessons learned? First, as with any social media campaign have a strategy that reinforces the overall objectives of the organization. Don’t confuse tools with strategy.

Second, identify the terms connected with your product or service, and produce quality content on a regular basis that is properly tagged and promoted to online audiences.

Third — STICK WITH IT! This honestly is the toughest step, especially in this age of trimmed communications budgets and departments. Don’t let the day to day imperatives distract from a approved course of action. Companies today should think of themselves as publishers on their issue of expertise, with the corresponding deadlines for copy.

Now that we’ve built a large audience and achieved this kind of SEO success, Strategic is working with TANDBERG to evolve their blog into a social portal that gives visitors more choice in how to interact with the company. Watch for an update to this post – and have a great Thanksgiving!

 

Getting Honest About How Attractive You Are — To Search Engines

Mike Grehan recently wrote a piece on ClickZ that really rang true for me. Mike is a long time player in search marketing, and cuts right to the chase when describing why many clients can’t get their sites to rank highly in search engines:

Your business model is flawed or ill-conceived. And your Web site is garbage.

The ranking problem is just as simple as that in so many cases. It’s not about the code or crawling or server issues. Fact is, you’re probably not being honest with yourself and hoping some technical miracle can help.

http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3631213

This article resonated with me because it’s true in public relations as well. Too often a client will think that PR is some kind of magical process that will immediately make their message concise and attractive to the media. Wrong — you need to be able to simply state your value prop, and the media will not give you a second chance if you can’t. My colleague Marc Hausman likes to tell the story of the prospect who told him that after a lot of thought, they decided they had 19 key messages to promote! Marc said no, you have three at the most.

This article also rang true for me when it talked about “earning” links online:

Ask yourself, “Why would anyone want to link to my site?” Be brutal. Write down as many reasons as you can about why other sites should link to you. If you can’t convince yourself another site would want to link to you, you seriously need to question what your value proposition is and how your site promotes it (or not, as the case may be).

There’s a lot of clever technical stuff you can do to Web pages to make crawling and indexing them easier. But it’s fruitless if you can’t convince yourself that anyone would want to link to them.

I try to practice this myself when writing this blog, and when sharing items via my Twitter stream. Is the content interesting to a broader audience, does it further an existing conversation? Doing this helps me counsel clients (always diplomatically, of course) to do the same and evaluate their content/message/site objectively.

As we say here at Strategic, great work comes from having great clients.

Add to: | blinklist | del.cio.us | digg | yahoo! | furl | rawsugar | shadows | netvouz

The World of 2.0 — According to PR Newswire

On Wednesday I attended a Media 2.0 event sponsored by PR Newswire. Michael Pranikoff, PRN’s Emerging Media director gave an animated and informative presentation to a full house at the JW Marriott on Pennsylvania Avenue. In addition to solid background information on the newest 2.0 trends, Michael put a lot of focus on free online tools that can help a company take advantage of social media. So, I’ll try to do the same in this post.

Video — learn to use it. Michael used the example of a FLIP video recorder, $100 from Costco. Play around with editing software and get to the point where you can post some clips. Why should the 12 – 24 demographic have all the fun?

Understand where your company stands online — there are free tools like www.popuri.us and www.socialmeter.com to see how popular your site is, ranked by Google PageRank, del.icio.us bookmarks, number of links, Technorati rankings for blogs. Give either a try and check how you’re doing.

One tip was very interesting to me — using http://del.icio.us/ to determine what terms people are using to bookmark your site.  This gives a view to how people are thinking about your site, and more importantly your product or service. This type of exercise, along with other free tools like www.freekeywords.wordtracker.com can refine your company’s keyword advertising campaigns.

Blog measurement site like www.technorati.com and www.blogpulse.com can identify who is blogging about your company. And by analyzing who they are and how many people link to them, you know who the influencers are and can focus your outreach on them. Of course you better do it well — simply sending these people PR content won’t work. You’re looking for a conversation, not just targets to add to a distribution list.

Every 5-7 months, the blogosphere doubles in size. Many of those blogs become dormant and never attract an audience. But others pull in readers in numbers larger than the mainstream media sites. Technorati reported that in Q4 2006 22 of the top 100 media sites were blogs, not media sites: http://technorati.com/weblog/2007/04/328.html 

Establishing ROI for online efforts is often difficult. Michael quoted a London School of Economics study that tried to quantify the value of managing your reputation online. The study was from 2005 and focused on very large companies, but the numbers were impressive — excerpt below:

In cash terms, for the average business in our analysis, every 1 point increase in word of mouth advocacy (net-promoter score) correlated with an £8.82 million increase in sales.

• In terms of percentage growth, a 7 point increase in word of mouth advocacy (net-promoter score) correlated with a 1% increase in growth (1 point increase = .147% more growth).

• A 1% reduction in negative word of mouth would lead to £24.84m additional revenues; every 2% reduction in negative word of mouth correlated to just under 1% growth (a 1% reduction = .414% more growth).

24.84 million pounds is about $50M US! The companies researched were credit card, automotive and airline companies in the UK — drop me a comment if you’d like the full report.

Some of these tools are more immediately applicable to b2c, unlike the b2b and b2g clients that Strategic handles. In fact, some online measurement tools like www.quantcast.com don’t work for sites with traffic below 2,000 unique visitors per month. But these 2.0 tools and applications are becoming increasingly important for companies of all sizes.  

Organic SEO vs. PPC

Good article today by Aaron Wall at SEOBOOK. He compares cultivating your organic SEO over the long haul vs. the quick hit possible with pay-per-click campaigns.

I was with Advertising.com when we invented PPC — though I guess early hires at ValueClick might dispute that claim. PPC was new, exciting and promised a level of reporting unheard of from standard broadcast advertising sold on a cost-per-thousand basis. Those were incredible days.

Today PPC remains very popular but there are drawbacks. One big one Aaron cites is having any successful strategy pounced on by so many others, making the success very shortlived. He compares this against the longer term but undeniable benefits of organic SEO, along with some insightful observations on human nature:

This is why I like SEO so much more than PPC. Most people are too lazy to spend years researching their topic, years building a brand, years building links, and years building social and customer relationships. We are afraid of failure, afraid of success, and afraid that we are investing too much in one place. But, if someone sees me ranking in the organic results they can’t just clone it unless they know SEO well, and are committed for the long haul. In many cases, knowing SEO well means having capital, time, passion, and a lot of marketing knowledge.

Here’s the full post