Search Engine Strategies: Public Relations Via Search Engines: SEO-PR
Day 2 of SES. Details on Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang’s keynote to follow. First, a session entitled Public Relations Via Search Engines. Something tells me I should have attended the What Is Spam session, but I just found this one more interesting.
Moderating was Chris Sherman, Associate Editor of Search Engine Watch.
Chris passed things over to Greg Jarboe, President and Co-Founder of SEO-PR. He explained how optimizing publis relations is a relatively new idea, when compared with regular SEO. His first work in the field was for SEMPO, announcing their formation, and everyone was surprised at how well the press release ranked on Google News. This was one of the first times people realized how Google News can be used for releases.
He showed a chart of the most popular news sites on the web. Yahoo News is number one, with 21.3 million unique visitors, tied by CNN (21.3) and followed by MSNBC (19.5), nytimes.com (9), USA Today (8.5), Google (6.4). He noted how 98% of journalists use Google News in research for a story, and 77% are actually searching for press releases (previously unheard of in the PR world). I can say from experience that nearly every internet savvy reporter I’ve met uses Google News.
Greg showed how they optimize a press release. One of the first things they did was to change a popular search term (sex) to a more relevant one (gender). Good plan. Also, he showed how eMedia Wire allows anchor text, while PR Newswire uses plain text to distribute. How are companies still operating like that? Anyway, they were able to track via code in the anchor text how many people read the press release and how many clicked on the links. Tow-thirds of the people arrived via news search engines.
One interesting fact: searching for the title of one of their press releases revealed that, since the press releases had RSS feeds, it was gettign picked up by major news sites and blogs. You can’t do PR online without RSS. The release in this case, for Verizon, saw a 438% increase in searches for the term, an increase of 1,286,459 searches over the benchmark search. The total cost to Verizon for all of this extra traffic: $779.
Now that’s an effective press release.
While pay-per-click advertising is very effective, the organic links receive the vast majority of clicks, and marketers must remember to put their effort into that.
