Digital PR Campaigns For SEO: 5 Things To Remember
The art of creating some kind of interesting content or story and then subsequently leveraging it for the purpose of improving a company’s search visibility has many titles. Online PR, digital PR, digital creative, creative digital are just some of the labels banded about. For the purpose of this blog post however, it shall be known simply as digital PR.
Over the last couple of years digital PR has become a staple of the SEO world – this is due to Google algorithm changes. However, dear reader you’ll find no black-and-white animal-based history lesson in this blog – and while the SEO world has crossed over into the world of PR, PR land has reciprocated with a plethora of formerly traditional PR agencies rebranding as “SEO savvy” (more on these later).
The fact is, if you’re running an SEO campaign of a substantial enough budget then the chances are this will incorporate digital PR in some form. I’ve run dozens of digital PR campaigns for all kinds of businesses and I’ve seen first-hand what works and, probably more importantly, what doesn’t work. So here are a few things to remember when it comes to such campaigns.
Forget About The Link
Links remain important (very, very important!) to SEO and no amount of “SEO is dead, long live [insert latest buzz word here]” blog posts are going to change that. However, to come up with a great digital PR campaign the best thing to do is to forget about the links. Unshackle yourself from the “where-will-the-links-come-from” burden, and instead simply focus all your efforts on thinking of interesting/funny/entertaining/controversial content or a story. Obsessing over links at the genesis of an idea is not going to lead to a good idea. Great content will naturally lead to links, so forget about them for now.
Forget About The Niche
This is where us digital PRs have life easier than our traditional counterparts, as we’re not shackled to our client’s particular niche for campaigns. For example, a traditional PR agency creating a campaign for a finance company will generally have to work within the realms of the finance industry. The campaign will be literal and targeted at finance publications; that’s where the finance company’s target audience is likely to be reading so it makes sense to fish where the fish are, right? It does, but not necessarily when it comes to a digital PR campaign.
A digital PR creating a campaign for the same finance company is not restricted to the finance sphere. Their ultimate goal is to create content which is interesting to as many websites as possible to maximise potential targets for securing linking coverage. The digital PR’s primary goal – usually – is not to generate direct sales from referral traffic so there’s no need to stay within the client’s niche.
Instead, the digital PR would look at what is interesting to the maximum number of people at that time and then work backwards and figure out what they can do to get the client into that online conversation. The digital PR would be more likely to come up with a campaign for said finance client along the lines of the size of mortgage Game of Throne’s Tyrion Lannister could qualify for [insert your own joke about a Lannister always paying their debts, here].
The benefits of thinking outside of the niche is that instead of just being able to target finance sites, the digital PR can now target popular culture news sites, Game of Thrones blogs (you’ll be surprised how many of these there are) and mainstream media sites as well as the original finance sites. A story that appeals to more sites is going to lead to more linking coverage. This is still fishing where the fish are, just in a bigger pond.
Don’t Forget About Your Catalyst Sites
News and content on the World Wide Web is a free-for-all; there are almost no unique stories, with websites picking up content from other sites and so on. At the top of this food chain sit a few catalyst sites. These websites – unfortunately, reader, I’m not going to give away the identity of these in this blog – have huge readerships and consistently act as the source of stories that are then subsequently picked up again and again from other sites further down the food chain. By tailoring your campaign to appeal to these sites your story has a higher chance of being covered by numerous publications.
Don’t Forget About Social Media
“We just want links; I don’t care about Twitter.” I paraphrase, but every digital PR will have encountered this sentiment at some point. Social signals remain a contested subject in SEO-Land, but social signals or not, the fact remains social media is a very effective method of getting your content to a wider audience, and therefore increasing the chance of it getting picked up naturally by websites. Social media should be viewed as an outreach channel for digital PR campaigns and to ignore it is to restrict your campaign’s potential. This again comes back to forgetting about the link momentarily and just concentrating on pushing your content to the maximum number of people. The irony is that by remaining fixated on The Link you decrease your chances of achieving linking coverage.
Don’t Forget About The On-Site Collateral
Along with staying within the niche, neglecting to include on-site collateral in a campaign is the other shortcoming I see time and time again from the new breed of “SEO savvy” PR agencies. It’s a common misconception that creating an interesting story that is good enough to be picked up by a news site automatically equals a link. Unfortunately, this is not the case. There are some (wonderful!) news sites out there that will always include a link, though these are an ever-decreasing breed.
Journalists need to be incentivised to include a link that is ultimately encouraging their readers to leave their publication. The incentive should come in the form of leaving part of the story on the website in a blog post or bespoke landing page. You need to give a valid reason for the journalist to direct traffic to your site via a link. Of course this all depends on the specific nature of your campaign, but this could be a sign-up form to that world-first service you’ve just launched, a how-we-did-it blog post detailing how you just created that amazing topical video stunt, or a product listing to that crazy new product your client has launched. It’s probably not going to be an infographic though.