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THE NEW RULES OF SEARCH AND PRHow to build greater brand visibility by integrating SEO into PR

White paper

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White Paper The New Rules Of Search And PR

introduction 2

thinking holistically 4

Understanding the modern search results landscape 6

how to evolve your processes 12

Conclusion and next steps 18

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IntroductionIntroduction

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Technology is changing communications at a rate never before seen. For

brands to thrive, their PR teams must be fluent in modern tools and

techniques combined with an innate understanding of how changes affect

their communications strategy.

As influence shifts from traditional gatekeepers (such as media) to users,

perhaps the most ignored, yet impactful, communications channels for

public relations professionals to leverage are search engines.

Why impactful? According to multiple studies, nearly all journalists use

search engines, such as Google and Bing, to find information for stories.

Why ignored? It is rare that a PR professional or firm has a true grasp on SEO.

The fact is, media professionals are relying on search to do their job.

Meanwhile, search engines and social media continue to integrate and

innovate together. As a result, no one is effective at digital communications

without optimization.

And as we move forward, sophisticated companies will embrace a philosophy

known as inbound marketing: the intersection of search, social, content and PR.

Thinking holistically

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The web does not happen in silos. Users (and media) don’t consciously

think to themselves: “Now I’m using a search engine. Now I’m using a

social network.”

They simply use the tools necessary to accomplish their tasks. It’s a fluid

experience.

And yet many brands separate their digital teams as if this were not the case.

For the most effective programs, SEO, social media and PR tactics need to

function holistically and not be separated.

If you’re not functioning holistically, you’re going to either make your

company look bad, create false expectations for a certain audience or

simply waste resources. And you’ll never realize the potential of a true

SEO / PR / social intersection.

As PR and marketing specializations intertwine, the point of intersection is

simple: content.

Content is what media find via search engines and react to organically.

Content is what users can share via their social channels, amplifying a

brand’s messages and building their communities.

What this content should be helping brands achieve is sustained impact

in search and social channels. With search engines taking into account

social both explicitly (via the recent Google+ integration) and implicitly (via

social signal), SEO without social is a thing of the past and content-driven

programs will lead the future.

Understanding the modern search results landscape

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If you are completely new to SEO and are not sure of the basics, we suggest

you start by reading Google’s comprehensive search engine optimization

starter guide (available in 40 languages). These best practices will help you

across all the engines, not just Google.

But it’s not enough to just cover the basics. You need to stay abreast of the

changing search landscape.

The first step for communications professionals, as with any change in

technology, is to experience it firsthand.

Don’t be frightened or opt-out of changes. Embrace them, learn what they

mean and become proficient in leveraging them.

Let’s review a few of the more recent changes in Google.

1. Personalized Results = More Relevant, Faster, Social SearchThe web has continued to become a more social, real-time medium. With this,

it is no surprise Google is melding its social product with search results.

It’s time to push the envelope and change, or face disruption by more agile

competitors.

Marketing tip: Google offers advice on how

you can appear above the fold when someone

searches on a topic related to your expertise.

Explore some of the ways your brand and

spokespeople can be directly recommended

via Google.

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You’ll note, even when not logged in, when you search for broad concepts

such as marketing, Google is serving up people on Google+ you might be

interested in connecting with:

Brands active in social are already favored in search: the engines incorporate

social implicitly (via signals – in other words social authority influences search

engine rankings) and explicitly (within search results – with social profiles and

pages, such as Google+ pages, appearing in search results).

Google has experimented with social search in the past. But now it is going

further and has brought it back, at scale, in a more useful and integrated way

than we’ve seen before.

Marketing tip: build a large, organic community

across platforms: on Google+, Facebook,

Twitter and other sites. We see from our own

client data that web users frequently participate

on multiple social platforms. Therefore,

reaching them holistically is critical. Google is

incorporating social results from a variety of

networks. While Google+ participation is being

rewarded greatly, don’t stop there.

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2. Google AuthorshipGoogle already offers a whole host of tools for webmasters that all marketing and PR professionals should be familiar with.

One of the more recent tools that provides a huge incentive for any brand publishing to the web is Google’s Authorship which allows site owners to display authorship visually in search results:

Our observation is that a majority of search results (in particular for brands) have yet to embrace the authorship functionality. And on text-heavy search results pages, being able to have an image helps make your links stand out.

Further, Google is providing data to authors specifically to show them how their personalized pages are performing:

Marketing tip: brands

should use Google+

to tag spokespeople

to content they

publish on owned

platforms. The result

will be more visibility

in search engines.

How to evolve your processes

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SEO should, ideally, be applied to all online marketing and PR initiatives. It is

in the interest of search engines to deliver relevant, useful content to users

and it is in the interest of PR pros to publish content that answers consumer

and media demand. In a world where every company is a media company, it

is not a choice to take this approach; instead it is the future of our industry.

SEO is a win-win situation for companies and search engines, which is one

compelling reason why the engines open-source search data. Companies

can either use the data to answer consumer and media demand, or competitors

will—it is as simple as that.

Even with the proliferation of social, search demand holds steady:

with comScore reporting more than 17 billion explicit core searches

conducted in November, 2011, and with 100 percent of journalists

responding to the Cision and GW University study using Google, no

PR pro can ignore search.

The news for PR also keeps getting better: SEO as a stand-alone

tactic is dying a slow death. Why? Because it is no longer just the

domain of SEOs: all communications professionals need to be flu-

ent in optimization. They need to know what makes up a technically-friendly

website and how to effectively market web content in a way that reaches

and gets passed on by users while improving search performance. The two

tactics do not happen in isolation.

Marketers of the future simply won’t hire those not skilled in these areas,

and it already makes little sense for a company to hire a consultancy or team

member on the wrong side of the digital divide.

Here are the basic steps to get started with integrating SEO with PR.

Contact us to talk

about integrating

SEO into your

campaign

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1. Develop a customer / media-centric keyword glossaryStart by creating a list of keywords that are pain-point oriented, words

customers and media will use to search for information they need to find.

Ensure that these keywords are not just terms you think are important, but

are terms that have search demand behind them. Free tools like the Google

AdWords keyword tool or paid tools like SEM Rush provide the data

necessary to help you make decisions when creating the glossary.

Be sure to group your glossary into relevant categories to provide greater

ease of use, and begin to matrix out web pages that are already optimized

for each keyphrase. This way, you not only have a guide for how you should

title new content (via meta title and on-page) but you have a record of how

to reference existing assets.

After the glossary is created and approved, you’ll need to do two things. The

first is to socialize the glossary to your team members and existing marketing

partners and ensure its use is enforced as part of content creation processes.

The second is to consider the glossary a living, breathing document you add

to over time as consumer and media demand is in a constant state of flux.

The benefit of this actually goes beyond search rankings and traffic: by

creating content following a keyword glossary that is research-based, you’ll

always be creating content that is of interest to your target. One of the more

powerful ways interest is expressed in our world is simple: search demand.

2. Conduct a technical (code-level) SEO audit of your website Today’s PR teams must be literate in modern web languages, able to analyze

/ make recommendations to a content management system and understand

web usability. Without having an optimized home base on the web (in the

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form of a company website or blog), any signal you are generating that a

search engine might want to reward you for could be accomplishing nothing.

We have seen examples where just a few tweaks to a CMS or removal of a

few lines of code (for example, if the search engines are blocked from accessing

a significant portion of a site via a poorly-coded Robots.txt file) have caused

significant improvements to natural search traffic.

The point is to eliminate self-imposed roadblocks to success. If your team is

unable to assess websites or blogs from a code-level standpoint and make

recommendations, it’s time to train your team, hire someone new or get help.

Technical roadblocks should not be barriers to success at this point in your

marketing.

3. Optimize your content: for users first, then search enginesThis sounds obvious, but we’ll say it anyway: actually optimize your content.

A lot of PR pros and marketers only go as far as talking about optimization

but don’t actually follow through with it. It is a fundamental shift for most

communications professionals to think of how their content will be found

from an inbound perspective as they’ve focused on outbound for so long.

But flipping your team’s mindset from outbound to inbound is critical to

scale SEO results.

The key part of optimization is to understand it is not simply to create content

for search engine spiders. Rather, it is to improve the usability of content for

users first, then also be findable by search engines for terms that matter. At

the end of the day, optimization is still people-driven as search demand is

driven by humans, not robots.

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4. Acquire organic links and social signal to your siteOnce your site is technically friendly and the content is optimized for popular,

relevant terms, it’s time to market your site. Engage in activities with partners,

the media, bloggers and other digital influencers to connect them with your

valuable site content and encourage propagation across the web.

Further, think about how you can develop more content on your site that will

attract others organically and inspire them to link to you. Scaling your website

content (with high quality, usable and interesting pages) is actually one of the

better ways to acquire organic links.

Other items you’ll need to consider as part of an SEO process are creating a

measurement process to show improvements and make data-driven decisions,

as well as integration with other online marketing tactics like social media.

But evolving your communications processes to play to a web-friendly world

is something you can approach iteratively. Don’t feel overwhelmed or that

you need to do everything right now. Start by nailing down the basics and

then incorporate them into a more holistic digital marketing process as you

get comfortable.

Marketing tip: register

your site with both

Google Webmaster

tools and Bing

Webmaster Tools to get

the full picture of how

the engines view your

content.

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Lists, Awards,Reviews

Blog Posts

TitleTag:

MetaDescription:

MetaKeywords:

8-12 words, important keywords onthe left. Focus on 1-2 keywordphrases. This is the MOST important location for keywords in a document used to rank web pages.

Search engines do not use these forranking purposes.

10-25 word elaboration of the titletag. Used to describe the site insearch results.

Marketing tip: Use the below best practices in

order to optimize the meta content on each of

your web pages, blog posts, press releases, etc.

Remember to also optimize on-page

information as well.

Conclusion and next steps

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Search, plus Your World is an exciting advancement from Google that

continues the trend of the last several years: bringing search and social

together.

Of course, there was an organic intersection between search and social

long before this. Brands with large social communities have greater reach

than competitors on the web through social channels. So, when they

publish a new piece of content, they reach a larger audience, a percentage

of whom will also be content creators (journalists, bloggers, etc). Those

content creators then re-share, link back and generate organic signal to

the original piece of content. This organic boost from the web provides

an advantage for establishing authority of a domain (and with it, search

visibility).

Years ago, we noticed many marketers were putting their SEO and social

media programs in silos. Those who embraced an integrated approach

are well ahead of their competitors in search visibility and community size

today. This is the crux of organic marketing.

Google’s recent search innovation is exciting but doesn’t actually change

what marketing and PR pros should have been doing all along: building a

platform-agnostic web community and optimizing content using the tools

and data available.

So what should marketers who are lost today do to find the right path tomorrow?

Learn SEO and social media marketingIf you’re a communications professional and only understand social

media marketing but not search engine optimization (or vice versa), it’s

time to learn both. PR professionals and marketers who do not are going

to get left behind. Skills from community building to keyword research to

content creation and analytics need to be a part of every marketing team’s

bread and butter. Kill the digital marketing silos, think holistically: even

integrate push tactics like email and paid with your organic tactics.

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Use Google+, but don’t stop using other networks eitherThe social web is more frequently “and” than “or,” especially for brands.

If you have a team already executing an effective social marketing

program, adding another social outpost to your approach (such as

Google+) should not be a difficult process. Integrate Google+ and

nurture communities in multiple outposts you’ve identified as relevant

for your target audience. As Google’s head of webspam ‘Matt Cutts’

points out, Search Plus surfaces public content from the open web, so

participation across platforms is going to get rewarded. One cautionary

point: we’d recommend you not just contribute content to other people’s

platforms, but that you also continue to scale up unique, useful and

optimized content on your own domain (blogging is an elegant way to

accomplish this).

Explore Google’s toolsWe also recommend taking advantage of the robust set of tools Google

is offering, such as Authorship, to stand out in the search landscape

and integrate Google+ features such as the +1 button or adding your

Google+ page to your own site to give your content the best visibility

possible in search. The magic answer, as always, is to integrate the web

tools that make sense for your strategy.

The bottom lineIt’s time to get serious about creating a digital strategy that sits at the

search / social intersection. Savvy companies are already here, but

many still need to catch up.

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about us

LEWIS was founded in 1995 by a former journalist and, since then, it has grown to over 300 employees

based in more than 25 wholly-owned offices across the US, EMEA and Asia Pacific.

Its regional headquarters are in London, San Francisco and Singapore. LEWIS is known for delivering

bold digital communications campaigns that enhance revenue, value and reputation for global brands.

Digital communications services span PR and media relations, social media marketing, search engine

optimization and digital content production.

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