Monday, November 17, 2014
Google Discontinues Carousel for Local Search Results
A Quick Start Guide to Schema – Your Competitive Edge
3 Basic Principles of Journalism to Consider When Writing Content for Google
The Coming Integration of PR and SEO
Posted by SamuelScott
This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.
Earlier this year, I published a Moz post that aimed to introduce the basic principles of public relations that SEOs and digital marketers, I argued, need to know. (Specifically, the post was on media relations and story-pitching as a means of getting coverage and “earning” good links.)
Following the positive response to the post, Moz invited me to host a recent Mozinar on the integration of PR and SEO. ( You can listen to it and download the slides here for free!) As a former print journalist who later became a digital marketer, I love to discuss this niche because I am very passionate about the topic.
In summary, the Mozinar discussed:
- Traditional marketing and communications theory
- Why both inbound and outbound marketing are needed
- An overview of the basic PR process
- How to use PR software
- Examples of messaging and positioning
- Where to research demographic data for audience profiles
- How to integrate SEO into each step of the workflow
- How SEO and PR teams can help each other
- Why the best links come as natural results of doing good PR and marketing
- “Don’t think about how to get links. Think about how to get coverage and publicity.”
At the end of the Mozinar, the community had some intriguing and insightful questions (no surprise there!), and Moz invited me to write a follow-up post to provide more answers and discuss the relationship between SEO and PR further.
Follow-ups to the PR Mozinar
Before I address the questions and ideas at the end of the Mozinar, I just wanted to give some more credit where the credit is certainly due.
People like me, who write for major publications or speak at large conferences, get a lot of attention. But, truth is, we are always helped immensely by so many of our talented colleagues behind the scenes. Since the beginning of my digital marketing career, I have known about SEO, but I have learned more about public relations from observing (albeit from a distance) The Cline Group’s front line PR team in Philadelphia over the years.
So, I just wanted to thank (in alphabetical order) Kim Cox, Gabrielle Dratch, Caitlin Driscoll, Max Marine, and Ariel Shore as well as our senior PR executives Bill Robinson and DeeDee Rudenstein and CEO Josh Cline. What I hope the Moz community learned from the Mozinar is what I have learned from them.
Now, onto the three Mozinar Q&A questions that had been left unanswered.
- Why do you use Cision and not Vocus or Meltwater or others?
I do not want to focus on why The Cline Group specifically uses Cision. I would not want my agency (and indirectly Moz) to be seen as endorsing one type of PR software over another. What I can do is encourage people to read these writings from RMP Media Analysis, LinkedIn, Alaniz Marketing and Ombud, then do further research into which platform may work best for them and their specific companies and needs.
(Cision and Vocus recently agreed to merge, with the combined company continuing under the Cision brand.)
- Do you have examples of good PR pitches?
I’ve anonymized and uploaded three successful client pitches to our website. You can download them here: a mobile-advertising network, a high-end vaporizer for the ingestion of medicinal herbs and a mobile app that helps to protect personal privacy. As you will see, these pitches incorporated the various tactics that I had detailed in the Mozinar.
Important caveat: Do not fall into the trap of relying too much on templates. Every reporter and every outlet you pitch will be different. The ideas in these examples of pitches may help, but please do not use them verbatim.
- Are there other websites similar to HARO (Help a Reporter Out) that people can use to find reporters who are looking for stories? Are the other free, simpler tools?
Some commonly mentioned tools are My Blog U, ProfNet, BuzzStream and My Local Reporter. Raven Tools also has a good-sized list. But I can only vouch for My Blog U because it’s the only one I have used personally. It’s also important to note that using a PR tool is not a magic bullet. You have to know how to use it in the context of the overall public relations process. Creating a media list is just one part of the puzzle.
An infographic of integration
And now, the promised infographic!
I told the Mozinar audience we would provide a detailed infographic as a quick guide to the step-by-step process of PR and SEO integration. Well, here it is:
A second credit to my awesome colleague Thomas Kerr, who designs most of The Cline Group’s presentations and graphics while also being our social media and overall digital wizard.
Just a few notes on the infographic:
First, I have segmented the two pillars by “PR and Traditional Marketing” and “SEO & Digital Marketing.” I hate to sound stereotypical, but the use of this differentiation was the easiest way to explain the integration process. The “PR” side deals with people and content (e.g., messaging, media relations, and materials, etc.), while the “SEO” side focuses on things (e.g., online data, analytics, and research, etc.). See the end of this post for an important prediction.
Second, I have put social media on the online side because that is where the practice seems to sit in most companies and agencies. However, social media is really just a set of PR and communications channels, so it will likely increasingly move to the “traditional marketing” side of things. Again, see the end.
Third, there is a CMO / VP of Marketing / Project Leader (based on the structure of a company and whether the context is an agency or an in-house department) column between SEO and PR. This position should be a person with enough experience in both disciplines to mediate between the two as well as make judgment calls and final decisions in the case of conflicts. "SEO," for example, may want to use certain keyword-based language in messaging in an attempt to rank highly for certain search terms. “PR” might want to use different terms that may resonate more with media outlets and the public. Someone will need to make a decision.
Fourth, it is important to understand that companies with numerous brands, products or services, and/or a diverse set of target audiences will need to take additional steps:
The marketing work for each brand, product, or service will need its own specific goal and KPI(s) in step one. Separate audience research and persona development will need to be performed for each distinct audience in step two. So, for a larger company, such as the one described above, parts of steps 3-8 below will often need to be done, say, six times, once for each audience of each product.
However, the complexity does not end there.
Online and offline is the same thing
Essentially, as more and more human activity occurs online, we are rapidly approaching a point where the offline and online worlds are merging into the same space. “Traditional” and “online” marketing are all collectively becoming simply “marketing.”
Above is our modern version of traditional communications and marketing theory. A sender decides upon a message; the message is packaged into a piece of content; the content is transmitted via a desired channel; and the channel delivers the content to the receiver. Marketing is essentially sending a message that is packaged into a piece of content to a receiver via a channel. The rest is just details.
As Google becomes smarter and smarter, marketers will need to stop thinking only about SEO and think more like, well, marketers. Mad Men’s Don Draper, the subject of the meme at the top of the page, would best the performance of any link builder today because he understood how to gain mass publicity and coverage, both of which have always been more important than just building links here and there. The best and greatest numbers of links come naturally as a result of good marketing and not as a result of any direct linkbuilding. In the 2014 Linkbuilding Survey published on Moz, most of the (good) tactics that were described in the post – such as “content plus outreach” – are PR by another name.
At SMX West 2014 (where I gave a talk on SEO and PR strategy), Rand Fishkin took to the main stage to discuss what the future holds for SEO. Starting at 6:30 in the video above, he argued that there will soon be a bias towards brands in organic search. (For an extensive discussion of this issue, I'll refer you to Bryson Meunier's essay at Search Engine Land.) I agree that it will soon become crucial to use PR, advertisingand publicity to build a brand, but that action is something the Don Drapers of the world had already known to do long before the Internet had ever existed.
But things are changing
The process that I have outlined above is a little vague on purpose. The lines between SEO and PR are increasingly blurring as online and offline marketing becomes more and more integrated. For example, take this very post: is it me doing SEO or PR for our agency (while first and foremost aiming to help the readers)? The answer: Yes.
In a Moz post by Jason Acidre on SEO and brand building, I commented with the following:
Say, 10 years ago, "SEOs" were focused on techie things: keyword research, sitemaps, site hierarchy, site speed, backlinks, and a lot more. Then, as Google became smarter and the industry become more and more mature, "SEOs" woke up one day and realized that online marketers need to think, you know, like marketers. Now, I get the sense that digital marketers are trying to learn all about traditional marketing as much as possible because, in the end, all marketing is about people -- not machines and algorithms. What the f&*# is a positioning statement? What is a pitch? I just wish "SEOs" had done this from the beginning.
Of course, the same thing has been occurring in the inverse in the traditional marketing world. Traditional marketers have usually focused on these types of things: messaging documents, media lists, promotional campaigns, the 4 Ps, and SWOT analyses. Then, as more human activity moved to the Internet, they also woke up one day and saw an anarchic set of communications channels that operate under different sets of rules. Now, on the other end, I get the sense that traditional marketers are trying to learn as much as possible about SEO and digital marketing. What the f&^% is a rel=canonical tag? What is Google+ authorship? I just wish traditional marketers had done this from the start.
In fact, such a separation between SEO and PR is quickly dying. Here is a simplified version of the marketing and communications process I outlined at the beginning:
Traditional marketers and communications professionals have used this process for decades, and almost everything that (the umbrella term of) SEO does can fit into one of these boxes. A message can appear in a newspaper article or in a blog post. Content can be a sales brochure or an e-book. A channel can be the television or Facebook. A lot of technical and on-page SEO is simply good web development. The most-effective type of off-page SEO is just PR and publicity. Public-relations executives, as I have written elsewhere, can also learn to use analytics as yet another way to gauge results.
It all goes back to this tweet from Rand, which I cite in nearly every offline conversation with the marketing community:
SEO as an entity (sorry for the pun) unto itself is quickly dying. The more SEO entails, the more the umbrella term becomes useless in any meaningful context. For this reason, it is crucial that digital marketers learn as much as possible about traditional marketing and PR.
So, in the end, how does one integrate public relations and SEO? By simply doing good marketing.
Want more? Don't forget to watch the Mozinar -- I'd love to get your feedback in the comments below!
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Friday, November 14, 2014
Ad Copy - 7 Key Steps for Adding Holiday Sparkle
Be Intentional about Your Content & SEO Goals or Face Certain Failure - Whiteboard Friday
Posted by randfish
We're seeing more and more companies investing in content marketing, and that's a great thing. Many of them, however, are putting less thought than they should into the specific goals behind the content they produce. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers examples of goals for targeting different kinds of people, from those who merely stumbled upon your site to those who are strongly considering becoming customers.
For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!
Video transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about being intentional about the content investments that you make. Now this is particularly important because otherwise it can lead to doom.
I got to organize the Foundry CEO Summit last week in Boulder, Colorado. I'm not sure when you are watching this. It might be several weeks ago now. But in any case, I'm talking with a bunch of CEOs and we have a number of discussion topics. One of the discussion topics, which was my personal favorite, one of the ones I was moderating was the top of funnel customer acquisition.
So I'm talking with a lot of these CEOs, B2B and B2C CEOs, about their content marketing efforts. Virtually everyone is investing in content marketing or thinking about it, which is awesome because it is very powerful. But many of them are investing in it somewhat unintentionally, or they haven't talked with their CMOs and their marketing teams about precisely what that content is.
So we pulled up a couple of blogs from some of the participants. I'm kind of looking through like, "I'm not sure that there's a strategic initiative behind all of the content that's being produced." That can be hugely helpful, and that's true both for the content side of it and for the SEO side of it.
Many of the folks who are watching Whiteboard Friday undoubtedly are really deep into the tactics and the SEO side. So this video is for your managers, for your bosses, for you to help them understand how to choose content investments and what to expect from different kinds of investments.
Let me show you what I mean. Different kinds of content exist to target people at different sections of their experience with your site: at the consideration phase, where they're close to buying, this is really for people who are thinking about buying your product; at the discovery phase for people who are just learning about your product or company; and at the viral or super broad content phase, where you're not even necessarily trying to attract an audience that might buy from you, you're doing other kinds of things.
So I'm going to try and walk through each of these. I'm actually going to start with the one that's closest to the conversion process or the conversion point in that process.
So let's imagine that I'm going to be the marketer at GeekDesk. GeekDesk sells these great sit-stand desks. I have one at home. I have one here at Moz. I love them to death because I stand up and work. I have sciatica in my left leg that I've had for many years, and I've been trying to work on that. One of the things I did is switch to a sit-stand desk. I actually almost never put it in sit mode anymore. I'm standing all the time. But in any case, GeekDesk makes great ones, ones that I really like.
So if I'm working at GeekDesk, my consideration phase content might be things like the models page, the models of all the different GeekDesks that I can buy. It might be a page on the advantages of the GeekDesk preset heights. GeekDesk has these little settings. I can push one, two, three, four, and it'll go to different heights. I have one at home where I can push it to two, and it will go to the height for Geraldine so she can work at my desk. Then I press one, and it goes to my height. Then I press three, I haven't pre-programmed three or four yet. But in any case, maybe if Elijah comes over, I'll set one for you.
It might be "GeekDesk warranty and return policy," or "sit-stand desks from GeekDesk." These are kind of product-centric things. My content goals here are product awareness and conversion. I'm trying to get people to know about the products that I offer and to convert them to buyers.
This is really about information for those potential buyers. So my audience, naturally, is going to be customers, potential customers, and maybe also some media that's already planning to write about me, which is why I want to have things like great photography and probably some testimonial quotes and all that kind of stuff.
The SEO targets for these types of pages are going to be my branded keywords -- certainly things like "GeekDesk" and "GeekDesk desks" and whatever the models that I've got are -- and then non-branded keywords that are directly, exactly tied to the products that my customers are going to perform when they search. These are things like sit-stand desks or adjustable height desks. That's what this stuff is targeting.
This is very classic, very old-school kind of SEO and almost not even in the realm really of content marketing. These are just kind of product-focused pages. You should have plenty of these on your site, but they don't always have overlap with these other things, and this is where I think the challenge comes into play.
Discovery phase content is really different. This is content like benefits of standing desks. That's a little broader than GeekDesk. That's kind of weird. Why would I write about that instead of benefits of GeekDesk? Well, I'm trying to attract a bigger audience. 99% of the content that you'll ever see me present or write about is not why you should use Moz tools. That's intentional. I don't like promoting our stuff all that much. In fact, I'm kind of allergic to it, which has its own challenges.
In any case, this is targeting an audience that I am trying to reach who will learn from me. So I might write things like why sitting at a desk might significantly harm your health or companies that have moved to standing desks. I'd have a list of them, and I have some testimonials from companies that have moved to standing desks. They don't even have to be on my product. I'm just trying to sell more of the idea and get people engaged with things that might potentially tie to my business. How to be healthy at work, which is even broader.
So these content goals are a little different. I'm trying to create awareness of the company. I just want people to know that GeekDesk exists. So if they come and they consume this content, even if they never become buyers, at least they will know and have heard of us. That's important as well.
Remember television commercial advertisers pay millions and millions of dollars just to get people to know that they exist. That's creating those brand impressions, and after more and more brand impressions, especially over a given time frame, you are more likely to know that brand, more likely to trust them, conversion rates go up, all those kinds of things.
I'm also trying to create awareness of the issues. I sometimes don't even care if you remember that that great piece of content about how to be healthy at work came from GeekDesk. All I care is that you remember that standing at work is probably healthier for you than sitting. That's what I hope to spread. That's the virality that I hope to create there. I want to help people so that they trust, remember, and know me in the future. These are the goals around discovery phase content.
That audience can be potential customers, but there's probably a much broader audience with demographic or psychographic overlap with my customers. That can be a group that's tremendously larger, and some small percentage of them might someday be customers or customer targets. This is probably also people like media, influencers, and potential amplifiers. This may be a secondary piece, but certainly I hope to reach some of those.
The SEO targets are going to be the informational searches that these types of folks will perform and broad keywords around my products. This is not my personal products, but any of the types of products that I offer. This also includes broad keywords around my customers' interests. That might be "health at work," that might be "health at home," that might be broadly dealing with issues like the leg issue that I've got, like sciatica stuff. It can be much broader than just what my product helps solve.
Then there's a third one. These two I think get conflated more than anything else. This is more the viral, super broad content. This is stuff like, "Scientific studies show that work will kill you. Here's how." Wow. That sounds a little scary, but it also sounds like something that my aunt would post on Facebook.
"Work setups at Facebook versus Google versus Microsoft." I would probably take a look at that article. I want to see what the different photographs are and how they differ, especially if they are the same across all of them. That would surprise me. But I want to know why they have uniqueness there.
"The start-up world's geekiest desk setup." That's going to be visual content that's going to be sailing across the Web. I definitely want to see that.
"An interactive work setup pricing calculator." That is super useful, very broad. When you think about the relationship of this to who's going to be in my potential customer set, that relationship is pretty small. Let's imagine that this is the Venn diagram of that with my actual customer base. It's a really tiny little overlap right there. It's a heart-shaped Venn diagram. I don't know why that is. It's because I love you.
The content goals around this are that I want to grow that broad awareness, just like I did with my informational content. I want to attract links. So few folks, especially outside of SEOs and content marketers, really understand this. What happens here is I'm going to attract links with this broad or more viral focused content, and those links will actually help all of this content rank better. This is the rising tide of domain authority that lifts all of the ships, all of the pages on the domain and their potential ranking ability. That's why you see folks investing in this regularly to boost up the ranking potential of these.
That being said, as we've talked about in a previous Whiteboard Friday, Google is doing a lot more domain association and keyword level domain association. So if you do the "problems with abusing alcohol" and that happens to go viral on your site, that probably won't actually help you rank for any of this stuff because it is completely outside the topic model of what all of these things are about. You want to be at least somewhat tangentially related in a semantic way.
Finally, I want to reach an audience outside of my targets for potential serendipity. What do I mean by that? I'm talking about I want to reach someone who has no interest in sitting and standing desks, but might be an investor for me or a supplier for me or a business development partner. They might be someone who happens to tell someone who happens to tell another someone, that long line of serendipity that can happen through connections. That's what this viral content is about.
So the audience is really not just specific influencers or customers, but anyone who might influence potential customers. It's a big, broad group. It's not just these people in here. It's these people who influence them and those people who influence them. It's a big, broad group.
Then I'm really looking for a link likely audience with this kind of content. I want to find people who can amplify, people who can socially share, people who can link directly through a blog, through press and media, through resources pages, that kind of stuff.
So my SEO targets might be really broad keywords that have the potential to reach those amplifiers. Sometimes -- I know this is weird for me to say -- it is okay to have none at all, no keyword target at all. I can imagine a lot of viral content that doesn't necessarily overlap with a specific keyword search but that has the potential to earn a lot of links and reach influencers. Thus, you kind of go, "Well, let's turn off the SEO on this one and just at least make it nicely indexable and make the links point to all the right places back throughout here so that I'm bumping up their potential visibility."
This fits into the question of: What type of content strategy am I doing? Why am I investing in this particular piece? Before you create a piece of content or pitch a piece of content to your manager, your CMO, your CEO, you should make sure you know which one it is. It is so important to do that, because otherwise they'll judge this content by this ROI and this content by these expectations. That's just not going to work. They're going to look at their viral content and go, "I don't see any conversions coming from this. That was a waste."
That's not what it was about. You have to create the right expectations for each kind of content in which you are going to be investing.
All right everyone, I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. We will see you again next week. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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