Shannon Paul’s had a post yesterday that included very good advice for PR pros who want to plunge into the social media world (make sure you look at the presentation she’s embedded in the post).  Shannon suggests that PR pros need to start thinking about how they can make their content searchable and sharable in order to make the leap.  Kudos to Shannon for raising an issue that the clients of PR agencies have been demanding - make it easy to find the information - focus on keywords, SEO and links.

Given that the intersection of social media, PR and SEO is a topic that’s near and dear to our hearts here at BuzzStream, I thought I’d expand on one of the topics in Shannon’s presentation - keyword selection.  Picking keywords is incredibly important, and not just for press release optimization…do it right and it will help all of your marketing activities.

For our SEO-oriented audience, most of this will be fairly basic.  For those of you in PR that are new to this, I’m hoping it will give you some good ideas about how you can more effectively identify keywords, and do it in a fast, inexpensive fashion.  There’s no one right way to select keywords, but we like the approach I’m going to describe because it helps you identify keywords that are closely aligned to the terms your customer uses to shop for or to find information about products in your market (as opposed to simply finding keywords based on things like overall keyword popularity).

Keyword selection can feel pretty daunting when you’re just getting started, but it’s not as tough as it seems.  Here’s how we do it at BuzzStream.

Don’t START with Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool!

Note that I didn’t say “don’t use the keyword suggestion tool.”  It’s valuable as a supplemental tool, but in my opinion there are a lot of reasons not to rely on it as your starting point.  The problems are similar in many ways to the problems with relying on shotgun blast media pitches for your media and blogger outreach efforts…it’s broad-based, but much of what you get is irrelevant.  Additionally, it doesn’t help you identify the long-tail search opportunities, which have a ton of potential value.  Instead, you need to start by trying to put yourself in the customer’s shoes (if you’ve developed personas and a positioning statement for the company, it’ll be even easier).  In order to do this, the first thing we do is brainstorm on the following topics …for each, I’ve included some of the more general terms we’ve identified for BuzzStream’s customer to serve as examples:

1. Who is the product for? - e.g., small business, SMBs, DIY
2. What type/category? - e.g., marketing, word-of-mouth, SEO, public relations
3. What is it? - e.g., software, service, tools
4. Verbs/adjectives? - e.g., improve enhance, better
5. What does it affect? - PageRank, publicity, lead generation

For each of these, start with the most general terms and progressively drill-down.  So, for example, you might have “marketing” as the most general term for “category,” and from there you might drill all the way down to something as specific as “microPR.”  The more general terms will have much more traffic, but they’re harder to rank on and they don’t convert as well.  It’s the exact opposite for the more specific terms, which is what makes them so valuable.

Once you’re done, you’ll end up with a bunch of keywords in each of the five categories.  Then you start putting the terms together - e.g., “small business marketing software,” and “tools to improve search performance.”  You can do this in Excel, so that you don’t have to manually create the combinations.  You’ll need to eyeball the combinations and remove the ones that don’t make sense…you don’t have to spend a ton of time doing this because the bad ones will mostly be thrown out when you test your keywords (I’ll cover this in a minute).

Check out the competition

You can supplement the concept-oriented keywords you created by looking at your competition to see what they’re doing.  There are lots of tools to help you see what others are bidding on and to see their ads.  This is valuable because you get to see the language they use in their ads…it also helps you identify competitors that you weren’t aware of.  Some of the tools to look at include adgooroo, spyfu and keycompete.  All of these tools include a free trial period.

Competitive keyword searching still won’t tell you which terms are working and not working though.  For that, you need to test.

Test, test, test!

Once you’ve generated your keywords combinations, you can test them with an Adwords campaign.  Setting up an adwords campaign is easy to do and it’s inexpensive.  You can take a very large list of keywords (thousands) and get a good idea of what your customer really care about for less than a $1,000.  The information you’ll get back is incredibly useful because not only do you find out what people are clicking on, you can determine what converts into blog subscriptions, email signups, leads, revenue, etc.

Other resources

This is really just the tip of the iceberg, and there are a ton of good resources if you want to dig in deep into keyword research and selection.  My favorite is Search Engine Guide’s series on keyword research, selection and organization.  Aaron Wall has great training information on keyword selection as well.

If there are specific areas of keyword selection you’d like us to drill into in future posts, let us know.

One other thing - keyword selection is as much art as science, so feel free to jump in here…PR and social media pros - what’s working well for you when selecting keywords?

Here’s a diagram I’ve been using internally to explain the strategies and tactics related to SEO, broken down in three major layers: the foundation, on-page, and off-page factors, and modeled in terms of a network layer model.

A network stack is a helpful way of thinking about this because it implies that each layer builds upon the other, and is dependent on the layer below it.  As marketers, we are the architects and optimizers of this stack, and it’s helpful to start thinking about how our decisions at each layer affect (and in some cases marry us) to choices higher on the stack.

A model for SEO that adopts the network-layer model

On more thought, as I’ve stated, I predict that traditional SEO as a distinct discipline is going to merge with PR.  That’s mostly correct, however some aspects are going to migrate to Product Management in my view.  I’ll expand on that in a later post.

I spent 8 years doing my own SEO while growing the site I co-founded, ApartmentRatings.com, from absolutely nothing into one of the top apartment-hunting sites.  I eventually reached the conclusion that my best SEO strategy was PR because it just seemed to work.  Now, I think this may apply to many more (all?) companies and point to a merger between PR and SEO in the near future.

Steve Rubel and Katrina French (by way of Jason Falls’s blog) got me thinking about my experience and that, thanks to Google, SEO and PR are ultimately becoming the same activity.  Same strategies, same tactics, same metrics.  Steve writes, “Google Page Rank is the ultimate way to measure online influence“, and Katrina says, “search and social are…intrinsically linked.”

So if you believe that the goal of PR is to get influencers to bring attention to your client or company, and Google PageRank is the ultimate measure of influence (and since we know that PageRank flows from one party to another vis-a-vis links), then a central goal of PR should be to acquire valuable, PageRank-passing links.

If you apply this to social media (which traditional PR agencies are now beginning to seriously engage), as Katrina points out, all these things that we’re doing in social media– building relationships, participating in conversations– all ultimately relate to search.  What’s search driven by? PageRank. Which goes back to links.  So this is all a big PR strategy.

I predict that we’re about to see a merger between two fields that couldn’t be more different.  Public Relations pros are (and I’ll generalize gratiutiously) some of the smoothest and nicest people you could meet– they are fantastic at building relationships.  SEO’s are, to put it nicely (and I count myself among them), usually geeks and hackers who have been toiling away in ways only alchemists would appreciate.

Lately, SEO’s have been talking about the fact that 75% of what moves the search results needle are off-page factors, and highest among them is link-building.  Yet the old methods are starting to falter — nowadays it’s about linkbait, better link pitches, press release optimization, and social media engagement.  And that pushes us toward doing things the old-fashioned way with human relationships.  You simply cannot expect to pitch bloggers, promote linkbait, ask webmasters for links, propose link-positive content partnerships, comment for dofollow links, promote your content on Twitter, etc. without quality relationships.  As Chris Brogan suggest, get to know people first, then ask.

For a lot of SEO’s, the prospect of our jobs relying on relationship-building is a little scary, which is why the merger with PR is inevitable.  PR people’s skills are simply too relevant and valuable to this process.  For PR, the Google PageRank paradigm is simply too dominant a measure of influence for clients not to expect their agencies to direct their efforts to improve it.  So look out, these two industries are about to merge.  It should be fun!

Updates/Comments

#1 Response to the argument that PageRank isn’t the best influence measure.

A few folks have argued that PageRank is not the best measure of influence for a variety of reasons.  Let me make a distinction– I care about measuring my influence in terms of the PageRank that I acquire– not particularly the nominal PageRank of influencers who link to me.  You can’t go around evaluating every prospective influencer by the PageRank stamped on their head.  However, your PageRank is a valid measure of your online influence compared to your competitors (which is ultimately what matters in the search results).

#2 Response to the argument that nominal PageRank is inaccurate.

I don’t want anyone to be confused that I’m saying they should focus on the nominal PageRank that’s displayed in the toolbar.  It’s a subtle distinction, but somewhere in the Google universe there exists a very precise, up-to-date calculated value of PageRank which I’ll call “true PageRank” that is factored into your position in search results.  For stats folks, the “true PageRank” is like the true regression line.  It exists in theory, but we can only see it via estimation, which contains error. Anyway, the point is that we should be focusing on activities that drive up our “true PageRank,” and evaluating how we spend our time and resources in light of it.

There are lots of strategies for building backlinks to your site and let’s face it, they’re all hard (except for the ones that are ‘banned’)– linkbait, competitor backlink mining + begging, crazy n-way reciprocal linking, paid links, content syndication, etc.

But there’s a little-known strategy many user-generated content sites could take advantage of: creating reports for reporters.  The goal is to create information tools that help reporters get data from your site and make it really easy for them to cite you and link to you (without ever having to call you).

In a way, it’s like the old PR strategy of listing yourself as an expert on Profnet, and then hoping that when a reporter needs a quote, they’ll call you.  More modern examples include Google Trends and Google Zeitgeist.  Trulia, Zillow, and Hotpads all offer heatmaps.  And at my old site, ApartmentRatings.com, we created average apartment rental pricing charts by MSA.

The benefits of this approach are:

1. your website can get cited and linked even if a reporter doesn’t have time to interview you,
2. you can exert some control over the content, making it necessary for the reporter to link back to it,
3. this tactic tends to generate increasing links over time (which is sort of the opposite of how a linkbaiting campaign works)
4. and of course there’s the brand benefit of being seen as a go-to source and leader in your industry.

What should you build? Charts, tables, statistics, snapshots, trends… something interesting, based on the largest  sample set you can muster, and if possible, geographically-segmented (since local reporters are more interested in trends in their city and/or state).  Obviously your opportunities here will depend a lot on your website’s actual data, legal restrictions, your creativity, and your dev resrouces, but here are a few ideas:

• What are your users searching for? Offer reports showing search trends.
• Collecting leads? Offer reports showing buyer trends.
• Aggregating data from multiple sources? Offer a report averaging the data and highlighting trends.

Once you set up reports, your data should automatically update over time.  And of course, you should think about it from the perspective of a reporter- is your information quotable, do your graphs look nice enough to reprint, are the trends easy to understand, is it clear how the data was gathered and how many data points are represented, do you provide access to the underlying data so the reporter can give the data to their art department, can they embed your charts on another site (and if so, is your HTML setup to properly give you a text link back), if a reporter has a question is there an email or phone number readily available.

I’m just back from SMX Advanced in Seattle, which was a great conference all about search marketing.  My personal interest was the organic search tract, which covers many methods we used to build ApartmentRatings.com.  And within organic search, the main attraction was link-building especially from a PR and social media perspective. 

I picked up a number of great ideas, and here’s an easy and quick one any entrepreneur can do right now: use Google date search to find your competitors’ newest links (especially on blogs and forums), then jump in and comment.  I call this jujitsu because you use your competitor’s successful marketing efforts against them. 

The key to this strategy is finding blog and forum discussion opportunities quickly and getting involved while the topics are hot.  When you comment, always include your signature with a link back to yourself.

Here’s how to do it: 

1. Go to Google, click Advanced Search, then in the field called “this exact word or phrase” enter a competitor’s domain name with quotes (e.g. “lawyers.com”)
2. In the field, “Search within a site or domain:” enter “lawyers.com”.
3. Click on the line marked “Date, usage rights, numeric range, and more” and choose “past 24 hours.” 
4. Now click the “Advanced Search” button to search. 
5. As a final step: in the search box, change the search from

   “lawyers.com” site:lawyers.com to
   “lawyers.com” -site:lawyers.com

   That tells Google to exclude any pages from your competitor’s own site and only shows other sites that link to your competitor.   You might also search for pages with include the word “Comment,” which is a good marker for pages that invite user comments, like this:

   “lawyers.com” -site:lawyers.com comments

Now you’re set to find some opportunities to participate in timely, relevant discussions.  This technique may also yield some reporters and webmasters who you can contact to pitch your site.

I’m a recently-exited entrepreneur and I have a few things to say about getting PR for startups.

My background: I co-founded ApartmentRatings.com in 2000, built the site to over 100 million page views per year, and sold it last year (after seven years) to a fairly large Internet company from LA. In
the process, we never spent a dollar on PPC advertising or PR agencies, and we bootstrapped all the way.

My goal is tell other entrepreneurs and marketing people, and basically anyone who’s trying to figure out a way to get their product or service to take off, about our mistakes and what worked for us.

This first post was inspired by two things: Jason Calcanis’ post about ideas to help startups save money and a SXSW session called startup metrics for pirates. Yarr. (Ok, that’s it for my pirate schtick.)

One of the items on Jason’s list is, “Really think about if you need that $15,000 a month PR firm.” Fred Wilson and Mark Cuban agreed.

ApartmentRatings.com never had a PR agency and we got full page stories in the NY Times and Washington Post, A1 in the Wall Street Journal, an NPR interview, and write-ups in dozens of blogs like SearchEngineWatch and other major market daily papers.

With the press, we attracted a lot of good traffic (and clippings my parents could show their friends), but the thing that was more important to me was that we got lots of valuable organic links from highly reputed sites. I basically viewed PR as a form of SEO strategy. I strongly feel that PR is the most potent SEO
strategy on the planet because there are fewer more credible sources than newspapers and a good blog post from even a long-tail blog often gets picked up by A-listers and mainstream media.

This blog is going to go in some depth on how we did it, but here’s my first suggestion:

Don’t buy a media list from Bacon’s or Vocus; build it yourself with Google Alerts.

Go to Google Alerts and create some searches that will surface reporters you’d care about (and more importantly who might care about you). You can search competitor names, related companies, or basically anything you think would be in stories written by reporters who might cover you. If you do this right, you
should get 10+ stories a day in your Inbox that will be written by reporters who are covering your space. They are your media list.

Make a Spreadsheet to Store Reporters Addresses

Make a list in Excel with the reporter’s name, email and phone, and some notes about what they wrote, and start building your list. Many major papers put the reporter’s email address somewhere on their stories, so the easiest thing is to just copy it off the story. This is also true of phone numbers. If that doesn’t work, I’d visit a publication’s “Contact Us” page to figure out what the email standard is for their newspaper. If that doesn’t work, you can always guess that it’s either first.last@domainname.com or flast@domainname.com. I know it sounds like a time consuming pain-in-the-arse, but you gotta do what you gotta do. This is “pirate” PR my friends… do what works. A little bit easier is the phone number… you can often get the main number
for the publication by Googling “Publication name, city, state” and if that doesn’t work, look it up from
their DNS records.

So that’s your first lesson in pirate PR. Build a media list based on what reporters are actually writing (not by the categories that Bacons or Vocus have encoded to them), and lookup reporters email and phone numbers for free.