[Build Backlinks Online] An Introduction to PR Strategy for SEOs

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Inc.
In case you missed it, Googleâs head of web spam, Matt Cutts, wrote this
on January 20: âOkay, Iâm calling it: if youâre using guest
blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop.â


Three days later, Jen Lopez of Moz responded with this excellent post on
âguest blogging with a purposeâ:


As with anything, you don't want to be out there trying willy-nilly to get
your posts on every blog for the sole purpose of building (probably bad) links.
It's important to have this tied to your business and marketing goals, as you
would with any other tactic. SEO is only one piece of the larger strategy, and
if you focus solely on writing posts for link building purposes, you're missing
out on a ton of other possibilities.


In Lopezâs post, I commented in some detail that âguest
postsâ are really just another name for what the public relations industry
calls âby-lined articlesâ and that the goals of the two should be
identical. In response later in that thread, Lopez and Everett Sizemore invited
me to elaborate on the âPR side of SEOâ in a detailed Moz post.


Well, letâs get to it!

Marketers, Assemble!



(photo courtesy of Marvel Studios)


First, letâs set the record straight.


As Iâve written elsewhere while using âThe Avengersâ as an
example (Joss Whedon fans, unite!), "SEO" is actually just a slang term for a
collection of best practices -- it is doing web development well, content
creation well, social media well, PR well, and so on. This is why successful
SEO, and digital marketing in general, necessitates that companies
âassembleâ a holistic, integrated team with expertise in numerous
disciplines. And that includes public relations.


Rand Fishkin once tweeted a similar sentiment:




Here, Iâll cover how PR relates to content and linkbuilding.

PR By Any Other Nameâ

I can already hear the groans: âBut, wait! Iâm not a PR flak!
Iâm an inbound marketer!â I completely understand â as a
former journalist, who only later went into SEO, I specifically had been looking
for something in marketing that was not PR. But the fact remains that much of
inbound marketing is just PR by another name:

Are you interacting with influencers, journalists, and bloggers on Twitter?
Sure, you can call yourself a âsocial-media marketerâ â but
you are really doing PR
Are you pitching guest posts by-lined articles to news outlets and other
online publications? It is not âguest post marketingâ â it is
PR.
Are you e-mailing people in the hopes of getting links, mentions, or anything
similar? Itâs often called âe-mail outreachâ today, but it is
just doing PR via a specific communications channel

It took me a long time to accept the fact that a lot of what we do as
âSEOsâ is actually, well, PR. But the sooner that we accept that
fact and throw away our preconceived notions about PR, the sooner that we can
start to learn, adopt and benefit from its best practices.


Hereâs the kicker: Technologies and communications channels change, but
people do not. Publicists, for example, may contact reporters with Twitter more
than the telephone today â but it is still one human being talking with
another human being. And PR experts know how to work with people. Social media
is often just a communications channel â and not a discipline unto itself
â that can be used by PR professionals, customer-service representatives,
lead generators, and more.

The Basics of PR Strategy

There are many types of PR. But since the idea for this post was born out of a
discussion on guest posts, I will discuss PR strategy here specifically on
pitching content and story ideas to journalists and bloggers. This is a brief
summary of some of the ways that The Cline Group works with our PR clients
â and the resulting âhitsâ (in PR-speak) give them the added
bonus of gaining quality, natural links and social media exposure as well!


The first thing to understand is that public relations is an art, not a
science. There are specific, defined ways to create XML sitemaps, ensure that
Google can crawl and index a website, avoid duplicate-content issues, reduce
page-load time, and more. PR methods, however, can vary as drastically as the
number of people using them.


Here, I will present the overall strategy that The Cline Group uses in our
public-relations work. This strategic, step-by-step process delivers the best
results.

1. Goal Identification

PR is not an end. It is a means to an end. The goal is not to âget
coverageâ â the goal is to get coverage that supports a
companyâs overall business and marketing goals. Here are some examples of
our PR clientsâ goals:

We want to gain VC funding or to exit by selling
We want to maximize downloads of our mobile application
We want to gain more leads who will become users of our B2B software
We want to build our brand through authoritative content

It is useless to create a PR strategy without first having a clear sense of
the objective.

2. Target Market Identification

The PR team must then research and compile a list of the general targeted
audiences based on the goals that the client established. Here are some for the
above examples:

Investment: Angel investors, start-up founders, corporate VC funds
Mobile Downloads: People who would be interested in a mobile app (of the given
type)
B2B Leads: The business owners, executives, and managers who would be
interested in the solutions that the B2B software provides
Content: The people who would be interested in the information that the
content communicates
3. Messaging and Positioning

Once the goals are determined and the target markets are identified, then the
PR team can determine the positioning (how will you brand the
company/individual/product/content to the target markets) and messaging (what
text, images, and more will you use to communicate the positioning).


Take one of our mobile-app clients, MediSafe Project. Which of the following
pitches do you think would be more likely to interest reporters, and, in the
end, their readers?

âMediSafe reminds people to take their medication.â
âA year and a half ago, Bob Shorâs diabetic dad asked him if he
had seen his dad take his insulin. Bobâs answer, âNo, I didnât
see you take your medsâ was interpreted by his father as âNo, you
havenât taken them.â His dad overdosed that day, which Bob says was
the reason he and his brother Rotem created MediSafe, a collaborative app that
helps keep track of long-term medication.â

The second example is the opening paragraph of a Cult of Mac article. That
coverage came from positioning MediSafe as a personal story rather than as just
another random app.

4. Media List Creation

The next step is to compile a list of the outlets â and the
most-appropriate writers at those outlets â that are read by the
identified target audiences. The importance of this phase of the process cannot
be emphasized enough.


An ideal media list should usually be comprised of publications that have all
of the following (in both PR and digital contexts):

The publications that are read by the target audience
The specific writers at those outlets that will likely be most interested in
what you are pitching
Publications with large readerships
Outlets (and writers) with large social-media followings
Publications whose online sites have high Domain Authority

When compiling media lists, remember that time is a limited resource. There
are only so many hours that a PR team can devote to a campaign. At one extreme,
they could send the same, generic press release to thousands of outlets via a
wire service and just hope for the best. At the other extreme, they could focus
all of their efforts on a single reporter at a single outlet that is highly
desired. A simplistic example: Say a PR executive has one hour of pitching time
â should he or she spend one hour on one outlet or five minutes each on
twelve outlets? Usually, you want to be somewhere in the middle.

5. Press Release Development and Pitching

The final stage is to craft the actual pitches and press releases. Sometimes
the same press release can be used. Other times, it is best to create
individualized, tailored releases for each type of outlet or each specific
reporter. It just depends on the context.


One example of online pitching will be discussed in the next section.


A good PR strategy can lead to great SEO results such as this outcome from one
single campaign for iOnRoad, a mobile app that was later bought by Harman
International following our work (the PowerPoint slide originally contained an
animated GIF of Hugh Laurie â a.k.a. Dr. House â from back in his
British comedy TV days):




This one campaign netted 591 quality links from 253 authoritative domains
â and a lot more.


Whether digital marketers are promoting a company, a product, or a piece of
content, those who use this general strategy will be many steps ahead of the
competition. Sizemore once summarized the importance with the following
statement in this essay of his:


If I had to choose between your average link builder and an expert PR
professional who knew how to approach and interact with media outlets and
presented well on camera, Iâd go for the public relations person any day
of the week.

Twitter's a PR Gold Mine

Twitter specifically is an invaluable tool for PR pitching â but it must
be used strategically and wisely in this context.


My colleague Scott Piro, our EMEA Managing Director and Chief Strategy
Officer, has written a guide to using Twitter for media relations. I highly
suggest that Mozzers read his essay for more details (not that Iâm
biased!), but I will summarize some of his points here:

Many busy reporters do not answer their phones and receive countless e-mails,
but they do pay attention to Twitter
Writers will often say in their Twitter bios whether they want (or do not
want) to be tweeted with pitches
Twitter is public, so do not give away too many details of an exclusive story
â switch to e-mail or the phone as soon as possible
Link to a press release somewhere online (on a company website or on a wire
service)
Know your audience and when to be more formal and when to be more friendly

Piro also gives two general examples of Twitter pitches:

The Benign Intro: @journalist Do you accept story pitches? If yes, whatâs
the best way to send you one? THX
The FYI: @journalist I emailed a story idea to your [media outlet name]
address. Hope u can take a look; I think itâs rly a good fit
PR: The Old and New Off-Page SEO

Iâd like to close this post with the rest of my comment on Lopezâs
earlier Moz essay:


When I was a journalist, the point of submitting freelance articles or op-ed
articles was to publish a piece of quality content to build your "brand" (as a
writer or pundit). It was not primarily to get links (especially when links did
not exist before the public Internet). In PR, companies submit what are called
"by-lined articles" to build a brand and raise awareness of your company among
the readers of a certain publication. (If you sell widgets, then you want
exposure in a media outlet that is read by people who buy widgets.) It is not
primarily to get links. Today, it's called "guest posts."


The same is true today. When my company gets articles in specific, targeted
media outlets for clients, the point is first to build a brand and second to get
referral traffic (and hopefully leads or sales) via a link in the author's
biography or elsewhere. No-follow or not, it didn't matterâ


I now advocate that no one do anything with the primary purpose of "getting
links." Do the great content, promote it on social media, and the links will
come naturally, indirectly, and organically. You are earning them and not
building them. One of these links are worth ten of the others.


Example: My agency gets a client a great by-line article in a great outlet.
The article may contain a (do-follow or not) backlink or not. But it doesn't
matter -- the exposure is what matters. Then, the readers will see the content
and perhaps write about the company on their own blogs with links. It snowballs
from there. But in the end, it's not directly about the links. As long as a
company does all of the "SEO" best-practices, the good links will come
themselves over time.


I would submit that this is what Google still likes. It is "guest posting" for
reasons other than links. The same is true for press releases -- you distribute
news releases to get coverage, not links. The links will then come later.


It all comes down to what Iâve called the âPR-based SEO
processâ:




The idea can be summarized as such:

Do something newsworthy
Create newsworthy content based on what has been done
Promote the company and content
Repeat as often as possible

Linkbuilders often ask themselves: âWhy would this website want to link
to us?â Reporters ask a related question (at least to themselves):
âI get dozens of pitches a day â why should I write about
you?â

If you can answer this question, youâve got a great head start. As I
wrote in the linked post above:


What can a company do that would interest journalists? The possibilities are
limited only by the imagination â release a new product, hire a big-name
executive, conduct an authoritative analysis of the state of the industry, and
so on. Then, create quality, engaging content in the context of the action
â a blog post, an infographic, a press release, a video, a podcast, and so
on.


The next step is crucial: use traditional public relations to promote the
companyâs news â and use online PR and social media to promote the
content created for the news to obtain backlinks, citations, and social-media
mentions. This practice will yield far better online PR results than just
stuffing backlinks into meaningless press releases.


Hereâs the secret: Reporters want to write about you. Years ago, space
in a newspaper and minutes in a broadcast were limited. Journalists could be
picky. Today, however, they know as well as we do that âcontent is
kingâ and the way to maximize traffic and (for their purposes) advertising
revenue. Writers are under constant pressure to write and write and write since
websites can support an almost-infinite amount of content.


So, it can be easier to convince them. Just give them a nudge through the
strategies that weâve presented here.


For more details on SEO and public relations, I invite you to see my SMX Milan
2013 presentation and notes. I will also speak on a similar subject at SMX West
in March 2014. I hope to see you there!
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