August 25, 2016
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The world of public relations has made significant shifts in the past decade. As the world becomes an increasingly digital place PR firms must adapt and embrace digital PR or they will become increasingly irrelevant.
Unfortunately, many traditionalists underestimate the significance of this shift. They will be left behind.
In the spirit of garnering as much attention as possible for your clients, search engine optimization (SEO) cannot be ignored. Below are three SEO mistakes to avoid.
1. Keyword Optimization – Take a look at almost any website and you may quickly find that it is not fully taking advantage of proper keyword use. Search engines need to be able to understand what websites are about so that they can index and rank them accordingly. This doesn’t mean you should stuff a handful of keywords anywhere you can. It means doing a little research and looking at the variety of ways people search for what you offer. For example, if someone is looking for a law firm to represent them after a car accident they may search for “car accident law firm”, “car accident attorney”, “car accident lawyer”, “auto accident attorney”, and the list goes on. Using a simple tool like Google Trends (example below) can help you identify opportunities and help ensure you capture the most popular terms but a good firm will use a variety of tools to make decisions on which keywords should be targeted. Once you’ve identified the proper keywords, integrate them into the places search engines weigh most heavily, such as your title tags, meta description tags, h1 tags, and body copy.
2. Link Building – Let’s be honest. Good link building is hard work. It can take a lot of time and be tedious to manage. This is precisely why most are not doing it. But the SEO community is united in the consensus that the number and quality of inbound links to a website is one of the most important factors when Google determines how highly that website should rank. What’s one of the best way to get a large number of natural inbound links to your website from credible websites with high domain authority? Earning press coverage!
A good PR firm will assist in getting online placements on authoritative news and informational websites. Some more advanced and contemporary link building activity includes using brand monitoring tools to find mentions of your company, product, or service online and then manually reaching out to the website to provide a link. Regardless of how you decide to build links to your website link building should be an ongoing effort. In the world of link building, slow and steady wins the race.
3. Content Production – If you truly want to garner a lot of traffic from those performing searches online you will need a lot of content. Content is how Google determines what your website is about and what phrases it should rank for. Make sure you use the keyword optimization information above when posting each article. Once your content production engine is running find creative ways to repurpose that content for social posts, newsletter content, podcasts, guest blog posting, and so on. With some slight modifications you can even take content that has been produced over time and assemble it into an e-book available for download as a way to capture leads.