The main driver for change is obviously Google’s series of algorithm updates.  These have downgraded the rankings of sites with poor and duplicate content and spammy links – while boosting visibility for those with unique, well crafted information and links from high authority sites such as publications (both of which could be argued to be the preserve of PR people).

But while Google’s updates are an opportunity for PR companies to attract new work, for SEO agencies they are a direct attack on what they are doing to support current clients ie their bread and butter.  They need to adapt in order to retain clients’ rankings and survive; which is why they have a much bigger incentive to add PR techniques to their offering.  And probably why I’ve come across a number of search agencies who’ve recruited PR people and copywriters in recent months.

To be clear, many search agencies have always used PR techniques to help with link-building. Now they’re investing more in the area and getting in position to challenge PR firms.

Image credit:  Sean MacEntee via FlickR creative commons

This is all about improving searches by highlighting articles and content by credible, trusted journalists and bloggers. And research by Searchmetrics (our client) reveals that at least one author profile snippet is displayed in the top 100 results in over 13 per cent of UK searches.

So here’s my list of 10 key things PRs need to know about the author markup trend:

1)  As a PR if you have a client who’s already a recognisd authority in his/her field, then having their profile pic appear in searches will draw more attention by highlighting that a blog or article is their handiwork.

2)  If your client is not well known – but wants to be – then having their profile appear in searches will help to build their profile.

3)  When images appear in searches, generally they attract more clickthroughs, so more people will view the content with an author profile entry.

4)  If you – as a PR – manage to get your clients’ news and information written up by  authors/journalists who have author profile entries next to their content, then these articles’ll be more visible in searches.

5)  If you run a blog for a client, then getting well known guest authors to write for it could mean their posts will appear with author profile images in searches – you can get even more visibility and traffic to the blog!

6)  To have a chance of driving author profile entries, writers need to be on Google Plus and to link their articles to their Google Plus profiles (see instructions from Google here).

7)  Author markup is another example of the growing importance of Google Plus and another reason why you and your clients should be on there.

8)  Interestingly, in Searchmetrics’ analysis, US focused authors are more frequently getting author profile entries displayed in Google UK searches. Perhaps because UK journalists, writers and bloggers have been slow to get on GooglePlus.

9)  Good news for technology PRs; tech authors are one category of writer that are getting frequent  author profile entries  in UK searches according to the Searchmetrics data. UK writers in the top 20 most frequently displayed in this way include Charles Arthur, the Guardian’s technology editor, and Edward Chester, reviews editor at TrustedReviews.com.

10)  Of course author profile entries aren’t the silver bullet answer to getting your content and your clients’ content visible in searches. You still need to be doing the SEO stuff to help it rank well for the right keywords.

By the way, if you want to know more about Searchmetrics’ study, it’s been written up by Econsultancy and Journalism.co.uk.

One of the interviewees makes the point nicely when he says “Power has tipped in favour of the Geeks” and these days PRs and marketers need to be able to speak their language.

PR people can easily find themselves working with SEOs, web designers and app builders and you can communicate much more confidently if you’re able to get in touch with your inner geek.

I started working in public relations agencies in the last century – well before digital PR and marketing were born. But I was lucky enough to stumble upon a job in technology PR (which I didn’t think was hugely sexy at the time).  Now I’m glad, as it’s meant I’ve been forced to keep geekified. 

My coding ability is limited to useful bits of HTML which can help when I’m trying to do something clever in a blog or to address an SEO issue, but it’s definitely helpful. Now I’m considering investing some time in developing this further. Anyone else?

Image credit: Flickr Creative Commons duda C

Many clients keep social media channels separate to their PR, but I think these findings support the argument that you should involve your PR company in your social media effort.  After all, PRs are the people you are paying to help you build relationships with journalists. 

When it comes to Twitter, for instance, your PR agency can help you build a target list of journalists and other influencers you should be following; provide suggestions about retweets and - in some cases - handle some of the tweeting jointly with your in-house team.

 The research also highlights that the majority (63 per cent) of journalists in the sample welcome PR pitches via Twitter – 52 per cent via LinkedIn and 41 per cent via Google+.  I wanted to add that, in addition to using social channels to proactively pitch to journalists,  PRs need to keep an eye out for journalists and bloggers who now often ask their Twitter and LinkedIn followers for input as part of the research for their articles.

So on that basis at least Google+ growth is showing some good momentum. 

The figures come from a study by Searchmetrics, which also found that FT.com had the biggest number of followers (ie people who had the FT’s Google+ page in their circles), but Daily Mail and Telegraph web sites had the most +1 recommendations for articles on their sites (a +1 is similar to a Facebook Like – an endorsement/recommendation  for a web page).

The most frequently +1’d article for Dailymail.co.uk was a story about how the majority of runway models meet the Body Mass Index (BMI) criteria for anorexia, which had been shared 837 times.  The Telegraph.co.uk’s most frequently +1’d article was a news story about an EU ban which prevents water brands from claiming that water prevents dehydration (1110), and the Guardian.co.uk achieved 1,142 +1s for a story about the crackdown on Occupy. 

So the stories that Google+ users are engaging with indicate – as this Econsultancy article points out – that stereotypes about reader profiles and interests for the various newspapers still apply online.

For the record, here is the data which was put out by Searchmetrics:

UK National Newspapers sites and Google+ visibility (19 March 2012) 

Wrong.  If you put valuable content on your blog and get a good PR company to drum up interest, it’s a great way of raising your company profile.

Take the blog managed by our client, search and social analytics company, Searchmetrics. We’ve run PR and social media activity to promote content on the this blog which has greatly enhanced Searchmetrics’ visibility among target audiences (even if we do say so ourselves).

In one campaign, a study published on the blog was featured on the BBC News web site and the Guardian technology blog, as well as top UK marketing media, including Marketing, Marketing Week, Utalkmarketing and Econsultancy.  Technology media that covered the story included The Inquirer, PC Pro, V3.co.uk, Computer Shopper and Web User.

The campaign produced dozens of mentions on SEO blogs and many hundreds of twitter mentions, as well as comments and links back to the  original post.   The PR exposure helped spread the message both nationally and internationally, with French national newspapers Le Monde and Les Echos also covering the story.

There was a dramatic lift in UK awareness and credibility for Searchmetrics. Traffic to the web site increased substantially, with many thousands of  visits to the publicised study on the blog.  20+  sales inquiries came in on the first day, with a significant rise in incoming calls weeks afterwards.

The blog post in question features a study of the UK roll out of Google’s Panda update (which changed how some prominent UK web sites ranked in Google searches) last year. There was NO traditional press release for this PR/social media campaign – we (the PR company) simply alerted target media and prominent bloggers of the content on the Searchmetrics blog. You can see the actual blog post here.

So there it is.  Proof – if you needed it – that there’s plenty of life left in the corporate blog..

 Phot credit: Kristina B

PR and SEO are getting closer together, with many SEO pros using PR techniques to support organic search campaigns. This is especially true in linkbuilding – where getting a link back to your web page from prominent online publications and blogs can greatly help SEO.

My experience of PRs, however, is that they would very rarely – if ever – consider asking an editor for a link to be inserted along with content they’re providing for a story or feature.   Search specialists are a lot less shy about this, as I was informed by top search and social marketer, Lisa Myers (@LisaDMyers of Verve Search agency).  

While presenting an award winning SEO case study about one of her clients at the UK Search Awards conference last week, Lisa explained that her agency was very up front about asking for a link when submitting articles to  online editors and bloggers.  After the event, Lisa told me that she got very good results from being open and direct with editors when requesting links.  Many PRs are still not trained to recognise the value of links and even if they are, they feel uncomfortable about asking for them.  Is it that we think it will somehow damage the journalist relationship? Are we just too coy? 

I’d love too hear what journalists feel about being asked for a link…. 

But my feeling is that if PR companies don’t start to pull up their socks about the links issue, we’re going to be surpassed by smart SEOs.  Watch  out!

(Image credit: Profound Whatever)

While I agree that press release wire services are no substitute for sending tailored PR content to journalists and bloggers you know and engage with regularly, I believe they can and do provide added value in five ways: 

1.) They can generate news coverage in niche media or those you  might not regularly target
On numerous occasions I’ve seen  a wire  generate unexpected coverage in surprising places. These include niche websites or blogs and  publications based overseas… and titles I don’t regularly target because they are a bit…well…tangential for my clients. 

2.) They can help you reach target audiences directly
Any distribution/wire service worth its salt will have its content indexed by Google and the other search engines. So provided you have done your keyword research right, there’s a chance it will hit some of the target audiences you want to reach directly. I know this is true because of  the countless times I myself have ended up finding a useful press release hosted on a wire site when I have been researching a topic via search.

3.) They can trigger social media mentions   
Every time I put a release on a wire I notice that it generates some social media mentions – normally retweets on Twitter.  Many of the wire services include social media insertion as part of the package.  And on the odd occasion I have seen this lead to my stories being re-tweeted by ‘power tweeters’ with thousands of followers.   

4.) They can generate backlinks to help your SEO…possibly
Many press release wire services allow you to insert links (to pages on your own or your clients’ web sites or landing pages) within the press release.  The hope is that as the release gets published and republished in various places across the web, this generates  multiple back-links.  As the search engines use the number and quality of backlinks to determine how highly web pages should rank, then in theory the wire services should be able to help your SEO. This is not a cut and dried case however;  I’ve had some SEOs tell me that backlinks from newswires do convey some ‘link juice’ to help rankings, while others pooh- pooh them as a waste of time because they believe these poor quality links are useless .      

5.) They can sometimes provide a safety net
Your target media  is changing constantly, with new titles coming out, being acquired or closing.  Journalists move between titles, change their beats on the same titles, or go freelance.  It’s difficult for you as a PR to keep track of every change as soon as it’s happened.  So a wire service might just provide a little bit of extra insurance that your story will get in front of someone that you should be targeting but have missed.

(Image curtesy of  UWMadArchives http://flic.kr/p/aqEfGi)

Obviously visibility on social sites such as Facebook is important because it can potentially drive traffic.  But – with Google and Bing beginning to look at popularity on social networks as a factor when judging the quality of web pages and how they should be ranked  - it could also be playing a role in improving search visibility, and hence traffic.

So there’s a good case for news and other web sites building and monitoring social visibility.  And one way of tracking this is analysing how often their content is shared.  Our client, search and social analytics company, Searchmetrics , studied this recently for 12 UK newspaper sites, collating data about the total average weekly links shared on Facebook (shares, likes and comments), Twitter, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, Google+ and Delicious over a ten week period. Here’s what they found out:

 Average Social Links per Week of UK Newspaper Web sites

1. www.dailymail.co.uk  (2,908,779 links/week)

2. www.guardian.co.uk   (2,587,258 links/week)

3. www.telegraph.co.uk  (879,783 links/week)

4. www.independent.co.uk (617,148 links/week)

 5. www.thesun.co.uk  (195,311 links/week)

 6. www.ft.com (83,382 links/week)

 7. www.dailyrecord.co.uk (82,151 links/week)

 8. www.mirror.co.uk  (54,881 links/week)

 9.  www.heraldscotland.com (13,063 links/week)

 10. www.express.co.uk (9,600 links/week)

 11. www.dailystar.co.uk  (702 links/week)

 12. www.thetimes.co.uk  (256 links/week) 

So the Daily Mail and Guardian sites are most visible – unsurprisingly perhaps as the Mail is rating as one of the busiest UK newspaper web sites  and the Guardian is well known for its impressive social media strategy. Those sites with paywalls obviously tended to have fewer links shared.

Social spread analysis

Searchmetrics also looked at the ‘social spread’ of the top two sites ie how visible they are across the six social networks. They compared the total links generated on  different social sites over a six month period.  TheDailyMail.co.uk generated over half of its links (50.78 per cent) on StumbleUpon, with Facebook activity (likes, shares and comments) accounting for 45.87 per cent and links on Twitter 3.21 per cent.

For Guardian.co.uk, more than half (56.77 per cent) of the links came from Facebook, with StumbleUpon accounting for 31.35 per cent and Twitter 10.98 per cent.

Searchmetrics suggested thatbecause StumbleUpon is a very popular site globally, the large number of  links it generated for UK sites could have been generated throughout the world from English speakers who use it. 

Most frequently shared content

The most frequently shared content on Dailymail.co.uk was shown to be an article (with images) about the Japan earthquake which had been shared 392,521 times on the monitored social sites. Guardian.co.uk’s most frequently shared content was a cheeky quiz discussing quotes from Muammar Gaddafi and Charlie Sheen. 

Dailymail.co.uk’s top three most frequently shared articles

1.  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1365318/Japan-earthquake-tsunami-The-moment-mother-nature-engulfed-nation.html (392,521 links)

2. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2018020/Amy-Winehouse-dead–Found-dead-London-flat.html (253,561 links)

3. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2013870/Robber-broke-hair-salon-beaten-black-belt-owner-kept-sex-slave-days–fed-Viagra.html (252,650 links) 

Guardian.co.uk’s top three most frequently shared articles 

1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/quiz/2011/mar/01/muammar-gaddafi-charlie-sheen-quiz  (363,938 links) 

2. http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2011/jan/02/photography-detroit (210,468 links)

3. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks (187,987 links)

The data for this study was taken from the global social media database that Searchmetrics operates to power its online software tools.  This is a regularly updated store of data points related to web sites and their visibility on social networks. 

BTW, if you’d like to have a demo and trial of this software, let me know.

Searchmetrics also analysed the spread of social networks on which Dailymail.co.uk’s pages were shared over a six month period (see underneath), revealing that the site received over half of its links (50.78 per cent) on StumbleUpon, with Facebook activity (likes, shares and comments) accounting for 45.87 per cent and links on Twitter 3.21 per cent.

More than half (56.77 per cent) of Guardian.co.uk’s social links came from Facebook with StumbleUpon accounting for 31.35 per cent and Twitter 10.98 per cent according to the study.

Social Spread

“Some people we have shown this data to have been surprised at the volume of links generated for UK newspapers on the StumbleUpon social bookmarking site.  This is a very popular site globally and the links could have been generated throughout the world from English speakers who use StumbleUpon,” added Dr Joepen.   

The most frequently shared content on Dailymail.co.uk was shown to be an article (with images) about the Japan earthquake which had been shared 392,521 times on the monitored social sites. Guardian.co.uk’s most frequently shared content was a humorous quiz discussing quotes from Muammar Gaddafi and Charlie Sheen. 

Dailymail.co.uk’s top three most frequently shared articles

1. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1365318/Japan-earthquake-tsunami-The-moment-mother-nature-engulfed-nation.html (392,521 links)

1. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2018020/Amy-Winehouse-dead–Found-dead-London-flat.html (253,561 links)

1. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2013870/Robber-broke-hair-salon-beaten-black-belt-owner-kept-sex-slave-days–fed-Viagra.html (252,650 links)

Guardian.co.uk’s top three most frequently shared articles

1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/quiz/2011/mar/01/muammar-gaddafi-charlie-sheen-quiz  

(363,938 links)

1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2011/jan/02/photography-detroit

(210,468 links)

1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks

(187,987 links)