PR and the Web: New strategies achieve higher rankings on search engines

published 2006

Many companies* and their marketing partners are failing to attract the traffic they expect to their web sites. Often this is because they fail to understand that before you can impress someone with an artistically creative web site, the site itself has to be found.

If your organisation is well known those you want to reach will likely type your URL into their computer and find you. But if you are in this position you are in the minority as most consumers use search phrases as their first step to finding a service or product providers. (In fact one survey claims over 90% of web users use a search engine every time they log onto the web, while it is also claimed that 70 percent of first-time visitors to a web site, find it through a search engine).

In short they don’t have a preferred organisation or product in mind - and will be guided by those who appear on the search engine page.

How you ensure your organisation, product or service ranks high on the search engine listings is fast becoming a specialist area of marketing - online or web marketing. Within this is a technique called search engine optimisation.

Today too many companies are still placing their web sites in the hands of people who have little or no understanding of who are searching for them or how to make themselves easy for these people to find. 

They often spend most of their budget on design.  They don’t recognise that online or web marketing is a specialist skill.  And their web site implementers probably have little idea what search engine optimisation is all about.

Additionally, many companies are captive to their IT departments that have considerable technical skills in building- and maintaining- sites, but don’t understand how to appeal to search engines. 

If you recognise that web search engines - Google in particular - offer more potential to attract customers, investors or others than other marketing channels - then you may need to undergo a paradigm shift. As search engines are constantly changing their search results ranking formula, it's possible that everything you have been told about getting a high ranking is out of date or incorrect.

For example, did you know that including an impressive graphic flash device as the sole device on your home page will almost certainly ensure that you don’t get ranked - because search engines can’t read flash files!

The key to being smarter than your competitor about strategic use of the web, and how to use it to increase business, is to see the web and search engines as something you earn the right to be listed on.

1. The world wide web is egalitarian. Status means nothing - it gives you no advantage. Your ranking in the generic search list can’t be bought. The smallest organisation can often get a higher ranking on Google than a multinational. Likewise the biggest organisations can often fail dismally - much to their chagrin. It’s all about RELEVANCE.
      
   Think of the web as a modern newspaper.  To get on the front page of the newspaper you have to create news that the editor believes its readers will be interested to read. The web is the same - it ranks items in what it perceives as the most interesting and relevant to those searching under that subject heading.
   
   

   There are special ways to get your organisation in the mainstream news - you need to know how the media judges what is and what is not news, how to write articles and releases so that they appeal, and you need to know all about deadlines and the special requirements of each branch of the media that will make your story appealing to each of them.

   It’s the same with the web. To be ranked highly you have to know how search engines work, what they are looking for, and how to prepare material that will be effective and appealing.

2. That’s why CONTENT is now becoming the key to search engine optimisation.

   It’s likely that you’ve been told ‘code’ is the secret - that your site has to have embedded programming codes all through it to increase your appeal to search engines. That’s why your IT people insist on playing such a role in the development of the site.
   
   However, whilst code is a factor, and links are important too, covering these areas without relevant content will not achieve what you want.
   
   The reality is that as the web explodes in size, all the clever coding by various sites can actually cancel each other out. Also search engines are constantly evolving and they are increasingly disregarding - and even penalising - sites that are using coding techniques and other artificial means to make themselves seem more appealing.
   
   To a large degree, the answer lies in the content of your site rather than the site’s creativity. But, as with any other channel, content has to be tailored for the web and, just as with copy for a magazine or newspaper, it has to be written in ways that will make it stand out and be easily identified and accessed.

_{^{* In 2005, Oneupweb completed its third study of America’s 100 largest companies, as ranked by FORTUNE Magazine and reported that only 13 FORTUNE 100 corporate sites were well search optimized. In 2004 the figure was only nine!}}

Where then is the role of PR professionals in this new communication channel?

PR’s role is to complement the work of the IT department and graphic design studio by:

1. Identifying the sectors - or topics - that an organisation wants to be associated with on the web and linking these with the actuality of the web. This often involves considerable research.
   
2. Developing content for the website that will make it relevant to search engines (sometimes this involves some changes to the structure of a site).
   
3. Instituting methodologies that will ‘market’ the web site to the appropriate search engines.
   
4. Monitoring hits to the website and the success of the campaign (many sites need to have a traffic reporting system included).

Public relations people provide the knowledge and expertise to obtain coverage for organisations in the media. As the web evolves - and the competition for rankings increases - public relations people are becoming the ones to turn to when search engine rankings become important.

Note: The author of this article is a Sydney based senior independent corporate PR consultant who works exclusively with PR Managers helping them withmanagement of the PR Department or their relationship with their PR agency. In addition he provides specialist corporate PR and communications advice where issues or change are impacting on an organisation. He also blogs regularly on PR and communications topics similar to those in this article.