We believe today’s public relations programs must reflect a basic understanding of search engine optimization.
The connections between content, online presence and organic search traffic are too strong to ignore.
We were reminded of this dynamic during a check-in on one of our SEO experiments from over two years ago. When the Toyota recall and PR crisis spiked in 2010, we developed a digital property to experiment with repurposing content – I had penned several posts on the topic – and different SEO dials. It took only a couple of weeks for the site to show up on Google page one for searches on “Toyota PR crisis” and derivative phrases.
The site wasn’t pretty.
Algorithms don’t know ugly.
Here’s where things get interesting.
We haven’t touched the site in over a year. Yet, plug in the words Toyota PR crisis and our site sits in the No. 1 position above Reporter News, USA Today and The Guardian.
When we scrutinize the why behind the ranking, the technical techniques and backlinks take a secondary role.
This is all about content relevance.
It’s the tight alignment of keywords with the content that collectively delivers the positioning.
I’m surprised more companies – particularly B2B players where adding even a few hundred of the “right” visitors can make a difference – aren’t applying this technique to establish more digital doors into their main websites.
Sidenote: The human bot uncovered the following related posts:
If You Build It They Generally Won’t Come
There’s Enough Room In This Town for Both Storytelling and Keywords