The following stats should be of interest to anybody who is in the market for selling (or buying) online PR services:
1. The term “online PR” is searched for around 266 times per day in the UK.
2. The top ranked UK site for the term “online PR” can expect to receive around 111 click throughs as a result of these searches (according to Google, the top ranked page for a term via organic search can expect to receive click throughs on average equivalent to 42pc of the total number of searches)
3. The SEO value of these click throughs to the top ranked site is around £150 per day (ie given that the CPC for “online PR” is roughly £1.35 for a number one ranked advertiser, the top organically ranked site is thus gaining around £150 in Adword equivalent spend).
5. The probability that someone searching on the term “online PR” is actually looking to buy online PR services is 0.56 (in other words, just over half the people searching on the term are looking to buy. The rest are informational browsers).
In case you were wondering, here are the top 10 ranked pages for “online PR” in the UK at the moment
2. http://www.bigmouthmedia.com/products_services/online-pr/
3. http://onlinemediarelations.co.uk/
4. http://www.toprankblog.com/2006/04/tips-for-online-pr/
5. http://www.immediatefuture.co.uk/
6. http://www.clickintopr.com/
7. http://www.davechaffey.com/blog/seo/online-pr-campaign-best-practice/
8. http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/story592.html
9. http://www.9xb.com/online_pr
Although no one knows the exact nature as to how Google ranks pages, there clearly are a variety of factors that contribute towards Google’s evaluation. Anyone who has taken an interest in SEO knows that there is a checklist of things that are believed to contribute such as number and quality of back links, domain age, use of keywords in URL, frequency of content update, page title, header tags, etc. And it is now possible to analyse these things in minutes rather than take days or weeks using a hotch potch of disparate tools.
Click here for a full, detailed speadsheet with an analysis of the top 10 ranked sites. It makes for interesting reading. Take for example, the Bigmouth Media page. It has achieved a very high SERP ranking on the term “online PR” in a relatively short space of time – in terms of backlinks, it has comparatively few – a mere 85 as opposed to Immediate Future’s 22,400 or Online PR’s 5,010 (it also shows that the Page Rank quality of the back links does play a part too). However, it ticks all the boxes for on page optimisation ie “online PR” appears in the page title, URL, header tags, meta tags, etc. It also has a Yahoo directory listing. Curiously, the 9XB page makes the top 10 with no page rank and no back links. But it does include the term in the page title.
Fairly obviously, if you could tick the boxes in every element, your chances of a high SERP spot are good. And given the value that accrues to the page gaining the number one organic spot (unlike gaining number one spot in terms of Adword position), you can see the importance of ensuring you’ve done as much as you can with the things under your control eg page titles.
Of course, this is only one keyword term. But you can see the benefit of this kind of analysis – and how it can be used to ensure a properly informed approach to online PR and content generation generally.
Anyone who wants further analysis (or would like escherman to carry out an in-depth analysis of their own market sector) are welcome to get in touch – just drop me an e-mail or call 020 8334 8095.
One reply on “Five key online PR statistics for the UK (and why certain pages rank better than others)”
Really well put. Often our clients are not aware of the repercussions of lax email ethics when they INSIST that we reach out all the time.