Category: Digital marketing

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Digital marketing digital pr online pr tech pr Technology PR

Why poor backlink requests are like bad PR Pitches

The SEO vs PR debate continues to rumble on. However, on a very tactical level, it occurred to me that certain SEO practitioners are starting to emulate some of PR’s worst habits – specifically, the bad pitch. Or at least it’s SEO equivalent – the poor Backlink Request.

The key qualities they share are irrelevance and lack of personalisation.

Journalists hate getting mass-mailed irrelevant junk. And in a similar way, if you run a website or a blog (and let’s face it, that’s a lot of us these days), it is just as annoying to get spammy link requests.

I’ve yet to receive a carefully crafted and personalised request for a backlink that shows the person making the request understands what my blog or sites are all about. Or what real benefit might accrue.

It was thus interesting to see Stefan Hull from top SEO firm PropellerNet at the Social Media Marketing event back in June present a case study on the work they’d done to support the Westfield shopping centre in Shepherd’s Bush. A key part of the project was getting quality backlinks. And how did they go about this? By properly researching appropriate backlink properties and then making personalised approaches to try and get the link.

In other words, the kind of work that PRs have been doing for decades with journalists. Substitute editorial coverage for backlink and you get the idea.

This seems to me an eminently transferable skill – and at least for once this is something where PR can bring something new to the SEO party rather than the other way round. I realise some people might think getting a backlink doesn’t have same appeal as getting editorial coverage – but given that SEO firms seem to be better at making money than PR agencies, perhaps one can’t be too sniffy these days.

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Digital marketing digital pr online pr

Does the average UK Facebook user spend 24 hours per month on the site?

According to Hitwise, the average amount of time spent on Facebook by a Briton has decreased from 30 minutes in December 2009, to 27.36 minutes during June and July 2010.

According to Google, the average session time was 26.40 mins – not wildly dissimilar to Hitwise’s estimate. Perhaps even more interesting, Google claims that the average number of visits per UK Facebook user last month was 51 (worldwide average is 33).

On Google’s figures, that would suggest the average UK Facebook user spent 1360 minutes on the site last month – or nearly 23 hours.

On Hitwise’s figures that would come to nearly 24 hours per month.

Given these are average figures, that suggests that some people spend considerably more than a day month online at Facebook.com.

Contrast this with Google’s view of Twitter.com.  Average session time is 11.50 mins – and average number of visits per visitor last month of 13. This translates into around 2.5 hours per month.

YouTube clocked in at an average session time of 23.20 and 17 visits last month. Total session time for July, 6.6 hours.

According to Comscore last year, the average British internet user spent around 29 hours per month online. Perhaps that figure has risen dramatically in the last 12 months. However, it would still  suggests that the vast majority of our online time is spent on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

Food for thought.

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Digital marketing digital pr General PR online pr tech pr Technology PR

Reach versus engagement: the new online battleground for PR and media

For decades, PR has been seen by many marketeers as “cheap reach via editorial” – in other words, the goal of PR was to gain editorial coverage that provided the greatest number of opportunities to see – at a significantly lower cost than advertising.

Because the means of providing a verifiable link between editorial coverage and business impact was either prohibitively expensive or just not possible, there has been a largely accepted assumption that positive press coverage is valuable – period.

In the past, the notion of measuring engagement with editorial content was largely theoretical.  Circulation and readership figures were treated as proxies for engagement (if a newspaper has a readership of 2 million, then we assume that a large proportion must be in some way engaged with some or all of the content – we just aren’t sure which content and to what degree. Or whether this engagement results in a meaningful business outcome).

However, you could argue that Google data now provides for a much deeper understanding of editorial engagement. At least online.

For example, by using the Google search “site” command, you can easily see how many pages of a site the search giant has indexed (ie are likely to be found).  And with Google’s Doubleclick Ad Planner tool, you can get a fix on a specific engagement metric – namely, time spent on page. The more time someone spends reading content, the more likely they are to be engaged with – and influenced by – that content (of course, it could mean that people are having difficulty understanding the content – but if that extended to all of a site’s content, you would presume its readership figures would tail off rapidly).

In conjunction with Adam Parker, Chief Executive of RealWire, the online press release distribution service, we took it upon ourselves to analyse a selection of 50 online, newspapers and magazines, examining three core areas:  readership, engagement and UK relevance of content. Adam provides an excellent analysis of the results on his blog, Show Me Numbers.

So what kind of engagement do people have with leading online news sources? (*Full detail and slide presentation of  joint Realwire/Escherman analysis here).

For example, the average UK visitor to The Economist site spends around 122 seconds per page. While the average UK visitor to the Reuters site spends around 214 seconds per page.

So what does a difference of 92 seconds per page mean? If you accept that a typical reader can consume around 200 words of content per minute then in principle, a Reuters UK visitor is going to consume around 713 words vs 406 words for The Economist – in other words, a Reuters visitor is going to consume nearly 75pc more content than the typical Economist reader.

If you look at the average number of pages consumed per visit, there are some interesting things to be drawn out. Across the whole sample, the average number of pages consumed per visit – either globally or in the UK – is around 4.  And if the average number of visits per month per visitor to a site is around 3, then the total number of pages consumed per month by a typical visitor is around 12 pages of content. Clearly, some site’s visitors will come back more often than others. But the likelihood that the majority of news site visitors will consume more than 20 pages of content in a month is low.

However, before Avanash Kaushik beats me up, I’ll be the first to say that all averages lie – and this analysis rests upon averages. Having said that, it doesn’t mean that this is a useless exercise. If the average engagement time per page is 60 seconds, that almost certainly means that some people spend longer reading a page, while others spend less time. By definition, the number of people spending longer reading a page is going to be less than those spending a shorter time than average. Which means that the vast majority of people visiting an online news site are engaging less with the content than the average. The same applies for average views per URL. Some URLs are going to get more views than the average (clearly a big story is going to get significantly more than the average). This means that the majority of URLs are going to be viewed less than than average. Which means an 80/20 principle applies – namely, a minority of a news site’s content, is going to get the majority of the engagement.

The implications for PR are clear. Getting positive client messages into the first few hundred words of a piece is going to be nigh on essential for sites with lower average page visit times – otherwise, the likelihood is that your message just won’t be seen by many of a news site’s readers – all in spite of the effort you put in to get a journalist to write about your client in the first place. Having said that, as a general rule, specialist titles seem to have lower numbers of visitors and page views, but tend to have far higher engagement with content. And what of offline media? In spite of dwindling circulations, a case could be made for the fact that engagement time with a print newspaper may well be much longer than that of an equivalent site visit – and thus the chance to be exposed to more content is higher (then again, the average shelf life of a daily national newspaper is a few hours. At least web content is in theory available continuously – assuming of course that Google indexes it).

Looked at another way, if you are really interested in maximising engagement with a client’s message (as opposed to maximising its theoretical reach), then this kind of analysis may well help you clearly delineate where the ability to genuinely create a causal impact may lie.

Engagement or reach – what will you be advising your clients to focus on?

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Digital marketing digital pr General PR marketing online pr tech pr Technology PR Web/Tech

Pogoplug allows printing from iPhone, iPad, Android or any other device, no matter where you are

Here’s an interesting new development from Pogoplug (a client) –  web printing. Or cloud printing if you prefer.

For the first time, Pogoplug users will be able to print from an iPhone, iPad, Android or other mobile device from anywhere in the world.

Pogoplug cloud printing will initially support all HP printer models and all Epson printers released since 2005.  Set-up is simple and straightforward; once a printer is connected to a Pogoplug, it is ready to use.

Additionally, users can email any document directly to their Pogoplug for printing.  Printers can be shared with friends, family and colleagues or used to create printer ‘hotspots’ for temporary access to a printer in a public location. The new Pogoplug “cloud printing” feature is coming automatically to existing and future Pogoplug customers later this Summer. And there are no fees for the new feature.

This follows on from another recent addition to the Pogoplug which was the ability to email any document for storage on a Pogoplug connected drive.

As the owner of a shiny new iPad, the Pogoplug is certainly helping to address complaints from some quarters about the rigamarole you have to go through to get files off your iPad to then work on a separate machine. For example, if you create a Keynote presentation,  you have to use some kind of file sharing software to export – and that means being in the vicinity of your desktop machine.

However, with a Pogoplug, you can simply e-mail your presentation (or any file) using “upload@mypogoplug” and you have access to your file from anywhere. For example,  I created a presentation on my iPad while  travelling – when I wanted someone in the office to edit it, I simply e-mailed it to a shared folder – and my colleague could work on it.

Neat.

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Digital marketing digital pr General PR marketing online pr tech pr Technology PR Web/Tech

How UK PR firms can improve their SEO capability overnight for £85

About 18 months ago*, I paid around £85 for a piece of software called Market Samurai. I can hand on heart say it is has been one of the most valuable tech investments I’ve made in that time.

To describe it as a general internet marketing tool doesn’t really do it justice. Whether it is drastically reducing the amount of time to handle keyword research or detailed analysis of SERPs, I constantly refer to it.

One of things that stands out for me is the vast amount of useful training material provided by the Market Samurai team – for free. Just watching a few of these videos would probably save PR firms many man weeks and hundreds of pounds of Mickey Mouse training from less reliable sources.

Here’s a couple to give you a flavour:

An Introduction To Keyword Research

How To Find Relevant Keywords

Before I get too fluffy bunny about Market Samurai, it isn’t going to do your SEO PR for you. But at least you can try out the product for free for a few weeks, so no risk there.

Anyway. Enough of my gushing. It is most unlike me. Why not click on the big graphic on the upper right of the page and get a free trial download. See what you think. In fact, I’d welcome feedback from people who try it out – I’m happy to share tips and tricks I’ve picked up using the product over the last 18 month with like minded PR folk who want to improve their SEO skills.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpOLMYlO2XE&feature=player_embedded]

*In the interests of transparency, I’m happy to say that I’ve signed up as an affiliate for Market Samurai. So yes, if you do end up buying it, I get a modest commission. It doesn’t impact the price you pay for it. However, you will note that I have no other such affiliate arrangements with any other provider. I’ve been recommending Market Samurai (for free) to anyone who will care to listen over the last year. So the recent creation of the affiliate programme simply gives recommenders like me a small reward for pointing people to a product I highly value in any case.

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Digital marketing digital pr marketing online pr tech pr Technology PR

Winners and losers in NMA’s search agency league table 2010 + PR implications

A curate’s egg – ie good in parts – is probably the best way to look at NMA’s latest league table of UK search marketing agencies.

As ever, I’m always grateful to NMA for providing the baseline data to look at. As I’ve done in previous years, I thought I’d dig behind the figures to see if there are any significant trends to be discovered – and to compare the search sector with the PR sector.

First up, some things worth noting regarding this year’s league table compared to 2009.

1. As per last year, NMA looked at net income (gross profit) rather than turnover in order to rank agencies.

2. The NMA table seems to suffer like PR Week’s league tables from agencies who submit figures when times are good – and then don’t submit when the data doesn’t look so rosy. There are only 19 firms in this year’s league table that were in last year’s. Hard to believe that 11 firms dropped out by recording a lower gross profit  (£36K) than number 36 ranked iVantage. So we can only assume they chose not to take part for whatever reason.

3. The financial periods being compared vary widely. For example, although in principle the table is intended to cover 2009, iCrossing achieved a number two position based on their figures to the end of Dec 2008. However, Steak returned figures based on a year end to February 2010 – as we all know, a lot can happen in 14 months. So worth bearing in mind that apples aren’t necessarily being compared with apples here.

So what can be gleaned from this year’s figures?

On one level, you might argue that Bigmouthmedia should be very pleased to have held on to their number one slot for the second year running with gross profit of £12.6m (in terms of PR sector comparisons, bear in mind that this is larger than most top 150 PR Week firms achieve in terms of top line fee income).  However, Bigmouth actually saw gross profit drop by 5.78pc on last year – or £775K.  Other firms also saw declines in net income – in fact a total of 42pc of the firms that appeared in last year’s table saw falls in net income. The biggest came from Latitude with a 52pc drop (£5.4m). As was well documented at the time, Latitude went (briefly) into administration in January, before a management buy out saw the firm back in the game.

In terms of net income per earner, Bigmouth once again are  top of the pile – £120K gross profit per employee – marginally down on last year’s figure of £123K. Last year’s top performer in terms of gross profit per employee – Net Planet Media – didn’t figure in this year’s table. Then again, it did derive 100pc of its income via paid search – so perhaps the removal of Google’s BPF had a big impact on net income (for PR comparison, the top fee per earner rate in the PR Week Top 150 is around 280K. However, even assuming stellar gross margins of 30pc ie unlikely, the best performing top 150 PR Week firms would still be well below Bigmouth’s profit per employee figure).

But who were the best search agency performers? (*)

On the basis of actual and percentage growth, then there is a clear winner – Propellernet.  The Brighton-based firm saw net income rise by 64pc to £2.268m. Propellernet was also second only to Bigmouth in terms of gross profit per employee (£113K). Congrats also to Agenda21 and Epiphany Solutions who saw net income rise 44pc and 32pc respectively.

So what does this tell us about the state of the search sector? And the implications for PR?

As NMA themselves pointed out “it was the first full year to cope without Google’s Best Practice Funding. This had often been used by agencies to lure in new business by offering any commission from Google to the client directly. In a world without this, agencies had to prove their added value.”

In other words, agencies had to move away from relying on PPC for income.  This can clearly be seen in the breakdown of individual revenue streams from agencies.

For example, back in 2008, Steak said it drew 80pc of its revenue from paid search. According to NMA, that percentage is now down to 37pc.  And this trend is being played out among other search marketing firms. But although natural search is taking a bigger slice of search agency revenue, in many cases, agencies are turning into digital generalists, offering e-mail, mobile, interactive and other services.

Of course, we ought to be careful about how these labels are defined. For example, top performer Propellernet says 70pc of its revenue comes from natural search with 30pc from paid search. However, Propellernet have been very vocal of late in promoting their SEO PR offering – indeed, they currently describe themselves as a search and social marketing agency. Perhaps some very healthy online PR related revenues are being wrapped up under the label of natural search?

Staying with PR, it was also interesting to note that the digital arm of PR group Golley Slater made an impressive debut in the NMA table with net income of £2.1m. In the PR Week top 150 table, Golley Slater generated PR fee income of £3.9m. Even if Golley Slater achieved record breaking gross PR profit margins of 30pc, then their digital income would still dwarf their profits from PR.  I strongly suspect their PR margins are much lower than 30pc. And PR fee income fell last year.

The search arm of PR group Chime Communications VCCP also saw net income rise to £1.16m – a smaller, but significant and growing contribution to the profitability of Chime overall.

In summary, this year’s NMA league table shows that even the search sector is not entirely immune to the general woes of the economy. Having said that, search firms continue to generate very respectable profits – certainly compared with the PR sector. And search firms are making no secret of continuing their land grab for PR work. The PR sector must therefore continue to up its game in terms of the quality and value of the digital services it offers.

(*) I was all set to name Summit Media as the best performer. They apparently recorded an incredible 1128pc increase (£1.364m) in net income based on the figures in last year’s NMA table which ranked them at number 29 with gross profit of £120K. However, according to this year’s table, they actually recorded net income of £1,208,160 in 2009 – so obviously a big typo remains in last year’s NMA search agency table.

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Current Affairs Digital marketing digital pr General PR marketing online pr

How much is BP really paying for those “oil spill” PPC ads?

BP ‘manipulating search results’ on Google following oil spill – so said The Times today.
The piece quoted Maureen Mackey, a writer on the Fiscal Times as saying: “What it effectively does is that it bumps down other legitimate news and opinion pieces that are addressing the spill… and [BP are] paying big money for that.”
Er, not quite.
First, BP are buying PPC ads – so they are hardly bumping natural search results anywhere. Second, there is an assumption that BP must be paying “big money” for these PPC ads.
Let’s take the phrase “oil spill”. Sure enough, plug it into Google and BP’s ad is there at the top – in fact, it is the only PPC ad on the page (at least when I did it).
So how much would BP have to pay for this? Using Google’s free Traffic Estimator tool, it would seem they would pay a maximum of $1.38 per click. And
Google estimates the number of click throughs that BP would get as between 29 and 45 per day. In other words, a cost of around $70 per day – maximum.
Now BP may well be bidding on lots of other “oil spill” related terms – but I’d hazard a guess that their total PPC budget for achieving these top ad positions is not nearly as much as some people assume (ironically, The Times article has probably done more to encourage people to search for the term “oil spill” and for people to click the ad in curiosity).
If you look at historical bidding patterns on the term “oil spill” you’ll see that nobody has really bothered much about it. In fact, in March in the UK (pre-BP crisis) not a single company was bidding on the term. In April, a lot more companies started bidding on the term both in the US and UK. Curiously, everyone seemed to stop bidding on it in May. And BP are probably the only one of a handful of companies bidding on the term right now. Coupled with a relevant landing page, that probably translates into a relatively low PPC cost.
Of course, the big question many people are asking is – are BP right to be buying PPC ads around these terms?  The moral issue aside, the notion that BP are bleeding money on this exercise is probably wide of the mark.
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Business Intelligence Current Affairs Digital marketing digital pr General PR Humour marketing online pr

Exclusive! Daily Mail actively using “prying” technology to influence reader behaviour

Visitors to the Daily Mail website are having personal information about themselves captured for the purpose of influencing their behaviour to purchase goods and services, we can exclusively reveal. The Mail also admits that it will use information gathered on individuals to “deal with” comments made on the site.
Extensive research carried out by a crack escherman web team can reveal that the Daily Mail deploys an array of sophisticated web analytics and tracking technologies including Omniture, Sophus3, Google Analytics and ComScore.
According to Andrew Smith at escherman: “It took us all of 15 seconds to identify the full scale of the Daily Mail’s arsenal of monitoring technology. Some of these tools can cost hundreds of thousands of pounds and clearly demonstrates how seriously the Daily Mail is prepared to invest in prying into the online behaviour of its readers.”
The sales literature for Sophus3, for example, makes no attempt to obscure its true purpose:
“Sophus3 has the capability to identify visitors who come from online campaigns, how they behave on your website and whether they turn into a lead or buy after that. With our analysis tools we can determine the effect of online advertising on consumer interest.”
In addition, the Daily Mail’s so called Privacy Policy brazenly asserts that it will use visitor information to: “Deal with, and respond to you about, a comment you have submitted for or on our message boards, blogs and other such user generated content facilities.”
However, demonstrating the highest standards of journalistic integrity, the Mail has already reported on similar kinds of outrageous breaches of privacy by organisations such as BT and Carphone Warehouse.
Concludes Smith: “The amount of information that the Mail is gathering about its online readers is immense – everything from the kind of browser they are using down to their IP address. There can be no doubt that they are openly using this information to try and personalise their readers experience – or worse – co-erce them into buying third party products and services. We can only hope that their own journalists will apply the same rigorous approach as they’ve used with other organisations to write a follow up story to expose their own colleagues questionable behaviour and flagrant disregard for privacy.”
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Digital marketing digital pr General PR marketing Media online pr

Rolls Royce Corporate Comms Director: “Social media is a complete waste of time”

Well, that’s how I interpreted the words of Rolls Royce Director of Communications Peter Morgan in the latest issue of Corp Comms Magazine. I appreciate that I didn’t attend the event where he is supposed to have made the statements below – but I don’t doubt that Corp Comms Editor Helen Dunne has faithfully recorded what he said.
According to Morgan: “I was communications director at BT for five and a half years. I’ve been communications director at Rolls-Royce for about six months. I don’t think there is a single example where social media has impacted directly on the reputation or share price of either of these significant organisations.”
The phrase I picked up on here was “impacted directly”. What about the indirect impact of social media on a company’s reputation with its customers? Surely if BT or any other organisation continually ignores grievances voiced by customers on social networks then this is surely indicative of a deeper malaise within the company? And that sooner or later those chickens will come home to roost?
“If a subject gains traction in the social media domain, if it is important, it very quickly feeds into the mainstream press. And when the Daily Mail phones to tell you that you’ve got a problem, you know you’ve got a problem. There is a self-alerting mechanism.”
But how can the Daily Mail call Peter Morgan? Although he is listed on the Rolls Royce corporate website as a media contact, he stands out from the rest of his colleagues as being the only one who doesn’t have his phone number listed (reminded me of the Director of Customer Relations for a FTSE 250 firm, who, as a matter of policy, refused to talk to customers).
Morgan seems to view social networks as simply feeder channels for the mainstream media. In other words, a social media topic is only validated if it is picked up by a traditional big media outlet.  Dealing with the Daily Mail et al should therefore still be the top priority for a corporate comms director. Presumably Morgan isn’t one of the 54pc of senior communications directors who think that their key challenge for 2010 is executing a digital strategy.
He continues: “For decades, there have been people in pubs all around Britain saying how much they hate BT or how frustrated they are with Virgin Atlantic or whatever. The fact that they now spout their opinions on a social networking site doesn’t make them any more important or more alarming. “
If I’ve understood his comment correctly then – in Morgan’s opinion – BT and Virgin Atlantic customers (or any organisations customers for that matter) are simply annoying oiks whose opinions are worthless. They are an irritating distraction to the main goal of making sure the share price is propped up at all costs.
In which case, the irony will not be lost on Morgan by this story in today’s Mail on Sunday in which his former employer, BT, is, gasp, monitoring and responding to negative comments on social networks – big style. If customers “spouting their opinions on a social networking site” are “neither important nor alarming”, then why is his former employer patently investing heavily in social media monitoring?
And how would Peter Morgan deal with this story if he were still at BT?
What would he do about how the story has been circulated widely online using the very social networks that he appears to regard as unimportant? Or deal with the growing number of comments the story is attracting on the MoS site itself? The bizarre irony of this piece is that most of the people commenting think the MoS has taken a daft perspective on companies paying attention to customer complaints online – but in turn, they are then using the MoS story as a platform to air their grievances about BT generally – but presumably these people are the same kind of “opinion spouters” that have been dismissed as unimportant previously.
On a different subject, anyone thinking of selling a sentiment analysis tool to Peter is also probably wasting their time:
“I’m deeply suspicious of this early warning idea. In most consumer organisations, the time taken between this becoming a good social media story (My note: what’s a bad social media story?) and this becoming a good online news story and the Daily Mail being on the phone is minutes. I think that it is a waste of money to invest in online tracking systems for social media alerting you to problems. Every problem that has come across my desk has travelled too fast for that early warning system to be of help to me.”
As I’ve said already, it appears that Peter Morgan believes dealing with traditional big media is the main priority of a corporate comms department. In which case, he is probably right to argue that using a social media tracking tool as a crisis management early warning system is flawed – but only if you view dealing with traditional big media as the top priority for a corporate comms department. Surely the modern day comms director must pay attention to what customers are saying – wherever they are saying it. And respond appropriately.
Finally: “Your company website is of critical importance. When deciding how to deploy resource, you would be rash to deploy social media at the expense of a principal corporate website. The oldest communications tool of all is frequently ignored.”
Presumably one of the oldest communications tools is the telephone – which as we’ve seen above, is one that Morgan himself seems to ignore too. At least as a two way communication tool.
So, is he a PR dinosaur? Or a voice of sanity? I wonder if he’ll stop by to comment on this post? Given his apparent attitude to social media, I assume he’ll never even be aware of its existence. But I’d be delighted to be proved wrong. I’d even be happy to take a phone call (020 8334 8095).
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Digital marketing digital pr General PR online pr tech pr Technology PR

What PPC ad spending can tell you about the UK PR sector and other digital tales

As part of a recent SEO analysis of the websites of PR Week’s Top 150 agencies (*), we found that only 37pc of them contained the keyword term “PR” in their home page titles. And barely 15pc used the term “public relations” (a fairly bog standard SEO technique).

We then realised that many firms referred to themselves as communications agencies and/or consultancies. So perhaps they were optimising on these terms?

Nope. A mere six agencies had either of these terms in their page titles.
You might argue that PR firms are using other terms to optimise around. But it doesn’t take much analysis to realise that most PR Week top 150 agency websites pay little or no attention to SEO.
But do they need to optimise their sites? Perhaps they will rank highly on Google in any case for standard industry keyword terms?
At first blush, this looks plausible. For example, for the term “communications consultancy”, Hanover, FD and Freud occupy the top 3 slots. And the term is searched for 29 times per day in the UK on a broad match basis.
But perhaps, these PR firms (and others) are missing a trick?
For example, on the term “communications agency”, no single top 150 PR firm ranks in the top 10. And with the term being searched for 217 times a day in the UK on a broad match basis, that is a lot of potential click throughs (and business) going elsewhere.
But are agencies making up for lack of natural search rankings by using Pay Per Click advertising?
Again, no. We estimate that around 60 companies spent money on Google Adwords around the term “communications agency” in the last 12 months. But not one of them was a top 150 PR firm. The same applied for the term “communications consultancy”. (Even those firms that are using PPC seem to be doing so in a fairly crude manner – they don’t test different ad copy and rarely provide a dedicated landing page).
So what does this all mean? Are top 150 PR firms failing to invest in their own SEO and PPC approaches because they don’t know how to do it? Or because they don’t think it is worth the effort?
Or does it say more about the clients who buy PR services? In other words, PR firms are sticking to non-SEO/PPC business development because they’ve tested it and found that this isn’t the way that their prospects decide how to choose a firm?
Perhaps. But even if this were the case, surely client side PR buyers are still looking to PR firms to give them genuine digital communication insight.
According to a joint PR Week/Brands2Life survey from December 2009, 54pc of communications directors think that their key challenge for 2010 is executing a digital strategy. On the agency side, you’d be hard pushed to find one that doesn’t tout its digital capabilities. For example, the following, taken from a top 150 PR agency site, is typical of what you will find in most PR firm’s marketing collateral:
“Search engine rankings are key to increasing the reach and visibility of your activities online. We optimise content across a range of formats for search engine visibility, from press releases to video content. We also ensure any new campaign is designed with natural search results factored in, to ensure that the right content is ranked and easily accessible.”
In which case, what are clients to make of the fact that most of the content on top 150 PR web sites is patently unoptimised. Or betrays a lack of understanding of other elements of the digital marketing mix such as PPC?
If the PR sector is to take a lead on digital communications, it needs to provide better evidence it can provide clients with the most rounded advice on executing a digital strategy. Its own backyard might be a good place to start.
(*) I’ll happily email the full SEO analysis of the PR Week top 150 to anyone who asks me. Nicely.