A recent report released by Google found that the typical B2B researcher performs 12 online searches before he or she engages with a brand. Considering this statistic, businesses should be prompted to ask their teams, “What have our public relations and marketing strategies done for our search marketing results lately?”
To ensure that your business is being found in these online searches, PR and marketing strategies must collaborate into one. For the best search marketing results for your business, educate your team on incorporating these methods into their marketing strategies.
1. Fully Understand Domain Authority
If you’ve ever read any kind of search marketing article, it is likely you have seen the mention of a website’s “domain authority” somewhere in your readings. So, what exactly is domain authority and what does it mean to marketers?
Domain authority is a score based on a 100-point scale that anticipates how highly a website will rank in Google’s search results. Your website’s domain authority is calculated by many different factors – primarily metrics such as popularity of your link (how many times your website has been clicked based on different search terms), how many other websites are linking back to your site, and how much domain authority those websites that are linking back to yours hold.
Of course, everyone would love for their website to hold a perfect domain authority score of 100, however those perfect scores are reserved for the online giants who dominate the internet, such as Facebook and certainly Google itself.
Many SEO experts have said that a good domain authority score for your website should be between 35 and 50; 50 or above is considered phenomenal. However in reality, there is no simple answer to this question. Domain authority is not a measure of your SEO efforts, but instead a competitive metric best used to compare your website against others in your market.
As long as your domain authority is at least close to or better than your competitors’, your website should be in a great position to rank well in search results.
2. Maximize Your Media Outlets
The media environment is quickly and constantly growing, changing and evolving. Identifying which media outlets to spend your time on for your most benefit can be difficult.
Targeting media outlets based on their focus, readership, and relationship to your company is very important. Communication professionals should also be considering the domain authorities of the media outlets they chose to utilize as well.
Prioritizing your media list from highest to lowest domain authority will help you ensure that the PR time spent will be earning links that will help build your website’s domain authority and provide the most value to your organization. Links distributed from higher authoritative sites will deliver more SEO power to your site and drive up your website’s own authority.
3. Request a Link
Many of today’s media outlets, especially in trade media, always include a link back to your website as a standard practice when you contribute to a piece or provide a bylined article. From a PR and marketing standpoint, that link helps drive readers to your website, assuming that the media outlet is an authoritative site that holds a high domain authority, it helps boost your own domain authority.
If a link is not automatically included once the article has been published on their website, it is always acceptable to request that one be added. Asking for a link to go to your homepage in the first mention of your company is completely respectable, but one should never demand that a link be added. For instance on occasion linking may be against the publisher’s policy, and demanding that they add one doesn’t help build your company’s relationship with the reporter.
Suggest to the author to utilize a link to a specific piece of content on your website mentioned in the article if that content is relevant to your contribution to the piece. This provides a more valuable and powerful link to the readers and benefits your search engine marketing efforts.
Being conscious about including information via an interview or bylined article that you are certain has in-depth content behind it is a savvy PR move from which the reporter, the reader, and your business will all benefit.
4. Incorporate Necessary Keywords
According to a recent Google survey, a reported 71% of B2B researchers start their research with generic search terms rather than searching for specific brand names. That percentage indicates consumers are looking for products and solutions first and brands are coming secondary.
So, how do we place ourselves in front of these researchers? First, you must conduct your keyword research for your business, location identifiers, your industry and also your competitors. Finding out what people are searching for might not be what you originally thought and sometimes even more surprisingly, identifying terms no one is searching for that you may have thought differently about.
After completing a thorough keyword research for your business’s website and online presence using short tail and long tail keywords, it is essential to incorporate these keywords into the content on your website, in news releases (placed in the first words of your headline), bylines, online descriptions, and blog posts. But don’t stop there. Incorporate these keywords into every piece of content that you produce. Add keyword-rich scripts to all videos posted on your website (including the scripts to webinars and presentations), and ensuring all graphics and images have alt tags with optimized descriptions.
Using your keywords is imperative to your search engine marketing success, but knowing when to stop is just as important. Keyword stuffing should never be practiced, and Google has no problem penalizing you if you are caught doing so. A good rule of thumb is to ensure that only 5% of your content consists of keywords, incorporating more than that and you can become a dreaded keyword stuffer. Writing keyword-incorporated copy is important for search engine rankings, but ensuring that you don’t sound like a robot to your audience reading your content holds just as much importance. Search engines will skim your content and rank it based on their algorithm, but keep in mind people will also read your content and rank it based on their own internal algorithms as well and maintaining and expanding your audience should be your overall goal for your online presence.
The Takeaway
Building a company’s online presence takes time, understanding, persistence, and teamwork. As marketing professionals, we understand that online content is the cornerstone of marketing and PR and because words are all that matter to search engines – PR, marketing, and search must work unitedly to balance the content and copy online while still delivering and improving search results.
By utilizing the above elements as co-dependent tools in your B2B marketing toolkit, your business can expect to see concrete results from the efforts delivered through your PR, marketing and search engine marketing strategies. Additionally, incorporating this knowledge and the practices above into your own strategies will help secure your place one step ahead of other B2B Marketers.
Which strategies will you incorporate for your business? Which do you expect to be most effective? Have you already incorporated some of these methods into your own marketing and PR strategies? If so, which ones have you seen the most success with? If you are seasoned to search marketing practices, do you have any words of wisdom for other marketers who may be new in incorporating these methods? We look forward to hearing your feedback and responses in the comments section below!