Let’s face it: whether you’re a blogger, a company trying to create a stronger online presence, or a journalist/PR professional, you have one common goal: you want your work to be seen! To be blunt, no matter how great your content is or how hard you worked on your campaign, it doesn’t matter if its not getting any views. In a world where millions of results pop up after entering a simple key phrase, it can be difficult to get your content to the top and make yourself seen. This week, I’m going to mention some important strategies and tools that will not only help you to get your content seen, but more importantly foster engagement with your audience.
In order to determine the individual steps you need to take, we first must have an understanding of what SEO, or search engine optimization, is. In a nutshell, SEO is a way of making your content visible among all the clutter by utilizing key phrases that will help bring your content to the top of the search results. Now, there are a few different ways that you can go about this. In the article SEM VS SEO: What’s the Difference and Which is Right for My Brand by Jennifer Yesbeck, she emphasizes that although both SEM and SEO seek to create the same results, there is a slightly different approach to these methods. To get a more detailed explanation I highly suggest checking out her article on Alexa Blog, but to summarize, the main difference between search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) is that SEM is a paid technique, and SEO relies mainly on utilizing free strategies that anyone can do.
With this in mind, it seems like SEO would be the best choice for bloggers like myself, or those in the field who like to take control into their own hands. From what I’ve learned via my own firsthand experience and checking out some of the tips on a few articles about the subject, the most important thing about SEO is doing the research to find out the key words that you should be using. It sounds so simple to just mindlessly plug in some words that you think apply to your company/content, but you need to put in more effort than that to be successful. I think a quote from John Locke from the article SEO Keyword Research: Finding Keywords That Will Drive Traffic summarizes this point well.
“Keyword research is more than just optimizing for your main search term. It’s about blanketing all the search terms your customers are likely to have. Each one of these questions is an opportunity for your business to answer a customer question and establish your authority as a service provider” -John Locke
The main goal of SEO is to drive traffic to your website/content, so its imperative to do your research and think of all the possible keywords that your audience is likely to search. Essentially, you need to think from the perspective of your audience and cater to that.
Speaking of audiences, your work isn’t done once you get them to your website. Of course, it’s great to have followers, but they need to be connecting with your content. If your audience isn’t engaging with the work you’re putting out, all your hard work getting them to your website has been for nothing. Especially from a public relations perspective, your gold is the information you get about your audience, their interactions with your content, and spreading the word. Along with various other benefits, the article How to Sell the Importance of Engagement Over Fan Growth on Social Media by Joe Escobedo from Forbes.com points out that “Engagement can tell you how well your content resonates with your audience. If your goal is to build a relationship with your audience, then you should definitely look at engagement”.
Any PR practitioner will tell you that building relationships with our publics is the core of the industry. Due to its lofty nature the PR industry can be difficult to explain to outsiders at times, but Murray Newlands describes the importance of relationship building in PR exceptionally well in a quote from the article Why Public Relations is Important for your Business from Inc.com. He states, “Great public relations means setting up ongoing relationships with many important influencers (and therefore their audiences) and knowing how your business may become an excellent data source for the influential”.
Overall, I think the main takeaways for this week are that whether you choose to go the SEO or SEM route, its imperative to be taking the steps and using strategies to get your content to the top where your audience will not only see it, but interact with it.
Maria's Musings 