For business owners it can be scary to take a leap of faith and invest resources into any form of external marketing. The key thing you want to establish is that you’re going to get value for money and some form of return on your investment. In the world of SEO and digital PR it can be confusing for clients to understand what is reasonable to expect from your digital marketing strategy. Any good freelancer or agency should be accountable for communicating what success looks like, ensuring you have the right context in your reporting to understand key growth markers.

Unfortunately in our industry there are some less trusted marketers who won’t be transparent about their ability, deliverability of results or methods in general. After working in this industry for over a decade, I’ve heard many stories and seen strategies in action which didn’t align with the standards I would personally offer clients. To help, I’ve put together my guide on red flags that should be considered when you look for a reputable digital PR or SEO partner.

SEO Red Flags

1. No KPIs or markers of success:
   There’s a delicate balance between over and under promising results by digital marketers, finding the right balance is key. Someone who gives you no indication of what success looks like has no benchmark or framework within their strategy, meaning you both have no idea of what you’re aiming for. KPIs shouldn’t be too niche, ignoring the bigger picture of SEO success, but they should be in place to have a common goal in mind for the marketer and the client. I start by asking clients that are their wider business goals, key product/service focuses for each quarter and expand my strategy from there, looking at how digital PR or SEO activity can have more specific impact on these goals instead of doing work for work’s sake.
2. You don’t know who is doing the work:
   It is important to note that there are agencies or freelancers who draft in support when things get busy. This is common and not an issue when the quality control is being overseen by the agency or freelancer themselves, although it should be disclosed to any clients affected. This becomes a problem when agencies or freelancers subcontract entire projects to third parties without disclosing it to clients and without taking ownership for the strategy or results. These agencies essentially become a middle man and this can waste budget for clients and resource investment, which could be more efficiently spent if the client cut out the middle man and hired the marketer directly. Clients contract marketers because they are choosing the expertise that has been sold to them in the pitch and by not being honest about who is doing the work, this means the client may be getting a lower quality of work than has been sold to them.
3. No team members are listed onsite with the right credentials:
   I’ve pitched against agencies before where not a single person on the team page had the relevant job title or experience for the services being sold, hinting that these services would be immediately outsourced if a contract is won. This relates to the previous point on transparency and accountability from agencies or freelancers to make clear who would be leading the projector doing the work. It’s important to understand the experience of the marketer to ensure they know your sector and have the skillset to employ the sold strategy effectively. Always look at your agency’s team members page and ask about what specialists they have to work on the account.
4. No senior staff working on the account:
   It can be common in some agencies that you see a senior team presented in the pitch who never end up working on the account, instead junior team members are placed onto accounts to save resource for ‘bigger’ or ‘more important’ clients. This shows an agency’s prioritisation if they aren’t willing to put experienced people on the account. Whilst it is important for juniors to get experience working on accounts and have their skillsets developed, they should never be dumped with the ownership of a full account when they aren’t ready and don’t have the necessary experience. Always ask who will be working on your account so you have full understanding of what level of skill will be applied to the strategy.
5. Unbelievable results:
   We’ve all seen hard to believe case studies being pedalled around LinkedIn over recent months. Oftentimes, these results aren’t always as they seem when you dive deep into them. It can set a dangerous precedent as clients understandably believes that insane results and viral campaigns can be achieved on a shoestring budget consistently, which just isn’t the reality of digital marketing. Growth and success takes long term investment, steady strategy and you may have months which fluctuate. Transparency and honesty in our industry is integral to managing realistic expectations. If you’re being presented case studies which sound hard to believe, do some digging and ask deeper questions to verify the validity of the results. Additionally, ask how frequent those types of results are as a one off success shouldn’t be sold as the norm to expect.
6. Boiler plate strategies:
   There are many marketers selling out of the box SEO and digital PR, which on the surface sounds fine but can be a huge waster of investment for businesses if they strategy isn’t correct for their industry and audience. Tailored marketing strategies require more resource but are worth the effort as it means you are adapting what works to suit the client you are working on. I wouldn’t sell product PR or reactive to a client where there are limited opportunities, just as you wouldn’t expect advertising of a fashion brand to be the same as a car dealership. Ask the question “how will this strategy directly work for my industry?” to understand if the person or agency you are contracting actually understands your business and website audience to be able to effectively deliver results.
7. Race to the bottom pricing:
   When it comes to SEO and Digital PR, you really do get what you pay for a lot of the time. There has unfortunately been a lot of discount pricing, essentially selling packages of basic marketing for low low prices, which correlates to the out of the box strategies previously mentioned. There’s a line between agreeing KPIs and explaining how the strategy will work to achieve them and simply selling X number of links or keyword positions, with no context as to what impact they’d have on the website’s organic growth. People selling actions without impact is simply a waste of resource. If it seems too cheap, you can guarantee you won’t be getting an experienced strategist on the account and results may be topped up by quick win or spammy tactics, which won’t move the needle. This doesn’t mean you have to pay sky high prices either, as freelancers can typically charge less than agencies due to lower overheads and operational costs. It’s important to find the balance and bring this back to who is going to be doing the work and what is their expertise.
8. Focus on isolated metrics:
   In line with cheap and not-so-cheerful packages comes isolated metrics. So many times I see marketers selling just links, as well as having requests myself for X amount of links. I will always explain to businesses that this viewpoint is narrow and not conducive to organic success. If you do KPI things like links numbers, it needs to be part of a bigger strategy which looks at your actual business goals. What products or services is your business focusing on? What are the goals of your SEO strategy, is it brand or non-brand? Is there are specific category of your site that needs a boost currently? All of this is relevant and having that tailored strategy means you don’t just get endless low quality homepage links that leave you wondering why your organic traffic still hasn’t grown. Additionally, just looking at growth in organic traffic can be a road to nowhere, as it’s easier to write content for content’s sake on irrelevant topics which don’t draw in a targeted audience. You need to partner with a marketer who understands relevancy and focuses on this over arbitrary metrics that don’t honestly communicate success.
9. Too much busywork:
   When you have bigger budgets or are working with a freelancer/agency who doesn’t have the right experience there can be a lot of busywork put into each month’s workload to simply pad it out and keep retainers going. I’ve onboarded several clients where a lot of important and urgent website issues had never been tackled whilst their previous marketers spent months on a strategy that consisted of work like updating metas on pages that were noindexed anyway and disavowing links which will be ignored by Google regardless. Less scrupulous marketers may take advantage of clients’ lesser knowledge of SEO and aim to give themselves easier work to do instead of doing important work that might be challenging and take time to implement. Low level work can make up a bigger project plan, but you should ask the right questions to make sure the big issues have been tackled first before you get into the lower priority tasks. Communicate with your marketer or agency to ensure they have your priorities clear and you’ve working towards a common goal, with the right prioritisation of tasks.
10. Buying links to top up results:
    This tip should really be obvious in 2025 but I’ve still seen agencies recently that rely on a strategy of buying links for clients. Whether to ‘top up’ failed digital PR strategies or to outright sell onto clients, it just isn’t the vibe for 2025 and Google has long clamped down on these black hat tactics. Any short term growth you see from this is misadvised and trust that you will see your organic traffic nosedive at some point once the algorithm becomes wise to the paid links. These paid links are also usually terrible quality, low DA and pure spam. Diligence is important here, making sure you know exactly how your marketer will be gaining backlinks for you, making sure they are going for quality and relevancy in an authentic way.

Hopefully these tips will help you vet your future agency or freelancer if you’re seeking out a new partner for any SEO or digital PR work. You should always ask for reviews or testimonials if unsure, as well as asking about your prospective marketers industry experience.

Are you looking for freelance digital PR or SEO support? Fill out the form below to enquire and get details on my services.

Leanne Vause

SEO & DIGITAL PR DIRECTOR

Leanne has over a decade of experience across SEO strategy, content marketing and digital PR. She has worked for a range of clients from SMEs to global brands both for agencies and in-house. She has a 2:1 upper class hons. degree in Media Studies from Manchester Metropolitan University and founded freelance SEO and digital PR business Search etc. in 2023.

LinkedIn profile here.

The post Looking for SEO or Digital PR Services? Watch out for these Red Flags appeared first on Search etc..

Now we are approaching the end of September, Spooky Season is truly upon us. In the digital PR world, Halloween provides the perfect opportunity to get creative and lean into topical features. By nature, some PR topics can border on risky from a brand standpoint, so we’ve put together some do’s and don’ts of Halloween PR.

Do make use of unique and updated data

Finding relevant and up to date data to support your campaigns can give you the edge on your competition. What will set you apart is creativity. There can be fierce competition from PRs to secure coverage and there is nothing worse than discovering someone has launched a similar campaign to yourself. Securing original or recently updated data can give you the edge and make the difference between coverage and failure. From hotel reviews which mention ghosts or spooky occurrences listed on bespoke websites which mention haunted locations, there are loads of potential data sources out there. A good tip if you are worried your data will be used by someone else is to add more data to make this unique. You could take one data point and turn this into an index or cross-reference this with different adjacently themed data to give your campaign a unique narrative.

Don’t use real-life crimes in your campaigns

There is always a moral line in the world of PR that we should me mindful not to cross. In my years working in the industry I have seen campaigns which reference crime data, such as reported murders in relation to Halloween. We should all try to remember these statistics relate to real life victims and it can come across as extremely insensitive to spin real life traumatic events into campaign data. My motto is to go for ‘spooky not scary’ and keep your campaigns light-hearted and mindful of both the impact on the brand’s and your own reputation.

Do find regional angles

Got some great data on Halloween sweets or spooky events to visit? Invest the time in curating bespoke regional angles and your campaign can gain much broader coverage. You should never treat digital PR as a one size fits all approach, as every publication has it’s own ways of working and audience interests. When creating regional campaigns, aim to break down data or highlights linking to cities over entire regions. Journalists prefer to focus on their own areas, for example reporting on Manchester versus the North West as a whole.

Don’t miss the boat on when to outreach

Timing is key with any seasonal campaign and you always run the risk of missing out if you go live too late, which can waste months of planning and execution. This is not only a time cost but a resource cost to agencies, staff and brands. You can start to outreach Halloween early into October, to plant the seeds of ideas before the competition gets too fierce. This should be really dialled up in the two weeks leading up to the date. Launching the week of Halloween or later leaves too much risk of gaining nothing for your release and making it a potentially wasted effort. Whilst it’s less likely to secure coverage on the day before or the day of Halloween, you can always target any reactive opportunities ad hoc to top up the waves of outreach you’ve previously done.

Do monitor the news leading up to Halloween

A lot can change in the news agenda which could render an idea no longer feasible. It’s important for PRs to keep an eye on different news outlet’s news stories to see where ideas may need to be swapped or adapted. News monitoring can also be a great way to find new and innovative ideas to jump on which you hadn’t previously thought of.

Don’t sacrifice relevancy with your campaign ideas

It can be tempting to pick an idea you know works well for Halloween themed stories, but if this has little relevancy to your brand then it won’t garner much traction. The weight of any links you do gain could be lessened by the lack of relevancy in the content on the media outlet site. A good tip is to hold an ideation session for yourself or your team, note down the brand, their products and their core audience groups. Expand two steps beyond each area in a mind map, use useful tools such as SEMrush’s Topic Research or Ahref’s Content Explorer to get more inspiration around what questions consumers are asking. This helps you build a profile of the brand’s core customer and their secondary interests. Secondary interests can be targeted for PR to allow for broader media targeting whilst still remaining close to the brand identity.

Do find suitable experts

Enlisting an expert to give weight to your campaign has remained a successful tactic which has worked throughout 2024 and Halloween is no exception. Lifestyle journalists love campaigns which use bespoke experts, such as mediums or astrologists, as these lean into their audience’s core interests and give some more authority to any advice your campaign may be offering. Putting out media requests on Twitter or using journo request services from Cision or Response Source can be great ways to build up your network of experts to lend commentary to enhance your campaigns.

Don’t forget to add rich assets to your campaigns

Journalists are highlighting more than ever before that having strong imagery, video and rich assets is beneficial to their content. Sharing a unique recipe of Halloween snacks? Be sure to include imagery of the end result if you have this as it can highly increase the chances of pick-up. If you have the resource, consider creating a supporting video telling the story of your PR data campaign on spooky road trips, this can be shared alongside a traditional release and imagery to offer journalists something your competition may not be able to match.

Hopefully these tips have given some food for thought this spooky season. If you’re interested in reading more, take a look at the content and digital PR sections.

Leanne Vause

SEO & DIGITAL PR DIRECTOR

Leanne has over a decade of experience across SEO strategy, content marketing and digital PR. She has worked for a range of clients from SMEs to global brands both for agencies and in-house. She has a 2:1 upper class hons. degree in Media Studies from Manchester Metropolitan University and founded freelance SEO and digital PR business Search etc. in 2023.

LinkedIn profile here.

The post The Do’s and Don’ts of Nailing Halloween Digital PR appeared first on Search etc..

In the world of content marketing for SEO a lot has changed over the years. As tactics evolve and algorithms update, it can be confusing as to what works in 2023. To help I’ve broken down some common content marketing myths that still are believed in the SEO world, take a look:

1. I need to post a lot of blogs frequently

It’s commonly misunderstood that because Google and search engines like sites who are publishing fresh content this means you must post all the time to keep momentum. This is definitely not the case and quality should always come before quantity if you are writing content with the aim of ranking for keywords and driving organic traffic. Google has become sophisticated in understanding relevancy and the helpful content update has reinforced the importance of posting content that is useful to humans first and foremost.

2. My blogs should only be about the products I sell or my business

To develop a multi-funnel content marketing strategy you should aim to create content which targets users at all consideration stages of their buying journey.

Using blogs as a top-funnel informational hub which discusses topics relevant to your business is a great starting point to grow your organic visibility and brand awareness. You should look to build out content which answers questions your ideal customers are asking. What is important is to create content you have the authority to comment on, within the realm of your audience’s secondary interests but still suitable for your expertise. This means don’t give driving advice for winter if your business sells fashion accessories, stick to what you know and your website relevancy will be rewarded in your SEO efforts.

3. Blogs can’t generate ROI

A common concern for business owners is that blogs aren’t contributing to the bottom line and delivering ROI. This is certainly not the case all the time and it’s important to consider long-term impact of blogs for SEO growth. Whilst you should be in the know and KPI your blog strategy accordingly, it is possible for the right type of blogs to drive sales in addition to rankings or top-funnel traffic.

For ecommerce brands, creating blogs which rank and have an active audience can inspire and influence these regular readers to buy your products if you create quality buying guides which assist them in decision making. It is also important to know that many blogs aren’t designed to drive direct sales however, it is important to set out the right intent in your blog content strategy in the first instance and measure success correctly for your goals.

4. There’s no point having a blog for my business site

If not utilised correctly, it is possible your blog isn’t driving traffic or awareness of your brand. However, employing a targeted organic strategy will deliver results to suit your business aims. All you need is the right expertise to steer you in the right direction.

5. My category pages don’t matter

For those who understand the importance of SEO content strategy it is very common for key pages like category pages to be ignored or overlooked. A lot of agencies and marketers become embedded in creating blogs for top-funnel traffic and never progress beyond this to the point where they are targeting more commercial opportunities.

Category pages should act as a supporting way to help users narrow down their search and give information that helps to make a buying or conversion decision. Much thought should be put into how information is displayed, how products are accessed from these pages and how users can filter down options to find what they are looking for. Leaving prospective customers with uncertainty at this stage could lose you a conversion.

6. Bounce rate is the most important metric

In my 10 years of industry experience I have lost count of the number of businesses who overly worry about the bounce rate of a page. For some it becomes the single most important metric to them, ignoring all other positive signs of website growth.

There are many varying factors that can play a part in why your bounce rate is declining and it isn’t something that businesses need to worry about overall. Say you have massively increased traffic to a page, more users can mean more drop-offs but you still have more people spending time on your page and may have more interactions, average time spent or other metrics signalling growth but if you only look at one metric in isolation you will convince yourself things are in decline.

7. My organic content traffic should be increasing every month

This is another common concern that businesses need not worry about. In most businesses, seasonality plays a huge role. There will naturally be times when more or less people are in market to purchase your product, this can be impacted by time of year, weather, seasonal habits such as school holidays or Christmas. As a business you can use SEO data to your advantage, pre-empt the seasonal habits and demand for your products and work your strategy accordingly. You should also compare year-on-year or like-for-like reporting to give a better picture of how traffic is stacking up versus similar periods of seasonality in the past.

Hopefully this advice is useful, if you are interested in support for your brand website’s SEO or content marketing efforts, get in touch using the form below for a quote.

Leanne Vause

SEO & DIGITAL PR DIRECTOR

Leanne has over a decade of experience across SEO strategy, content marketing and digital PR. She has worked for a range of clients from SMEs to global brands both for agencies and in-house. She has a 2:1 upper class hons. degree in Media Studies from Manchester Metropolitan University and founded freelance SEO and digital PR business Search etc. in 2023.

LinkedIn profile here.

The post 7 Content Marketing Myths that are Commonly Believed appeared first on Search etc..

Whilst it’s important to set your own path as a brand developing a marketing strategy there is still a lot you can learn from evaluating your competitors. Reviewing competitor activity and consistently benchmarking yourself in relevant ways is crucial to a well-informed marketing strategy. Today Digital PR Manager James Lavery shares his advice for effective competitor analysis in digital PR.

What are the biggest missed opportunities where brands or PRs may not be using competitor research effectively?

Brands often look at what their competitors are doing from a product and services point of view, but don’t look into what they’re saying and how they’re communicating it.

If a brand’s business goal was to drive more media attention and website traffic to specific products/product pages, then it might be tempting to just pitch the product to the media. But rather than just relying on the obvious tactic, assess what topics and talking points there are around the product/service. How are competitors contributing to relevant publications who cover these types of stories?

Make a note of how competitors are pitching information, too. Are they creating bespoke creative pieces on-site? Are they sharing internal news? Are they launching surveys? What styles of outreach work best for this particular industry?

What makes good competitor research analysis?

I don’t think there’s any uniform, one-size fits all approach as the business goals of our brand will dictate what types of things we include. But a solid foundation would be to split your competitor analysis into what competitors are doing well, and could be doing better.

You might also want to include insights from organic competitors, rather than just market competitors, as market competitors are not necessarily always competing with our brand in Google rankings.

Remember that the brand you’re working with may not have as thorough an understanding of PR or SEO as you, so simplify complex language in a way that allows them to understand how competitors are/aren’t executing the correct PR strategy, and how our brand could use these learnings to achieve goals.

How can you use PR competitor learnings to pivot a strategy?

When a PR strategy hasn’t gone the way I want it to, my first action is to try and repurpose existing information to secure quick wins.

Looking at where competitors have secured placements can allow us to find examples of publications or contacts missing from our media lists that we can easily pitch to. 

You might also want to look at stories your competitors have contributed to before. Is there anything new that your brand already has available (in the form of a blog post, a pre-written comment, data, etc.) that could provide additional value to these stories? If you know a topic already has media interest, then it’s fine to look into it again so long as you’re contributing a fresh take.

If your brand is B2C/ecommerce, then it’s likely that you’ll want to appear in ‘best of’ or ‘top 10 top products’ listicle type articles. If you can spot any articles that get republished every year, it can be a good idea to reach out to the writers and try to get your brand featured ahead of time. This will be particularly effective if you spot that your competitors aren’t doing this proactively.

Remember that not all competitors will be incorporating SEO strategy into their PR, so spot opportunities for where you might be able to outperform them here if traditional PR tactics aren’t working:

• Flag broken backlinks to key commercial pages
• Chase journalists for unlinked brand mentions within coverage
• Approach charities, organisations, accreditation bodies or partnerships that your brand is part of and ask them to link back to your brand if they aren’t already 

What types of things should PRs look for in competitor analysis?

PRs should look for examples of:

• Where competitors have made use of expert insights and commentary to add value to trending topics
• On-site content with newsworthy hooks
• Fresh data that has wide appeal
• Influencer or blogger collaborations
• Product placements
• Promotion of events and internal news

However, don’t just look at things competitors are doing well. We can often get inspiration by looking at missed opportunities from competitors. For instance, some analysis might show a competitor is getting placements on relevant sites but not reaching out to journalists to get a link, meaning they lose out on added SEO impact. Or they could be creating useful, informative content that has potential to get news coverage, but they might be hiding it within downloadable PDFs instead of visualising it on a piece of shareable on-site content. 

Reviewing what doesn’t work can often inspire ideas of how to repurpose something a competitor has done but improve upon it for stronger performance.

How can PR competitor analysis be communicated to clients or brands better?

It’s really important to set client expectations and discuss main KPIs very early on in your working relationship so you can fully understand business goals. This will help to inform what parts of your competitor analysis to share.

For example, if you’ve agreed to do proactive outreach of on-site content alongside off-site opportunities like product outreach or reactive expert comments, then you’ll need to make it clear to clients that your competitor analysis will look at different metrics. This is because results vary depending on the approach of outreach you take. 

Product outreach tends to result in affiliate links, so we might just be looking at the number of placements here. If we can spot a more data-driven campaign launched by competitors, there is likely more granular detail necessary for us to communicate to clients. How many links did it get? What types of websites covered and were they relevant? What datasets did it use and can we repurpose this data for any other campaigns? What is the readership estimates of the publication covering the campaign?

What are your top tips for competitor analysis?

The world of PR is going increasingly more digital, so it’s important that we hone our more technical methods of research:

• Make use of SEO tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush to quickly pull lists of top-ranking content and link opportunities for your brand
• Use Google search operators as a cheat sheet to quickly find campaigns and content focused around specific topic areas
• Sign up to competitor newsletters and PR newsletters to get regular industry campaign insights
• Where possible, work with content and SEO teams to collaboratively audit competitors’ websites. Look for opportunities to improve or create new content on your own brand’s website based on findings that you could then pitch to the media.

How often should PRs be looking at their brands’ key competitors?

Competitor analysis is always more effective when it’s taken with a more holistic approach that takes into account activity over a longer period of time. This is because it gives us a more clear idea of what a competitor’s actual strategy might be. If we spend time looking at competitors every month, it might be harder to see the bigger picture.

I would recommend doing competitor analysis every 3-6 months, depending on the brand’s needs. 

In a tougher economic climate, is there anything for brands to consider to keep a competitive edge for PR?

Understandably, many brands are hesitant to invest in high-risk campaigns. The market is becoming saturated with similar ideas and products, and it can be daunting to spend the money on something that might not cut through the noise.

But not every campaign has to break the bank. Staying reactive and being able to quickly provide comment or data with minimal sign-off or turnaround time is by far the best way of being able to keep a competitive edge. Brands should prioritise improving their ways of working to ensure they can quickly respond to media requests.

My personal experience is that comments or data that I can turn around within 24 hours is significantly more likely to secure a relevant placement.

One top tip is to audit journalist requests relevant to your brand’s expertise and compare these with competitor coverage – you might spot that competitors aren’t contributing to a lot of potential opportunities. This allows you to prepare responses far in advance on repeatedly appearing topics that you know competitors likely aren’t responding to. 

What is important to consider when comparing brands to other brands?

Some brands have such a huge market presence that they don’t need to throw themselves into reactive newsjacking and disruptive creative campaigns, as they can still remain visible. However, smaller brands should view this as an opportunity to invest into tactics overlooked by their larger rivals, as it can help them reach audiences and acquire online visibility that their competitors miss out on.

On the flip side of this, some bigger competitors have a very robust PR strategy and launch impressive campaigns that have clear performance goals. While it can be tempting to mimic these, we have to be realistic about budgets. Communicate clearly what is going to be realistic for your brand – how can we use elements of high-investment campaigns to achieve our own goals without needing to exceed resources?

Any other advice you have on competitor analysis in digital PR?

Where possible, provide additional insights into campaigns being launched within your brand’s industry space that are relevant to your client’s expertise. These won’t necessarily be campaigns launched by competitors, but the coverage and media exposure they get will still be worth looking at and sometimes can actually provide more useful than studying competitors with no clear PR strategy in place.

If you’re interested in reading more, take a look at the content and digital PR sections.

James Lavery

Digital PR Manager

James is a Digital PR Manager based in the UK. He has worked across digital PR, content marketing and communications for 6 years in-house and agency side.

The post How to Effectively Learn from Your Digital PR Competitors appeared first on Search etc..

In the world of digital PR relevancy is everything. We asked Freelance Digital PR Manager Jennifer Jordan, of Jennifer Jordan PR, how PRs can achieve maximum relevancy.

Why is relevancy so important for digital PRs?

Relevancy is key when ideating for campaigns as you have to consider the area in which you’d like to build your client’s authority, alongside factoring in where their potential client base is. If your content campaign idea is focused on a completely different industry to your client, with not even a wider industry connection (for example, leisure or technology) then you’re missing a big opportunity to build authority in this area.

From a Google perspective, search engines use relevancy of links and content when it comes to understanding a website – therefore, it plays a big role in ranking factors. If the content and links are aligned with the website offering, then there’s a greater chance of your client being seen by their target audience. If your client wishes to rank for certain topics or keywords, this can be your starting point.

What tips and tricks would you recommend for relevancy in campaigns?

Firstly, I look at our target publications and what content they cover, as this can be a good indicator that we are on the right track with our campaign ideas. If your client’s dream publication is Ideal Home, spend some time researching the type of home related coverage they prefer to take – is it future or current trend pieces? Or lists based on data? 

It’s vital to consider the target demographic of your content campaign as it also needs to be relevant to them. Ask yourself if your target audience will find this piece of content useful or interesting.

I’m a big fan of creating mind maps when ideating for campaigns. This means that you can start with the client industry (or industries if they cover multiple) in the centre of your thought process, and work outwards with your ideas, in order to visually keep yourself on track with relevancy. If you’re straying too far away from the client niche or industry, you can go back to the starting point and take another look. 

Finally, keeping up with the current newscycle is imperative for keeping proactive and reactive campaigns relevant. Pitching a campaign about dealing with hayfever symptoms at the end of August when the health journalists have moved on to more autumnal topics will be a waste of your time. You could focus your time on newsjacking current trending issues if your client has expertise in the area being discussed in order to provide industry opinion and gain further authority.

How can PRs draw a line between a related topic and irrelevant topic?

Simply put, just because the topic is related to your client industry, it may not mean that it is a relevant campaign to their brand and their objectives. For example, a homeware client would be great for home related campaigns, however they probably should not provide advice on checking your boiler or guttering!  

How can PRs better communicate to brands the balance between topical PR campaigns and keeping them on-brand?

Journalists will seek experts in the actual field for their articles in order to preserve accuracy and authority on the subject they are writing about. Pitching a fashion brand spokesperson as an expert on sleep to a journalist will not be considered and you can ultimately risk tarnishing the client’s reputation, and even your relationship with journalists.

How can brands be clearer with PRs on how to identify relevant brand audiences?

Ask if your freelancer or digital PR agency is available for an onboarding call or if they have a discovery document in place already to help them learn more about the brand before tackling any work. This sets out expectations early on and showcases brand objectives, messaging and dream publications. Sharing customer demographics data is also a big help when identifying an audience and will signal where the audience is likely to be online and what content they may be seeking. 

What other advice do you have for PRs?

I’d always recommend doing some thorough competitor research analysis to discover what campaigns are already being done in the similar industry to your client, and where they are gaining coverage. Use this to inform your strategy and target the same publications, and look at titles where key players in the industry are getting links and where your clients currently are not featured. This should also assist with campaign relevancy.

If you’re interested in reading more, take a look at the content and digital PR sections.

Jennifer Jordan

DIGITAL PR MANAGER

Jennifer has worked at top agencies for 8+ years in the North East of England. As a freelancer she provides SEO content writing and digital PR services to brands.

The post How to Maximise Relevant Targeting with Your Digital PR Campaigns appeared first on Search etc..

Gabriella Smith, Freelance Digital PR Consultant of Gabriella Lucy PR, shares some expert tips on how reactive PR doesn’t have to be last minute.

Newsjacking and reactive PR are buzzwords you’ll often hear when discussing digital PR strategies. They’re tactics that should absolutely be in your press office toolkit, to ensure you’re constantly jumping on to relevant topics when stories break in the news. 

These tactics are also key to building trust around your brand with your target audience and new customers, whilst building relationships with key journalists so they know who to come to next time they’re looking for an expert to comment on a certain topic. Reactive PR also shows the world that you are super relatable, and have an awareness of the current trends. 

Whilst a lot of newsjacking and reactive PR relies heavily on reacting to trending stories, which, unfortunately cannot be predicted ahead of time, there is a way to get ahead with your reactive PR strategies – by implementing ‘planned reactive’ tactics. 

By looking ahead at key dates such as national days, releases of annual reports and seasonal events, you can draft content ahead of time and (hopefully) be featured in the press before your competitors.  

How to introduce ‘planned reactive’ tactics to your PR strategy 

• First up, identify some key themes that you can offer expertise around as a brand. Consider why these themes are relevant to your brand and the services or products you offer. It’s important not to stray too far away from your offering. As much as we’d like to be, we can’t all be experts on everything – and journalists will only include a comment from a brand that they consider to be much more relevant to that topic. 

• Identify key dates and plot these out into a content calendar. For example, if your client offers training in education or tech, these are often topics that are featured in the government’s spring/autumn budgets. A couple of weeks before the date, ask your client to predict what they think will be announced in the budget. As experts in their field, they’re highly likely to have a viewpoint on this. Work with your client to draft a comment, providing their unique stance on the announcement. If there’s a possibility the announcement may have two outcomes, draft two comments and then on the morning of the announcement – you can push out the most relevant one to press. 

• To flesh out your content calendar, use sites such as Awareness Days to identify national days coming up, ONS for relevant reports being released, and consider regular seasonal events (such as hayfever season, Easter, Christmas, Black Friday, bank holidays etc).  

• Consider what your unique stand point is as an expert. Do you have any customer data that can show a change in behaviour around a certain topic, or have you seen a huge increase in product sales compared to the same period last year? Using data in your content can give you a competitive edge, which other brands may not have access to. 

• Don’t try to cram in too many key brand messages. Whilst it’s absolutely important to comment on topics that are relevant to your brand, this is not a sales pitch. Think of this as an in-direct selling tactic, by raising awareness of your brand to a mass audience. 

• Consider any existing content you can repurpose to save time. If you have any relevant blog posts that can be adapted and pushed out to press ahead of a key date, take advantage of that! 

Once you have all of your key dates plotted out, it’s best to get your content ready to be pushed out to the press a minimum of a week ahead of the key date. That way, you’ll be getting ahead of competitors, and can give yourself plenty of time to follow up with journalists closer to the date itself! 

If you’re interested in reading more, take a look at the content and digital PR sections.

Gabriella Smith

DIGITAL PR CONSULTANT

Gabriella has 10 years of experience across digital PR and has worked for leading agencies in Leeds. She has delivered strategies for household name brands across a range of sectors.

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If you’re new to SEO or even digital marketing in general, we’re here to help. There are some simple aspects you can have an understanding of which will help you put efforts into the right places.

What You Need to Know

Lets start with the basics. SEO is short for Search Engine Optimisation, put simply this is the results you see in search engines which aren’t paid ads. When you google or search something on a search engine the results you get are based on a multitude of factors. How you search a word or phrase can impact the results you receive, we call these keywords.

Other factors that play a part are the technical make-up of your site, it’s relevancy, backlinks (more on this later), content onsite, positioning versus competitors, site history and how established it is in the respective sector and much much more. A host of varying factors are taken into account by Google and it uses an algorithm to decide how your website may or may not appear for certain keyword phrases. This is the same for other search engines but we primarily focus on Google.

Google is the biggest search engine and responsible for most traffic driven through people using search engines. We call this organic traffic as it is traffic driven more naturally than a paid for ad. So why does this matter to a business? A 2014 independent study showed organic traffic made up 51% of major websites traffic (traffic being people visiting your website), whereas social media drove just 5%.

If you can harness the power of organic search then you can effectively drive not only volumes of traffic to your website but also make sure the people finding your website are super relevant. It is to be expected a portion of visitors you drive to your website will convert into customers if you are doing this in the right way. Read on to see how SEO can be used specifically to drive sales.

The Basics

You’ll hear some frequently used terms in the industry so here’s a quick guide to help understand what’s what:

SEO
Search Engine Optimisation: the method and practice of using marketing tactics to make a website more visible in search engines for prospective customers

Keywords
The words, sentences or phrases people may use when searching something in a search engine

Backlinks
Websites usually hyperlink to other websites (where you click text to take you from one to another). When websites link to your site we call these backlinks. These can be used to improve SEO performance

Organic Traffic
Visitors coming to and starting sessions on your website (periods of time browsing) who have found your site via search engines like Google

Content
Pages, blogs or other types of articles on your website. Content can be produced for different reasons to further boost traffic to your site and engage customers. Content can be planned around a keyword strategy to target terms which work well for SEO

Digital PR
Using a range of PR tactics and strategy to drive results for SEO. This can be focussed on backlinks and getting links from relevant, authoritative websites in order to boost your SEO performance of your site

Rank
On average, a rank is where your site is shown in Google search results. There are 10 organic website listings per page of Google search results, meaning if you rank 10 or under, you are appearing on page 1 of Google and are likely to drive more search volume for people searching this term than competitors listed on page 2 onwards.

Search Volume
Google and other tools estimate how many people on average search per month for a keyword or key phrase. This number is the estimated search volume, meaning if everyone who Googled that word/phrase visited your site, this could be the number of prospective customers you can target. Not everyone who searches your keyword will click your website in Google results, so it is important to expect a small percentage of your search volume is a realistic figure – this will be dependent on your site content/products, the keyword, the intent of the customer and where you are ranking. The search volume figures themselves are also not an exact science, different tools estimate wildly different volumes for particular keywords as exact figures aren’t available from search engines. This is where having an expert SEO marketer comes in to decipher the varying tool statistics and put this into an actionable plan that will drive results.

Tips for Local SEO

This is a key point we have seen businesses fall down on for simple reasons. When someone begins to look at keywords to target for a business it’s typical to see mistakes with targeting keywords that are way too competitive for smaller businesses to compete.

Say you’re a florist and you want people looking to buy roses to buy from your local flower shop, it might seem a natural first choice to look at keywords relating to the product. You might look at a basic keyword such as ‘roses’ which can have hundreds of thousands of monthly searches in the UK alone. As the prospective traffic is so high, every major player in this market will be targeting this term and they can invest more infrastructure and resources into securing top rankings for large volume terms. According to Ahrefs, only 5.7% of pages will rank in the top 10 search results within a year of publication.

The other issue is, even if you managed to rank and drive high traffic to your site for a top keyword like this, most of it will be irrelevant users. If you’re a local business especially, you wouldn’t advertise in cities you don’t have stores so this works the exact same way. You will have far better success targeting your strategy to small search volume keywords which are being used by highly relevant people in your local area, people who are also in a position to buy your product or service.

Say you are a Manchester business, you may want to look at targeting the broader north west of England. You might decide to also target different parts of Manchester, such as: Bolton, Salford, Trafford etc. It makes sense to have a keyword strategy (as part of a broader organic strategy) which brings together your products, your customer intent and your location to find the sweet spot to target.

With the right strategy and expertise, you can find your niche online and drive relevant customers to your site. If you are looking for support with content marketing or digital PR for your site, please get in touch.

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