Hope you don't mind me asking Alex but what is your main driver for PR - are you looking to gain traffic, or increase brand awareness for future marketing / advertising efforts, or credibility from articles and features on established media platforms ..... or all the above?
Do you find that £4k will see a ROI immediately (as in a CPC campaign should) or is this a longer term strategy and £4k investment part of a larger spend piece?
It’s all of the above really. Just to give things some context, I’m managing the PR for the company I work for part time as the SEO/SMO Exec. I’m not currently distributing PRs for my own projects, but I will do once the time is right to implement a PR strategy because I see it as a valuable and necessary part of my marketing strategy.
So the overall goals I’m working to are to improve search rankings for specific terms, increase brand awareness, develop our credibility amongst our target audience, increase traffic, increase sales and, where relevant, encourage other actions based on the news we’re distributing.
For example, we’re currently holding workshops across Europe and the US. The PR was used to inform and encourage a specific customer group to sign up and attend the workshops. We first used them to inform potential customers about us and of the workshops, then we used the media to show that we had credibility (because we were widely reported).
However, as an indirect benefit, some people picked up the story and linked back to us which helped our SEO strategy.
If we were looking at this as a link building exercise then yes we gained a few links which is great. However, the customer engagement and reputation development were worth far more and since the release went out, direct and organic traffic has been higher and we’ve signed new customers.
Before signing up to this package, we trialled a month of PRs and actually we improved dramatically for specific keywords. But this only happened when external sources picked up the story, several PRs didn’t really have much effect on rankings, although they improved traffic and sales. So even though many of the news outlets nofollowed the links, our customers still got the news and acted as desired.
In terms of ROI, PR is part of a much bigger communications strategy to achieve the goals above. I’m using it as an SEO tool, monitoring PR distribution against keyword rankings and will adapt content based on SEO goals, but this is just one of many things we're using them for. We’re also looking at patterns in sales, traffic, perception towards the brand, whether the PR affected the purchasing decision etc.
So given the above, PRs do work for SEO, but I feel that they shouldn't be seen solely as an SEO tool, especially with many sites noindexing/nofollowing content. If you looked at it just as SEO you wouldn't have a particularly good ROI, but when you consider brand awareness, credibility, sales, traffic etc then I think they're a great tool.
We do see some immediate ROI, but since some of the goals are around perception and awareness we’re looking at the long-term picture.
Sorry about the essay, feel free to let me know if you have any more questions.
