The Secret to Achieving Excellent SEO

By Rosalie Berg, President, Strategic Vantage Marketing & Public Relations

Great SEO. It’s the golden goose of marketing. For most companies, it can be a fabulous source of ongoing leads and credibility.

The problem is, most people don’t know how to best achieve great SEO. They try to build back-links and optimize their websites with meta tags and keywords, and often pay an SEO company a monthly fee in hopes of improving their ranking.

But what SEO companies may not tell you is that there’s a far better way to get great SEO. And this method, much like SEO, is a gift that keeps on giving.

I’m talking about publicity.

Appearing in the press is a game-changer when it comes to SEO. And best of all, a boost in search results can happen very quickly, unlike traditional methods to improve SEO which can take months or years to bear fruit.

So how does publicity help SEO?

The Value of Press Coverage, Multiplied

When your company appears in an article published by a well-known outlet like The Wall Street Journal or a trade publication like National Mortgage News, all eyes are on you. In addition to getting a huge audience for your story, appearing in the publication gives your company legitimacy as an innovator, a thought leader and as a company that others should watch.

The publication’s excellent search ranking will benefit you, too, as articles from a reputable media outlet typically appear high in online searches.

Pages of Search Results

When someone goes online to look for your company, your company website should ideally appear in the first page of search results. But that’s not enough. The first pages of search results should also be filled with articles of positive press coverage on your company.

This is key, because prospective clients and future employees want to read what third parties say about your business—not just what you write about yourself. After all, most people make a big part of their decisions based on their online research.

Trending Topics

What about when someone doesn’t know about your company? Publicity makes a huge difference there, too. When they search terms like “mortgage outsourcing” or “mortgage lender in Seattle,” articles that were published online that include those words will appear in search results. And if your company was cited in those articles, they will learn about your company, too.

Fresh Content

When search engines rank your company’s website and decide whether it will appear on the first or fifth page of search results, one major factor they consider is how regularly you update your website with valuable content. So how do you continually bring fresh new content to your website? Publishing excerpts of your coverage in the press or your latest blogs on the home page of your website is a surefire way to do this.

Redirecting Attention

Publicity also helps deflect attention from negative news. Maybe your company was fined by a regulator or had a lawsuit filed against it. Filling the internet with positive publicity on your firm will push down negative stories over time so that they’re no longer on first or second-page search results. The newer, positive publicity will focus readers’ attention on news you want them to read.

An Important Clarification

When I speak of “publicity” or “press,” I am not referring to paying to appear in unknown websites or pay-for-play outlets with low readership. These outlets often reach out to executives with opportunities to appear on a top 10 list or to be profiled in their advertorial-filled publication. But there is always a cost involved, and these publications don’t usually have strong readership or high online ranking.?The media outlets that will help your SEO are legitimate ones with thousands of readers and that won’t require payment to be published.

Public relations—which includes publicity—is the practice of managing, improving and promoting the distribution of information for a company or entity. Companies leverage public relations as a means of attracting attention to their companies, educating the public, controlling the narrative of what is being said about them, and even redirecting attention away from areas of concern.

Publicity, much like sales, is something companies should be doing on an ongoing basis, year-round. It is so invaluable to a company’s growth and public perception that, in most cases, it’s unwise to go without.

But how do you produce an ongoing stream of publicity to keep in the minds of prospects and fuel your SEO? Trying to do it with your own internal marketing or communications resources tends to generate disappointing results. It’s far too difficult for internal staff to do what public relations agencies can do. Check out our blog?“Public Relations 101: Misconceptions About Publicity That Will Hurt Your Business”?which explains the pros and cons of doing PR in-house versus having an agency do it.

Ready to throw some gasoline on your sales efforts? Contact us [email protected]?or call (305) 971-6239 and we’ll show you how.