Webinar Transcript: Managing SEO and Online PR

DECEMBER 1, 2009

Bill: Bill Barnes – Host
Greg: Greg Jarboe – Presenter

Bill: Hello and welcome to Enquiro’s B2B Expert Series of Webinars. My name is Bill Barnes. I am the Executive Vice President of Enquiro and host of these webinars. This is our 18th in the series and we’re delighted to present another one for you. I know you’re going to love this one today. Our expert is well respected in his field and I know you’re going to enjoy his presentation.
Before we get to that, I wanted to fill you in a little bit on a couple of things. First of all, I wanted to tell you a bit about Enquiro, the host of these webinars and the company behind them, the one that brings together all these experts to share information. Enquiro is a search marketing agency, which we do both SEO and paid search. We have a real deep understanding of user behaviour to help our clients achieve maximum results with their search marketing initiatives, and that deep understanding comes from a basis in research. We have our own research department and we do a lot of it.

You’ve probably seen whitepapers, which are available for download, that explain a lot of intricacies into user behaviour. Our latest research project is The BuyerSphere Project, and The BuyerSphere Project is one that really focuses in on our target market, which is B2B companies, and helps companies understand how businesses buy from businesses. And delighted to say that The BuyerSphere Project, the book is now available on Amazon, so please feel free to look that up and get yourself a copy. The author is our CEO here, Gord Hotchkiss, and it’s really brought up a lot of interesting discussion around B2B and online. And again, we’ve done multiple webinars about that with accompanying whitepapers. Please go to Enquiro.com to download those and take a look.

The other thing that I wanted to mention to you before we get on to our expert today, Greg Jarboe, is I wanted to talk a little bit about an event that we have coming up. It takes the B2B Expert Series and brings it face-to-face. And we’ve started this series in a way that I think has been a lot of fun and we’re doing another one coming up on Thursday, December 10th. If we could look at the next slide, that would be great.

Thursday, December 10th, starting at 7:45 in the morning and running till about 1 o’clock in the afternoon, if you’re in the Bay Area at all, this is near our office in Redwood City at the Sofitel Hotel. It’s a great event. In addition to seeing some unbelievable experts speak – Graham Mudd from comScore is there with a keynote, Greg Hotchkiss of course will be there with a keynote as well talking about the BuyerSphere – and then we’ve got a panel that just opens up and talks about all sorts of B2B marketing initiatives – Leslie Hernandez from Google will be joining us; Cody Young from ReachForce; Jon Miller, a big contributor to The BuyerSphere Project, from Marketo is there; another contributor, [Matthias Bloom 03:13] from Covario will be there; and [Patricia Hearny] from Business.com as well. All of them on a panel, just open forum, letting you ask anything you want.
So if you are in the Bay Area on December the 10th, we invite you to join us. In addition to all those great speakers, we’ll feed you breakfast, we’ll feed you lunch, and we’ll give you a copy of the BuyerSphere book. Normally it’s $199 for one of our face-to-face events, but for listening today, $97 if you type in the promotional code that you see being displayed right now.

So with that business out of the way, let’s move on to today’s webinar and meet Greg Jarboe who will be speaking today. I do want to remind you as well, during this webinar at any point if a question comes to mind please use the question box with your GoToMeeting box there, just feel free to ask it any time and we’ll address those at the end, or of course there’s also Twitter, which in addition to the questions you could start your own conversation on the side, which has been very helpful.

Greg Jarboe is the President and co-founder of SEO-PR – an SEO firm and public relations agency, they’ve got offices in Boston and San Francisco – and he’s a member of the Market Motive faculty. He is a frequent speaker at SES conferences, MarketingSherpa summits. Where else have I run into you, Greg? Bulldog Reporter events.

Greg: And… My God. Yeah. [laughs]

Bill: All over the place. He is also the news search, blog search, and PR correspondent for Search Engine Watch blog. He has 25 years of experience in corporate communications, marketing, and search engine optimization at Lotus Development Corp., Ziff Davis, and other companies. I always enjoy watching Greg speak when I get a chance to see him and I’m absolutely delighted that he has agreed to come on and be our expert today.
So let’s move on now to today’s presentation, “Managing SEO and Online PR” with Greg Jarboe. Greg.

Greg: Well, thank you, Bill. I appreciate the warm remarks. And… Whoops! We’re going a little faster than I thought, so let’s go back one.

One of the things that I want to talk about is the radical changes that are taking place in online public relations. Just a couple of weeks ago, we issued an optimized press release for Starwood Hotels and Resorts, and one of the things that stunned me as we were sort of looking through the places that had covered the story, we discovered that the New York Times had not just covered the story, they had picked up the press release verbatim and included in it the anchor text links that we had put in it to the new hotel that was being announced. And I don’t know how you feel about this, but to me this was a new phenomena, this is not something I have seen before, and it certainly begins to illustrate some of the things that are shifting around in the online public relations world.

So one of the things that we want to talk today is about how companies can create buzz, manage a reputation, outperform the competition, do a variety of things by taking advantage of these new and different changes. One of the other things that certainly has transformed the landscape is the advent of Google Universal Search back in May of 2007, and one of the things that that has done is it incorporates video and news results and image results in the regular Google Web Search results when they are appropriate. So next week in Chicago, the SES Conference is being held and we’re doing public relations for that particular event, and one of the things that’s sort of worth noting is that if you did a search for SES Chicago 2009, you not only would find the web results and some blog results but you’d also find news results along with an image in Google on page 1, above the fold. And again, these are the kinds of things that your online PR people should be thinking about, because this is now happening much more frequently.

To sort of give you sort of an overview of the various and sundry things that you might want to think about doing with some of these new phenomenas, we’re going to talk a little bit about reputation management and certainly how Universal Search and the way news search engines index news and how video has come along to impact all of that. We will explain not only how SEO ties into public relations but how public relations ties into SEO, and so this is one of those things where although they may be separate departments in your business, they are departments that should at least have a brown bag lunch together because they have a lot in common and should be talking to each other. We’ll talk about how video should be if it isn’t already playing a role in PR for your industry. Importantly, we will talk about how you can measure the impact of all these opportunities, because if it’s not measurable then it becomes kind of a “We’ll do it because it’s supposed to be good,” but you can actually measure the results – that certainly accelerates adoption a lot faster. And finally I’ll share some thoughts on the so-called interplay of social media buzz and online PR. There are a lot of theories that float around out there. Not all of them are valid and we’ll examine some of them.

So let’s start off with the reputation management issue. I don’t know if there’s anyone on the call from Stork Craft. If so, my condolences because this screen shot was just taken a few days ago. If you did a search in Google for the company name or the brand name, you not only would have found news results for Stork Craft at the top of the page above the government recall information and well above the company information, and then you would have also found a YouTube video about the Stork Craft cribs being recalled. And if this is your brand, God bless you and good luck. You no longer are automatically going to rank number 1 for a brand name if there is breaking news about your brand, and if that breaking news is accompanied with images or video you could find yourself having to work overtime just to make sure that when people are searching for you they find your side of the story. Although it’s unclear what your side of the story would be if your product’s just been recalled and it’s the largest recall in history.
Nevertheless, one of the reasons why the presence of images and video is so significant is demonstrated by this research which actually comes from Enquiro. Back in 2007 they did some of their classic eye-tracking studies, and this one was on a hypothetical result, but nevertheless it sort of shows the impact of universal search. If an image, and that’s where the letter A is – this happens to be I think an image of an iPod – turns up in even position 4 of results, even though you are not ranked number 1, 2, or 3, the eye is drawn immediately to the image on the page of results. That’s where it goes first. Where the eye goes second is to the text next to the image, and only third does the eye then go up and scan the top 3 listings. This is the impact of Universal Search, this is the impact of having video and images turn up in those Universal Search results. It basically transforms where you need to be in order to be seen first. For lots of years, ranking number 1 was the goal. Now you can rank number 1, 2, or 3 and still not be the first thing that people look at, so this is a significant change.
Now how often does this happen? More often than you might suspect – 58% of people according to a survey conducted by comScore said that they remembered seeing Universal Search results when they were conducting searches. The most common types are video and news followed by images, and fourth there with the little circle around it, “multiple” means that you’re seeing video and news, or video and images, or news and images all at the same time in the results. And so this is happening more and more and it’s one of the reasons why our world is changing. And you will definitely have somebody in your department who says, “I’m in charge of SEO” and they’re optimizing web pages on your site, and you’ll say, “Terrific. Well, who’s in charge of when video turns up in the results?” And everyone will look at each other and they’ll shrug their shoulders because “Well, that’s not my job, is it?” And the answer is “Well, it needs to be somebody’s job,” and it needs to be somebody’s job pretty soon because increasingly those video or news results are being found in web results too.

Now one of the other things we’re going to take a look at is how you can take advantage of all of this through online public relations. The classic way to do this is what is called press release optimization. And here you write your press release in such a way that it includes relevant search terms in the headline, in the lead paragraph, in some of the blanks that are in the press release, and the reason you do this is because when a search is conducted in let’s say Google News, one of the things that you can find – and this is a search for the term “baby photo contest” – the press release ranks number 1 in the results, the image that was embedded in that press release also ranks in Google News, and if somebody is looking for information, it turns out this press release ranked above a story in the Chicago Tribune, partly because it was a little more up to date. It had come out April 2nd and the Tribune story had come out April 1st, but with a single day’s advantage in recency, this press release trumped what one would consider a mainstream media article ranking for this particular term.