Have you audited SEO practices around your communication efforts lately? If not, the spring and summer months might be a good time to do so. As such, PRNEWS offers insight from search optimization pros to help.
Most companies conduct SEO audits two to four times a year, according to Business2Community contributor Dave Polykoff. Before hiring an outside firm, consider the firm’s past clients, ask them about its methods, adherence to search engine guidelines, measurement and fee structure.
Post-Pandemic Recap
As Greg Barkley, director of SEO and digital PR at Effective Spend, wrote in these pages, pandemic-era online shopping behaviors likely are here to stay.
So, if your company sells physical products on its website, customers increasingly will expect expedited delivery—such as curbside pickup–as well as Amazon-style product reviews. Search engines will continue to emphasize website usability in page rankings, including e-commerce workflows. Even if you don’t sell physical products on the site, speedy loading and easy navigation are important for SEO.
UTM Tracking
In addition to usability and the old EAT standbys–Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness–all made more complex in an era of misinformation, communicators may want to take the rest of the spring and summer to examine their link-tracking practices.
In a recent edition of his “Almost Timely” missive, digital marketing expert Christopher S. Penn writes about the continued importance of UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) tracking codes, which Google Analytics uses to measure user behavior at websites.
UTM codes, which are code snippets attached to the end of a URL, are used to pinpoint traffic sources to your website. In addition, they may contain keywords and other identifiers.
Like all things in PR (and life), it is crucial for communicators to have goals and questions in mind for UTM tracking to be effective, Penn writes.
PR pros constantly are asked to prove attribution: ‘Where did that traffic come from? Who visited our company’s site after reading an article that my executive was quoted in?’
Using the identifiers in UTMs in concert with Google Analytics helps PR pros give credit where it’s due—whether to social media platforms, an article, e-letter or elsewhere.
UTMs, as Penn jests, are a case of “U Tell Me what to do…That’s the entire purpose: to tell Google Analytics what we want it to do with our data.”
| SEO Lingo to Keep in Your Back Pocket
Analytics folks love acronyms, so it’s great to speak their language, whether you have somebody in-house working on SEO, or you’re engaging an outside firm. Here’s some of the need-to-know:
E.A.T.: Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. PR pros should think like a news organization, backing claims with relevant, trustworthy sources, ensuring Google does not flag their web content for misinformation. Schema: Structured data in a standardized, hierarchical format to help search engines classify a webpage and the information contained in it. Ex.: Recipe > Ingredients > Cook Time > Calories. Schema.org includes a template of structured data that Google uses to ‘enrich’ your result. Rich Results: Standout visual results in the list of sites returned by a search engine, such as cards, panels, images and other information outside of the website name and URL. Title Tag: HTML element that tells Google what your page is about and helps match searchers’ queries to your site. This is what shows up in search engines, but not visually on your webpage. The main keyword you want your page to rank for should appear here. H1 Tag: Like the Title Tag, it tells Google what your page is about, but visually appears as a headline. Your main keyword should also appear here. Source: ’WTF is SEO’ substack
|
Speed, Ease-of-Use Matter More Now
The faster and easier your site is to use, the higher its Google ranking. And that’s truer than ever, says Hannah Kurtz, SEO manager at Verizon.
“With more and more folks leaving their homes, expect your audience to be even more reliant on their smartphone for quick answers,” she says.
Communicators who don’t feel comfortable taking on the tech side of SEO can act as the end user, putting themselves in a user’s shoes to determine if the speed or usability of the site is frustrating. They can then pass that information to SEO professionals heading optimization efforts.
With Google’s upcoming page experience and core web vitals update, things like site speed and user experience (UX), particularly on mobile, have never been more important, Kurtz adds.
Google judges core web vitals by three primary criteria:
- loading;
- interactivity;
- visual stability.
(Read about the Google update here.)
The update, originally set for last month, is expected between mid-June and August.
Google Wants to Keep you on Google
Much like the social platforms’ algorithms deprioritize content from other platforms that would navigate you off of their site, Google increasingly is keeping users on its search results page via rich results: answer boxes, map cards, and ‘people also ask’ questions.
Kurtz points to a recent study that found more than 64 percent of Google searches last year did not result in the user leaving the search results page.
Does this mean communicators should ditch owned media, moving away from a strategy that funnels users to their company’s website? Perhaps, but the alternative may not be as out of one’s control as you might think.
“While this can be a challenge, it’s also a fantastic opportunity to re-think strategy,” Kurtz argues. “Optimizing for these areas within Google itself not only gives your site more visibility on page one, but also helps control the narrative around key audience questions.” (More on which elements to optimize that key ‘structured data’ in the sidebar.)
PR Should Work With SEO
It’s easy to silo SEO’s technical elements in the developer or technical side of your organization, but PR and SEO pros should be coordinating “early and often” as campaigns are rolled out, says Kurtz.
“As article placements, event coverage and speaking engagements are planned, your SEO team will want to optimize the website around themes and keywords related to these moments,” she advises.
In addition, Kurtz says this level of coordination will help ensure that audience members who take to Google to read more are learning about your brand from your website rather than a competitor (yes, despite Google’s play to keep users on its search results page).
Don’t Put Backlinks in the Backseat
While great digital PR can boost name recognition and relevance, it’s also an opportunity to rack up ‘high-quality’ backlinks. These are external sites that link to your owned property, Kurtz says.
Backlinks have long been an SEO ranking factor. And with proper tracking practices “your SEO team can uncover not only where existing backlinks are, but what type of traffic that brings in,” Kurtz says.
A backlink, or inbound link, to your site from another site or vice versa, is helpful for SEO—but quality matters. If you link to untrustworthy sites, it will not benefit your SEO.
Backlinks serve as a “vote of confidence,” telling Google a site deserves higher placement in the ranking food chain, according to Moz.
Make sure the reporter has links to every portion of your site relevant to the story you’re pitching. Website and reputation are linked inextricably, so if the reporter cites your study, expert or product without linking back to your site, your SEO will not benefit.
As Kurtz puts it: “When conducting digital PR efforts, please ask for a backlink with optimized anchor text (the hyperlinked text); your SEO team will thank you!”
Contact: [email protected]