Planning for SEO and PR Success

The message here is simple one – there has to be a good level of planning in order to successfully carry out any really successful SEO, PR, or combination of the two. Why? In order to know whether you have succeeded or failed you will need some kind of measurable indicators of this.

Online PR incorporating SEO will need planning and preparation on a number of different levels. The measurement structure you put in place will governed in the first instance be by the aims, objectives, and outcomes you require. There is also the scope for unexpected results, good and possibly bad. A realistic audit of your communications and network universe can often be good place to start in effective planning and measuring of communications.

The Importance of Measurements

Active promotional activity either has direct financial costs, costs in terms of time / manpower, or even opportunity costs. As such a return on investment (ROI) should always be expected. The wide variety of social media, websites, blogs and other online promotional media and channels which can be used to spread the PR message requires an increasing number and diversity of measuring tools and methods to arrive at figure or measure of success. The long life of entries around the web also complicates the measurement situation. The combined efforts of PR and SEO will also make it difficult to separate the exact contribution of each.

Traditional SEO Measurements

The most basic results of effective SEO work have traditionally included increased visitor numbers, and increased number of incoming links. The incoming link numbers however are also part of the effective SEO work itself. Increased enquiries, sales, sign ups, downloads etc are also associated with SEO activity, but can depend on other factors related to an awareness of how to improve conversion and retention rates on web pages e.g. good site architecture, usability navigability etc.

Often associated to an extent with better quality incoming links is not only a higher PageRank™ figure but also the number of pages indexed by Google. Updated and new content e.g. your online PR activity will also hopefully lead to an increased number of indexed pages. By typing site:yourdomain.com into Google you can see which page have been indexed and can compare this to the situation prior to the online PR.

Where SEO, PR and other online promotional activity are concerned, your website statistics package can be augmented by a number of other ways to get some idea of your return investment.

Pay per Click activity to generate visitors still requires a strong element of search engine optimisation to ensure that landing pages are relevant to adverts in order to reduce CPC and increase the CTR. Tracking codes can be used along with comparisons with historical PPC data in order to try and measure increase and uplift.

Other Measurements

Whether using your own or a network of social media routes and contacts via Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, Flickr, MySpace, Digg, YouTube etc, there are ways of measuring your PR mileage. For example there are many websites available for measuring and monitoring all manner of Twitter activity and popularity including twitgraph.com, tweetstats.com, twitaholic.com, tweetreach.com, twitteranalyzer.com, tweetmeme.com, retweetrank.com, twidentify.com, livetweets.net, hottweetwers.com etc.

Websites such as socialmeter and popuri.us and quarkbase can help to measure the popularity of web pages for social book marking and other types of sites.

To measure the effectiveness of PR and associated SEO where forums and blogs are concerned the RSS feed figures e.g. the score indicated in Feed Burner can be one way of measuring this kind of buzz.

There are a large variety of other online and offline measurements which can track the effectiveness of your online PR including measuring the increase in telephone calls, measuring the uplift in affiliate marketing activity and / or coupon redemption and mail order activity. Online PR can generate offline results so you may still need to measure column space achieved, TV or even radio activity associated with the PR.

Return on investment is a therefore a very important indicator of how well your business resources are being used. Putting your business time and effort into SEO and PR activities therefore require at least some effective measuring and monitoring systems, knowledge and routines to be in place.