(SearchLine) What would you say to getting the Web traffic equivalent of $11,500 in pay-per-click advertising for $779? Thought so.
It can be done, if you can produce a press release that’s optimized for the news search engines. That was the message behind one of the panel discussions at this year’s ad:tech Chicago conference, “Making Search Even More Efficient”, which laid out the rationale behind optimizing public relations content in order to get it found by Yahoo! News and Google News.
That rationale starts with the fact that many people are searching today specifically on the news search tabs. Even when they don’t, the search engines often include relevant Web news items in tabs called “one-boxes”.
As iProspect CEO Fredrick Marckini pointed out, these appear at the top of the search results pages—often one for news items and another for relevant local search results, in addition, of course, to the sponsored listings at the top of the page.
A company with a Web page ranked fifth or sixth in organic search on Google or Yahoo! can quadruple its Web traffic by moving into first or second position on its keywords, Marckini said. But with those news and local one-boxes preempting the top page locations, “That begs the question: which position is number one?” he said. “If you’re not optimizing your content to be in all of these tabs for those occasions when they’re pulled and pre-empt the actual search results, you’re missing maybe the biggest opportunity in search.”
Optimizing to appear in those “one box” slots might be easier than optimizing for ranking in the general search results, and perhaps just as effective at getting your content or product noticed by searchers. There’s much less competition among news documents on Google or Yahoo! than among the general run of Web pages on a topic. Marckini pointed to a dummy press release optimized for the search term “designer fashion”. A Web page trying to get into the top ten general search slots for that keyword would have to struggle against 4 or 5 million documents; a press release, iProspect found, only had to contend with 352 news items, sorted for relevance and timeliness.
If it’s well-optimized, your press release has a good chance of being in the number one position [in the news one-box],” Marckini said. “As it gets older, it will move down the search results. But don’t worry, because as your release ages, coverage that results from the release may appear above it.”
Marckini quoted comScore Networks findings that the Yahoo! News tab alone now gets about 29 million searches a month. That compares to nine million a month for general search on Ask.com. “The Yahoo! and Google news tabs are pretty significant search engines in their own right,” he said. “You want your content in there.”
Greg Jarboe, president and co-founder of the marketing firm SEO-PR, made the point even more emphatically. Until recently, search engine optimizers have been understanding public relations better than PR people have understood SEO, he said. “But the real sweet spot is when you have enough people in your organization that can combine both. They understand what a good, relevant press release looks like, and understand the power of optimizing for news search engines.”
The power comes in large part from the reachable audience for online news and PR. Of the 97 million Americans who go online on an average day, Jarboe said, 60 million use search, and another 50 million search for news. That compares to daily traffic of one million for The New York Times, and perhaps 10 million for NYT.com. In fact, Hitwise found that in March of this year Yahoo! News had a larger market share than the Web sites of many of the biggest names in offline news, including MSNBC.com, CNN.com and USAToday.com.
What’s more, studies have shown that 75% of journalists admit to using search to look up background material for stories they write. Those searches are likely to turn up[ plenty of press releases. “This is a whole new world where getting found in search is not just good for reaching the public, but for reaching the media,” Jarboe said.
He gave an example of a release his firm sent out before Valentine’s Day for Internet Yellow Pages site SuperPages.com, breaking out consumer floral purchases by gender. The release was optimized for such keywords and phrases as “sending flowers” and romance. The results included a number two ranking on Yahoo! News for “romantic dining”, and a fifth-place ranking on Google News for other relevant terms. The release got picked up by news outlets including Morningstar.com and UPI.com, as well as by blogs such as ShopAholic. A week after the release was issued, newspaper sites such as the Fort Worth Star-Telegram were still picking it up and writing about it, extending its shelf life a top-ranked result in the news search engines.
Jarboe said tracking revealed that some 3,229 visitors clicked on the link in the SuperPages floral press release in the news search engines, taking them to the Web site, and that more than 2,700 of those clicked deeper than that landing page. That translates to an 84% conversion rate, compared to the usual 30% rate. Other metrics suggest that the SuperPages florist release may have accounted for 1.3 million additional searches on the topic.
Perhaps the most impressive stat was that getting those 3,229 clicks to the site would have cost about $11,500 in pay-per-click advertising, Jarboe said. The cost of writing and optimizing the single press release? That $779 we mentioned earlier.
For even better numbers, Jarboe said, think of the amount SuperPages would have had to spend on that 1.3-million lift in the number of searches for florists: that could have cost them $4.6 million. “All in all, a pretty good return on investment,” he said.
And PR can help search traffic even when the release doesn’t get picked up by news outlets like Morningstar.com or UPI. Marckini recalled advising a start-up laptop repair service to avoid both search optimization and paid-search ads and focus on writing a press release optimized for the term “laptop computer repair.”
“Nobody writes articles about new Web site launches, period,” Marckini said. “There wasn’t one significant press clipping. PC Magazine didn’t cover it; Information Week didn’t cover it. However, the press release moved into the actual general search results on Google for ‘laptop computer repair’.” Tens of thousands of people viewed the release, and many of those clicked on the link within the release, went to the Web site and placed orders for $600 computer repairs.
“Was that release a failure? I don’t think so,” Marckini said. “Public-relations outcomes are now expressed in search results as much as they are by anything else. Press releases lead to articles and clips that are found on keyword searches forever. The futures of marketing and of related areas, such as PR, are search-centric.”
