Revenue Journal®

I recently interviewed Greg Jarboe, one of the founders of SEO-PR, a company that has established itself as one of the market leaders in the field of search engine optimization using public relations techniques. I've known Greg for many years; back when my husband and I were in Silicon Valley running a high-tech marketing agency in the 80's, Greg was director of communications for the then high-flying Ziff-Davis.

Greg has always been urbane and prophetic, so he's fun to interview. But he's also learned a thing or two about optimized PR. Here's what he had to say.

PR in general:

At the highest level, marketing has changed radically in the last 10 years, and most parts of the marketing mix are aware of it. It seems the PR people became aware of it last. They knew the world changed, but they didn't know how, because they didn't have a good system of measurement. If you're measuring clips, you're measuring outputs, but not outcomes. How many clips do I need to make a sale? That's the real question. Otherwise, you have to resort to "ad equivalency" measurements.

Editor's Note: Ad Equivalency Formula

(Cost of Advertising, in Column Inches) x (Number of "Coverage" inches) = Ad Cost Equivalency

So, if a 7x10 ad in a trade publication is $4,000:

($4,000) divided by (70 inches) = $57.14 per column inch

Two inches of PR coverage would then be worth $114.28 in equivalent advertising costs (2 times $57.14).

You can also take this analysis a step further by considering circulation, to calculate the Cost Per Impression.

Let's say that the trade publication's circulation is 20,000.

($114.28 Ad Equivalency Cost) divided by (20,000 readers) = $ .005714 "Cost Per Impression"

Please note that these formulas can only be assigned to media that sells advertising, and, as Greg goes on to say, there's a problem with this method. However, we wanted to put these formulas in here in case they'll help you. Back to Greg:

At the end of the day, how do I know that clipping generated leads, sales, revenue, profit? Dunno. If you're not measuring what is crucial or important to a client, when things change, you'll be the last one to know.

How he ended up doing SEO PR:

Because I thought measurement would always be a chronic problem, I got out of PR. I became a VP of marketing in 1999, which looked brilliant at the time [pre-bubble].

After the bubble burst, I worked at a search engine optimization firm. I thought I'd left PR behind. The person who is now my partner, Jamie O'Donnel, was working in direct marketing. He, too, had left a PR career.

In September of 2002, Google launched Google News. As part of my work in search, I did some searches on Google News. I fell off my chair. Not only were there articles from NY Times and Washington Post, there were press releases. "Oh, my God," I thought. "Press releases in Google News."

I saw this as a new opportunity-to take my background in PR, what I had learned from SEO, and partner with Jamie O'Donnel, who had a background in direct marketing and tracking. We formed SEO-PR in late 2002. We've optimized several hundred press releases since then.

What he's learned about optimizing releases for search:

It all boils down to a variation on something Professor Harold Lasswell said in the late 1940's. It's all in this one sentence: "Who seeks what in which channel from whom with what effects."

1. Who: There are now 2 or more audiences doing searches that PR people care about. One is journalists (98% of them go online and 73% search for press releases). The second one-bigger and more important-are prospects. (Others include investors, potential employees, partners.)

2. What are they searching for: If you use the keyword tools in Overture, Google, and WordTracker, you will see which terms people are using to search. For example: Southwest Airlines. All their press releases had in the headline, "Southwest Announces." To the search engine, that means "Southwest" - as in Arizona and New Mexico. If someone is looking for Southwest Airlines, they type in Southwest Airlines. Two words. So they weren't being found for their own news. In February of 2004, they added the word "Airlines" to their headlines in press releases. You have to know what people are looking for.

3. In what channel: When we started, only Google News was available. Since then Yahoo! News has been overhauled to become more like Google News. MSN Newsbot is in beta now. They too, are starting to display releases. Ask Jeeves News, Lycos News, Excite News, and Topix.net run press releases. Feedster.com is picking up the RSS feed summaries of press releases. Yahoo News gets about 21 million unique visitors a month, which rivals the number of unique visitors a month to CNN.com. Google News gets about 6 million unique visitors a month, which is fewer unique visitors than NYTimes.com gets, but more than Washingtonpost.com gets. Topix launched last spring. It's a year old. They're up to 2 million unique visitors a month. Most PR people wouldn't have them on their "A" list. There are no editors to pitch. Instead, you're pitching an algorithm. It's like, "How do you pitch a curmudgeonly "algo"-on deadline." If you have an optimized press release, new search engines will find it within 1-7 minutes.

4. From whom: This is the bad news. When most people search, very few of them will go beyond the first page of results, usually 10 listings in the first page. Most people won't scroll to the bottom of the page. So if you're not in the top 3 or 4 listings, the vast majority of people won't find you. This is why optimization is so important. Merely putting your release out, and putting a keyword in it, won't rank you very high or very long in any search engine. If you do it right, you can be ranked for up to 30 days. Southwest Airlines, pushing airfare to Philadelphia, ranked #1 for that term 29 days later. Generally speaking, news engines continue to tweak their algorithms, so what worked last month won't work the same way next month. It's the same as pitching to a new editor. You have to find out what the algo wants. How do you do this? You have to be running enough news releases to see the kinds of material that's getting picked up. You have to get 5 ranking reports a day, for different clients. If it's not what you saw yesterday, something has changed.

Fortunately, the fundamentals don't change. Every search engine wants to give users the most relevant results. Their mission is still relevance.

To evaluate your press release's relevance, you can assume that the headline is the most relevant, then the summary, then the first paragraph. The headline should be a summary of what the story is about. News service algos work the same way as human beings: they scan the headline and first paragraph. So in that sense, writing and optimizing are still in sync. But you do have to choose your words carefully. And you have to know specifics about how the algos work. Last fall, Google News changed its algorithm so that it only displays the first 65 characters of the headline. They didn't announce this; they just started doing it. We observed this change.

What it told us is that you can't do "teaser" headlines anymore. You've got to get the meat of your release into those first 65 characters.

The same rule applies to email subject lines; many human editors get their releases sent to them via email feeds, and your headline becomes the subject line. If the meat of your subject is "hidden" because it starts to appear at word 5, that email won't be opened. Back to Greg:

Too many PR people are into puns. We're all busy. Just tell me straight out.

Here are two examples of a headline. The first one is too clever and takes too long to get to the point; the second one is more straightforward, and will get more readership and distribution: Example #1: "Feisty Magician-Turned-Marketer Tries to Work Marketing Magic With Best-Selling Book" Example #2: "Author Picks Fight with Harry Potter - and Wins; #2 Bestseller"

Recency is another issue for the algos. Yahoo! News will penalize you for "getting old" faster than Google does. After two weeks, Yahoo! News considers the release "old." In Google, after 28 days, you can still be the most relevant result.

5. With what effects: Most PR people think you can't measure effects. You can and you should. What you need to understand is the end game is not to get people to read your release. That's the beginning of the process, not the end. That's step one. We can tell you how many people read the release; they have to click on the headline and a snippet of text that appears in most news search engines to read the entire release. So we know how many people have read the release. Step 2 is what do they do after reading the release. You can measure that. In the release, include more than one call to action. Have one for reporters, one for prospects, and a third one for investors (if appropriate for your situation).

Let's say you're announcing a new product. For prospects, the call to action shouldn't lead them to the home page, but to a product page. If you send them to the home page, they'll click away, frustrated. Give them more information on the landing page, but also make sure that product landing page includes a call to action-an invitation to sign up for a newsletter, order the product, etc. Always have a way for them to take the next step. For Southwest Airlines, when they were publicizing the new fare for Philadelphia, the link in the release had a unique tracking code. That link only appeared in the press release. That link - and other unique tracking links in 16 other press releases over 2004 -- accounted for $1.9 million in ticket sales. The cost to Southwest Airlines was about $10,000. It also generated publicity in the New York Times and the Washington Post, which we can't measure-because those papers don't provide unique tracking codes.

What we track depend on our client's situation. In some cases we track to the qualified lead; in other cases we track to the online sale. For example, we've done work for the Wharton School. No one signs up for an Executive MBA program as a casual transaction. But you can fill out a form to attend a presentation about their program, in a city near you. That's the next step. In that case, it's a lead generation process rather than a "sign up and run your credit card" process. We can still track those leads through to the sale, when they sign up later for the program, by running a name match in Wharton's database.

Using SEO and PR, we were able to triple enrollment year over year for the School of International Studies at the University of the Pacific in Stockton CA. The dean of the school compared the quality of leads using the PR method versus other methods. Folks who had come through the new search process had higher GPAs and higher SATs.

Biggest surprise over the last two years:

We assumed PR agencies would benefit the most from our search-related PR services. But with rare exceptions, when we presented this to them, they blinked, and then said, "Our clients aren't asking for this, so why should we offer it to them? When our clients ask, we know where to find you."

Meanwhile, we were being tapped on the shoulder by search engine optimization firms. It's a natural extension of their business, really. We realized we were knocking on the wrong doors. We started forming partnerships with search engine marketing firms; we have partnerships now with well over 60 search engine optimization companies.

Big Ah-ha's?

Initially we were focused on news search engines. But the big "ah-ha" was RSS feeds. It turns out our partner, PR Web, has a more robust RSS feed capability than the two leading PR wire services (PR Newswire and BusinessWire). PR Newswire only has one, and BusinessWire now has five. PR Web has more than 200 RSS feeds. They also send releases out via opt-in email to a database of 100,000 journalists, analysts, and free-lancers.

What was also surprising to us was the number of websites that run news on their sites.

To find out how many people have picked up your release in their RSS feed, just copy your summary into a search engine, because your summary will be the "body copy" of the RSS feed. Google will search for up to 32 words (used to be 10). You may also want to search just for the headline; some just pick up the headline only. We've found that hundreds of websites and blogs are picking up press releases from companies in their industry.

Thanks, Greg.

The bottom line is that the PR world will never be what it once was. Your releases are now going directly to readers via search engines and feeds. Any PR house that is not providing SEO services in addition to traditional journalistic services is not giving their clients the full benefit of today's buzz-building tools.