The three pillars of SEO

So, your website is already the epitome of technical perfection. The site architecture ensures cornerstone content is at the top of the hierarchy. The pages load quickly and on-page optimization is in place to include your keyword themes in the page titles, body content, file names, image alt tags, etc. So what’s next?

Your technical marketing agency now needs to create “sticky” content to ensure your engineering audience is engaged, stay on the page to read the carefully crafted copy, follow the links to related content, and perhaps even funnel through to become a lead (or if you have an e-commerce site, a customer).

A modern, technical PR person knows your market and your target audience because they are writing about them all the time and because of this they’ll know where your products or service fit in. They can write content that’s not only keyword-rich, but is engaging and uses natural language, satisfying the needs of visitors and also the search engines that crawl your website.

Most important of all, if they’re specialists in your sector, whether that’s electronics, industrial, IT or something else entirely, they can create this content while taking up the minimum of your valuable time to do so.

Fine so far, we have a technically excellent website that has highly engaging content but SEO takes time. So how do you get visitors to your website in the interim? You can use various outbound techniques – PR, advertising (online & offline), direct mail, email marketing, etc. But this is limited to the target markets you define and relies on using the media. What about the prospects you know are out there, but neither you nor the media know how to reach?

How to generate high-quality inbound links

Firstly, push your messages through your existing social channels, at the time/ day when your followers are at their most receptive and likely to engage. At this point, your quality content will do the work for you and generate links organically. Good content gets shared and social sharing tools are essential for link generation, ensuring not only a wide dispersal of inbound links but that you can reach an audience that is potentially a lot larger than could have been achieved through outbound marketing alone.

Secondly, ensure your agency uses both online and offline channels for distributing search-optimized media stories, garnering not just coverage, but a wide dispersal of quality inbound links. You can’t just leave it to website visitors to generate inbound links – you need to generate these too – both from authoritative industry-related websites and blogs, as well as social networks. Both types of links are essential for SEO success. Each inbound link symbolizes that someone is casting a vote for your web pages and increasing the visibility of your website to a larger audience. Plus, links from social networks signify “fresh content” to Google, giving your web page rankings another boost.

It’s important to note that you can’t solely rely on wire distribution services because the quality of links generated through these services is dissipated by Google’s penalization of duplicate content. Each press release that gets reproduced in full needs to refer back to the original article (usually hosted on the PR distribution service’s own website), which greatly reduces the SEO value of all the other places where the press release is published.

Social Media Relations

So what else can a digitally astute technical agency do? Media relations are at the heart of every good integrated agency and even in today’s digital-first world there is no exception. Authoritative industry blogs can be targeted, relationships nurtured, and coverage achieved. An agency can leverage its contacts, not only with journalists but with freelancers, bloggers, and industry influencers to your benefit.

Essentially, to achieve improved SEO results and get the most out of your agency, you need to use all of their skill set: their ability to create compelling content that targets visitors as much as it does search engines, their media relations capabilities, and their ability to distribute messages to a highly targeted and receptive audience.

To discuss how we can help your SEO activities, contact us here.