Sam Bramwell, Head of Digital PR at Dark Horse
When every marketing pound matters more than ever, businesses who target their consumers effectively will stay ahead of the rest.
SEO and Digital PR are the most accurate arrows in your marketing quiver to reach those targets as both disciplines can be refined to micro or macro precision and hit your customer base in the bullseye.
First, a quick pop quiz: Do you know what HReflang is or whether the Google algorithm is the same for all searches?
Maybe that’s not your job, which is fair enough, but ask your agency or SEO team. If they don’t know what HReflang is, then you’re doing international SEO wrong. Likewise, if they think the algorithm remains the same for all searches, it’s probably time to change your SEO provider.
Manchester SEO agency Dark Horse know the answers and specialise in creating SEO and Digital PR strategies that are target-driven, meaning there is little or no wastage in the marketing budget to achieve the sales conversions you want.
Know your business (and everyone else’s)
The place to start is an SEO audit of not only your own business but your competitors. This means you can see who is targeting whom, how they’re doing it and whether they are doing it well.
A proper, detailed audit that’s not just a tick box exercise. This will give in-depth insight into the opportunities available through targeting and provide the basis of a campaign to reach those customers effectively and efficiently.
And it’s not just SEO. Digital PR can also be highly targeted if it is done right and provide crucial backlinks to turbocharge your SEO and rankings.
Going global
The other beauty of both disciplines is that they can be used internationally or very, very locally, but does your business have the expertise to harness this targeting effectively?
International SEO should be about growing your organic visibility in international markets so you can reach audiences in multiple territories.
It is geotargeting but on a bigger scale, with proper international SEO identifying which countries you do business in and what languages will create the best site for the different territories throughout the world.
This is where HReflang features which is a piece of code that tells Google ‘I’m the X language and X country version of X Page’ to avoid duplicate content and help you rank in each country individually.
Did your team answer that correctly?
SEO that’s closer to home
Now to answer the second question in our quiz and the answer is the algorithm is different for local searches.
Google uses a different algorithm to choose which site best responds to a local search query than it does for other queries.
So, if your business is targeting a specific locale or needs to be visible in your local area, a typical SEO strategy isn’t going to work.
In fact, you need a local SEO strategy that targets that local algorithm specifically – and it’s a whole other beast.
It’s PR but not as you know it
Simple keyword SEO strategies no longer work for Google which wants to see organic growth and value in a company before it ranks that business above others.
To achieve your targets, companies need an SEO strategy that incorporates Technical SEO, Content Marketing, Digital PR & Outreach.
Digital PR is key to gaining rankings as search engine algorithms have become more sophisticated and no longer simply serve consumers businesses that ‘own’ keywords in their marketplaces.
The algorithm now places more importance on what it considers quality content and Digital PR is the vital component of that decision-making.
PR has often been seen as the hit-and-miss marketing discipline, but the new era of Digital PR makes it much more tangible and accountable.
The role of Digital PR is to give companies backlinks from media outlets that will increase that company’s rankings.
But again, you need an expert team to deliver this. For it to work, the content needs to be curated with the reader and audience in mind, with links from recognised media platforms. That means campaigns that the media wants and will use, which is no mean feat.
The beauty though is Digital PR is measurable through the number of links and analytics of their impact.
It also means Digital PR can be tailored and targeted, whether it geotargeting territories on a global level, to those on your doorstep or media selected by industry.
Hit the target
There’s no point in having targeted campaigns if they don’t hit the target. That’s where a specialist SEO agency can help, again, by taking your business from zero to hero in search results.
