How Public Relations can Turbo-Charge Search Engine Rankings

In the escalating SEO war, almost nothing has the power of news

In the fight for eyeballs on the Internet, it's guerilla warfare out there. So competitive are some industries that marketers are paying as much as $10 to $20 in pay-per-click [link to "PPC basics," 5s/2] bidding to rank highly in sponsored links on Internet-search results.

But you don't have to pay big bucks to zip to the top of rankings. Although the mathematical algorithm that search engines Google and Yahoo! use are kept very closely guarded as trade secrets, we do know the important factors in rankings:

How many other Web sites link to your Web site.
The prominence on your Web site of the same words that prospective patients use in their Internet searches.
The amount of relevant information on your site and how often it's updated.

The last factor is especially important as it relates to news. Search engines like news because ... well ... people like news. It's what Internet users crave and search for. Supporting statistics:

71 percent of Web users get their news online. (Nielsen/Net Ratings)
21 percent of newspaper readers are using the online version exclusively. (Pew Internet & American Life)
The number of newspaper site visitors grew by more than 30 percent from 2005-2006. (Newspaper Association of America)

When a news story goes out over the Web, it literally goes around the world in seconds. And if there's a link back to a healthcare Web site, that site can catapult to the top of the search-engine rankings in hours.

Make news on the Web and you bring new patients to your Web site immediately, often by the thousands. We've seen it happen many times.

For example, we recently issued a short, very routine press release about a client opening a new location. Prior to the release, the client ranked number five on the first page of Google rankings for several search phrases. Anywhere in the top five is considered gold in search rankings, known as "above the fold" placement in the tradition of newspaper PR placements. (PR pros delight in seeing any pitches to journalists result in a news story on the top half of the first page of a newspaper – which means it's highly visible in news boxes on the street because it appears above the mid point, where the paper is folded.)

We placed the press release on a number of Internet news feeds and also on a Web page by itself on the client's site. Within four hours, presto, the Web page containing the release on the client's site ranked number two on Google and Yahoo! – ahead of the homepage.

Online Journalism Booming While newsrooms are shrinking alarmingly quickly, many major daily newspapers are seeing mushrooming growth in online readers, according to Editor and Publisher magazine and the Nielsen research company. As of 2008, some newspapers have seen a doubling in numbers of online readers in just a year. The Vanishing Newspaper Is the daily newspaper dying? Or just catching its breath for a new competitive sprint in a different format? The Pew Charitable Trust's annual report on American media says people appreciate journalism perhaps as much as ever. But mass communications is reaching a pivot point in accelerating changes. Moms Mad for the Web Parents are among the highest users of the Internet, significantly outpacing couples and singles without children, according to a variety of sources.