A lot of the work we do on the Interactive and Emerging Media team can be reduced to one simple keyword combination: search marketing.
SearchEngineWatch.com, one of the most authoritative resources on search, points out reasons why we, as PR practitioners, should care about our clients’ search engine rankings:
- Page one positioning in search engine results affects brand value. The results page is often the first contact a user has with an organization — how your client appears on that page influences user perception of the organization.
- If a searcher persistently sees an organization on page one for the key phrases they are searching, they will likely believe that organization is a major player in the field.
- User-generated content such as peer reviews and comments are the number one influencer prior to action or purchase and are showing up in search results pages.
- Journalists regularly use search engines to research a story, Negative content on a search results page can be very damaging to organizational reputation (just Google “Kryptonite bike lock” for reference — thanks Krejci).
Source: http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/080128-192544
Some believe that search marketing is the future of public relations, with many agencies offering communications services integrated with a comprehensive search strategy. Mike Grehan of ClickZ Network offers an interesting perspective in this post: http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3628229
If this subject really grabbed your attention, put The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott on your winter reading list.
