We believe today’s public relations programs must reflect a basic understanding of search engine optimization.
The connections between content, online presence and organic search traffic are too strong to ignore.
We were reminded of this dynamic during a check-in on one of our SEO experiments from over two years ago. When the Toyota recall and PR crisis spiked in 2010, we developed a digital property to experiment with repurposing content – I had penned several posts on the topic – and different SEO dials. It took only a couple of weeks for the site to show up on Google page one for searches on “Toyota PR crisis” and derivative phrases.
The site wasn’t pretty.
![toyota recall site](https://hawebpage.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/toyotarecallsite.jpg)
Algorithms don’t know ugly.
Here’s where things get interesting.
We haven’t touched the site in over a year. Yet, plug in the words Toyota PR crisis and our site sits in the No. 1 position above Reporter News, USA Today and The Guardian.
![toyota crisis pr](https://hawebpage.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/search.jpg)
When we scrutinize the why behind the ranking, the technical techniques and backlinks take a secondary role.
This is all about content relevance.
It’s the tight alignment of keywords with the content that collectively delivers the positioning.
I’m surprised more companies – particularly B2B players where adding even a few hundred of the “right” visitors can make a difference – aren’t applying this technique to establish more digital doors into their main websites.
Sidenote: The human bot uncovered the following related posts:
If You Build It They Generally Won’t Come
There’s Enough Room In This Town for Both Storytelling and Keywords