Here is a post from the chronically under-used Irish PR discussion forum on boards.ie. It’s a bit technical but the gist is that for communication practitioners working in the 21st century a lot of Irish consultancies score pretty badly on search engine reports. You can view the thread in its entirety at http://boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055417880 and contact the person who did the leg work about it there.
If you don’t understand what this is about and it applies to you then you ought to make it your business to get advice lest you get left behind.
On the back of the Thread started in the PR forum about Linkedin – it got me thinking – how do the PR websites do in terms of “Search PR”. As well “the names have be changed to protect the innocent”, no one is mentioned by name.
With much difficulty I managed to get 109 websites for companies/individuals that held themselves out to be in the PR game. Can I state for the record the compiling of that list was a real dog!
I then ran some keyword analysis against some of the sites and some separate keyword research to try and extract keywords. I appreciate that some companies have particular specialities and this is far form an exhaustive search – but it does cover a good range of keywords.
Eventually I settled one these keywords/key phrases in no particular order of merit:
Corporate communications, crisis communication, crisis management, Event Management, Financial Public Relations, Investor Relations, Media Relations, Press Releases, Public Affairs, Public Relations, sponsorship Management. Again the keywords are broad searches but all of them have strong search volumes in terms of Google Searches.
I now put the 109 PR websites under scrutiny – to see how they would rank in search engines against these terms. The search engines used were google.ie and google.ie with an Ireland only search (I have a limited time here and much more importantly its pro bono work!).
Google Search (from Ireland)
Corporate Communications: 4 sites in the top 50, Highest ranked – 22 (p3)
Crisis Communication: 8 sites in the top 50, Highest ranked – 9 (p1)
Crisis Management: 4 sites in the top 50, Highest ranked – 18 (p2)
Event Management: 3 sites in the top 50, Highest ranked – 22 (p3)
Financial Public Relations: 10 sites in the top 50, Highest ranked – 1 (p1) !!!!!!
Investor Relations: 0 sites in the top 50, Highest ranked – 0
Media Relations: 3 sites in the top 50, Highest ranked -17 (p2)
Press Releases: 0 sites in the top 50, Highest ranked – 0
Public Affairs: 1 sites in the top 50, Highest ranked – 47 (p5)
Public Relations: 7 sites in the top 50, Highest ranked – 4 (p1)
Sponsorship Management: 2 in the top 50, Highest ranked – 17 (p2)
Look – it’s by no means conclusive research, but it does point out that, corporately, PR companies could do better in search
