I had a conversation with an old friend from my WebmasterWorld forum about PR marketing for AI search. The friend had contacted me to find out my opinion on this subject. The discussion seemed useful to me, so I rewrote it into an article.
Raising digital PR awareness because links matter less
The friend I had this conversation with is Alistair White (LinkedIn profile), an Australia-based search marketing professional with decades of experience.
White asked me:
“I was wondering if you had any thoughts on performance-based digital? »
My answer was yes, I have a lot of thoughts on the subject. The following is one of them. In the future I will follow up on other ideas.
I used to do brand marketing slash PR for a B2B starting around 2004. But I expanded it to another business around 2013 because I saw the writing on the wall that links were already in decline. So my approach was born from link building, but my intuition was that links didn’t matter. It was about introducing the company to ten thousand, twenty thousand, sixty thousand potential customers and doing it in a way that clearly shows that this company is solving the problem for these professionals.
Strategy: direct outreach to potential customers
What I did was narrowly focus on a specific demographic that strictly matched their target customer. So a typical customer was the IT manager and IT people of a large company. Another demographic was the department head. Two different demographics that both required the same solution. The campaign was therefore divided into two parts, one for each demographic group.
It was essentially a public relations campaign focused on identifying associations and organizations. Virtually every industry has a professional association. So what I did was first target organizations at the national level. The reason is that once you do a project at the national level, it is ten times easier to do similar projects at the state level. Just show them the national article featuring the company, and state-level organizations would almost always say yes.
Once you completed this project at the state level, it became ten times easier to get a yes with the different chapters at the regional or county level. Every time I completed a project, it put the client in front of thousands of potential clients. Eventually everyone knew who my client was and completing projects became easier.
What were these projects?
- Newsletters
- Organizational reviews
- Website Articles
- Interviews
Each organization was different. So I would click everywhere, see what they were doing and create the pitch to suit what they were posting.
Attribution is not always possible
It wasn’t about building connections, it was about building customers and making money.
And that’s not something an SEO would have considered thirteen years ago, because there’s no clear way to know if the customer spent X this month and earned Z the next month from that activity. An SEO would never consider it because there is no way to directly track ROI.
You can follow part of it with the question “How did you hear about us?” “. But how do you know if a customer heard about the company because a colleague at a conference who saw the customer’s propaganda told them about it?
Not everything can be tracked. That’s why everyone else in SEO didn’t take advantage of these opportunities because they were wondering: where’s the link, where’s the attribution? Well, now the secret is out. It is also infinitely adaptable.
Both companies I did this for experienced consistent year-over-year growth, and both were ultimately acquired and made the founders a lot of money. And how did I know it worked? Because that’s how I’ve promoted some of my websites, by building immediate awareness, the kind that gets people to type a domain name into the search box.
Google has algorithms that track things like branded navigation. You can’t create this kind of user behavior with links. You can’t create branded navigation with SEO. And yet, these are things that have been part of Google’s algorithms since 2004 with the Navboost algorithm and in 2012 with Google branded navigation.
Brand marketing and public relations… and SEO?
SEOs have historically lagged behind actual algorithm developments at Google by about five to ten years. And I understand that ideas that a five year old can understand, like “add EEAT” to articles, are easy to understand. Everyone does it. But you know, anyone who’s done that knows now that it was a big waste of time.
And it’s not that I’m going against the grain. It’s just that most of the time, SEOs pursue these ephemeral tactics with an SEO hammer, going bang, bang, bang. But it’s becoming clearer now that SEO for AI search is no longer the nail-biter that link building once was.
For example, how will you encourage people to do a brand search on Google? How are you going to introduce people to your brand in the first place? How will you target the office manager who makes the decisions in a company? Well, I shared an idea about that, didn’t I?
These are the kinds of things that will trigger a positive ranking factor at Google, and yet none of them are part of the SEO toolkit.
In 2015, I brought up the idea that content is king, which is of no use to succeeding online.
I wrote:
“If content is king, how come the biggest sites on the Internet aren’t in the content business? What about Netflix? Do you think that’s the content you pay a monthly subscription for? Or is that convenient?”
Netflix is not in the content business. They work in the commodities sector. Anyone can provide content, but no one offers convenience like Netflix does. This is because their focus is and always has been on user experience. Convenience, the user experience, is why customers pay for Netflix. If Netflix had followed the Content is King strategy, it would have been a blockbuster.
…Don’t focus on creating content. Focus on understanding what the user wants and your content strategy follows.
I cannot stress enough the importance of understanding that user experience is the basis of many of Google’s important decisions related to its algorithm.
These are not new ideas that I am presenting, but they were ahead of their time, and perhaps still are. Yet they are as relevant today as they were in 2015 or 2004. Some say they are more relevant today thanks to AI Search.
Featured image by Shutterstock/Mer_Studio
