subject: Building Backinks for Charlotte public relations firms [print this page] Building Backinks for Charlotte public relations firms
Building backlinks for Ad Agencies
Ad agencies are typically aces at creating marketing strategy for their clients; however, one area consistently falling short is their own online and SEO marketing efforts. The good news: Agencies are naturally positioned to excel in the online social arena, and natural activity in this area produces backlinks as a byproduct.
Backlinks are the links to your website from other websites, and they are a key gauge by which Google decides how important your website is. Backlinks are more valuable when they come from other quality websites, and when they link back to your site using keywords critical to your company's marketing efforts. If another website encourages visitors to "click here" to get to your site, that has a fraction of the search engine value compared to linking with the term "ad agency," for example.
So how do you build backlinks? Back to my thesis - that agencies are naturals to build this critical SEO component. First of all, publish. In today's 2.0 world, everyone is a potential publisher, so get your people blogging, digging, stumbling, tweeting and commenting. Encourage all of your creative staff to become committed bloggers, and pay for their unique domains and offer design assistance to put a polish on their sites. If a commitment to blogging is too much to ask of your professional communicators on staff, why did you hire them? A tough but fair question, I think.
Second, add social components to your content: create RSS feeds and add social bookmarking features to everything your team writes. Share your stuff, and encourage others to do the same.
Third, participate. Reading, commenting, reviewing, sharing others' work - all of these things will naturally lead you to be read, and shared as well. Once I was surprised to find an online public relations blog I had was read by a Cleveland business reporter; this reporter began linking to my site, and my blog jumped in search rankings overnight. I have no idea how he even found me, but I was hyper active in that online business and marketing community.
Fourth, blog in concert when it's strategic. Having three or four firm bloggers all blog about the same topic, and linking to it with the same terms, can create a mini Google bomb in your favor. My Charlotte public relations colleagues and I developed a social media newsroom template, and we all blogged about it and linked to it. Three years later that site still ranks on Google's page one for social media newsrooms.
My final thought is the hesitancy to get started: But what will I write about? The Internet is overflowing with experts - self-described, self-important social media experts. Many of these people are talking loud and saying very little. I suspect the professionals on your team have a lot to say of value, once that proverbial ball gets rolling.
