Four Google Products That Boost Your PR

How Google Plus, Author Rel, Youtube, and Hangouts Can Strengthen Your PR Efforts

April 22, 2014: There’s been a lot of talk about public relations and SEO. Searchenginewatch quotes Mike Cherenson, former chair and CEO of the Public Relations Society of America on the importance of SEO for the PR discipline.  Likewise, the folks at Raven SEO write extensively why press releases need to be keyword optimized. If you want your PR communications to get to the audiences that you intend, then SEO is an absolute must.

It’s clear that many in the PR profession agree that if you want your PR communications to get to the audiences that you intend to reach, SEO is an absolute must. But there appears to be far less agreement on the degree to which Google Plus contributes to establishing SEO authority. For example, in a survey conducted by Didit of the largest U.S. PR firms, 11 of them had no Google Plus presence at all, and an astounding 64 percent did not include a link to their Google Plus presence from their website home page. (Twitter adoption, by comparison, was universal, with 99 percent using Twitter and promoting its usage proudly from their home pages).

Google Plus (and Author Rel, an HTML tag associating pages with Google Plus locations) are very important – both to Google  — and to the people using Google. Here’s why you should be integrating them into your PR strategy for your clients – and for yourself:

Author_Rel is your friend. Author_rel is a way in HTML to identify yourself to Google and say, “this is my content.” Your client, either individually or as a brand, will need to establish at least a Google e-mail (Gmail) address. Once established, the image associated with your account will come up on Google search results (which in the case of a client, can be either a photo or a brand logo.) Author_rel provides a clear SEO boost as well as a direct link to your client’s Google Plus profile page. From the SERP on which the listing appears, you can drive traffic to your client’s website or to their Google plus feed. Google has maintained that establishing authorship is one of its top-tier goals. Those who do so will be rewarded with better SEO results.

It’s not just web pages. Author_rel provides its own distinct set of data in under the Author tab in Google Analytics. This allows for precise tracking of the effectiveness of press releases and other PR initiatives. This makes specific content measurable in the context of Google Analytics.

It’s not a zero sum game. All of the various social management platforms let users release content simultaneously across multiple platforms. While we at Didit advise that creating unique content on all of your social channels is best, identical content in certain cases is OK – for example, a press release that is identical across Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus. Use of Google Plus can only add to the reach you’ve already achieved for your client over Twitter, Facebook and other digital platforms. Using Google plus will not interfere with any strategies you have in place for other platforms – it will instead enhance it.

It all adds up. We also highly advise the use of Google Hangouts for PR. Content shared in Youtube via a Google Plus feed and Author­­_rel will have a positive effect on page rank for your client’s keywords and terms. Use of Google +1 and Author_rel  on the client’s website will add to this, as will sharing of content via Google Hangouts and Youtube. Specifically, the use of Hangouts by celebrities such as Tyra Banks, Brad Pitt and Ellen Degeneres show the power of the platform in extending a client’s digital reach. Brands that have seen great success with Google Hangouts are the Council of Fashion Designers of America, Toyota and Penguin Books.

It makes you and your client look professional and smart. When winning new business, the ability to show prospects hard numbers in SEO lift can be a powerful differentiator, when such metrics are used in conjunction with traditional social metrics such as followers and engagement.

What issues have you run into when using Google products with PR clients? Contact us.