Getting SEO into the Rest of Your Marketing

In a perfect world, SEO would be seamlessly integrated into the rest of your marketing efforts. Everything you do to market your business, both online and offline, can be leveraged for SEO in some way. However, it can sometimes be tricky to "SEO-ify" your other marketing efforts when you aren't used to integrating SEO into everything you do. It can get more complicated when you start pulling in multiple people (when you move from a one-man marketing team to a whole department) and ask them to re-optimize their work for SEO. While you're not trying to step on anyone's toes, it's important that your SEO efforts stay consistent across the board and in every facet of your marketing. It's not nearly as complicated as you might think; it just takes a little refocusing.

In my experience, traditional PR people seem to be the most hesitant about incorporating SEO into their day-to-day work. As I said, you're not trying to step on anyone's toes or tell them how to do their job, but online press releases are too valuable for your link building efforts to let them skate by without being optimized for SEO! Optimizing an online press release for SEO isn't nearly as complicated as you may think--there is no need to rewrite, just tweak! Just like you want to naturally optimize a blog post to target a certain keyword you want to treat your online PR the same way. Incorporate your most important keyword into the headline of your press release and add it naturally throughout the body of the press release as well. A good rule of thumb is one link per one hundred words, and it's good to get a mix of full URLs (http://www.anexamplewebsite.com) and various anchor text links in the body and the boiler plate. One way to help vary up the links in your press releases is to create multiple versions of your company boilerplate and rotate them through each press release. This is especially helpful if you have a larger site and a targeting a wide variety of keywords. Each keyword, both long-tail and broad, need to get some attention from your link building if you want your site to do well for them.

Tradeshows can actually be a big help to your SEO, provided you take the time to leverage them the right way. First off, make sure you get a link on the tradeshow website as one of the attending vendors. You might be able to get a few more links if your company is a sponsor or media partner. Also check to see if the tradeshow allows vendors to submit content to the show's blog. You want to make your booth stand out to attendees before the doors even open! Having a banner ad on the site or a blog post will help introduce your brand and connect with attendees sooner than other vendors. Prior to the tradeshow, send out an optimized press release or a promotional blog post so your customers can know to look for you there. During the tradeshow, take videos and photos of your booth, interactions with attendees and other fun activities your company partakes in. You can share those directly to your social profiles (as well as live updates during the tradeshow!) and use in a recap blog post when you get back from the tradeshow!

Let's say you own a local pizza shop. How is an offline community event like a school fundraiser supposed to help your SEO? First off, see if the school is sending out any emails to their students and families about the event and ask to be included as a sponsor with a link back (people can check out your menu beforehand!) or get listed on the school website as a local partner. The fundraiser might get some local news coverage, and getting quoted in a news story is a great and trusted link source! Invite attendees to upload their photos from the event to your company Facebook page (maybe offer an incentive like 15% off their next pizza) or signup for your company e-newsletter. You could also ask people to rate your pizza joint on sites like Yelp or Google after trying your pizza!

Obviously marketing is a lot more than online PR, tradeshows and local events, but these are just three simple scenarios to show how SEO can and SHOULD be incorporated into all your marketing efforts. It doesn't take much to make everything you do "SEO friendly" but the long term benefits are well worth the extra effort.