I wrote a post recently about our client, PocketComms, who had the fantastic experience recently of making the headlines accross the UK press. Unfortunately, none of the newspapers used the brand name PocketComms but instead used a generic description, Picture Cards. This meant that anyone who may have been interested in purchasing or finding out more about the product as a result of reading the article would get lots of results about memory cards for cameras but nothing about PocketComms!
So what can be done if you ever find yourself in the same situation? I thought you might find it useful if I shared my experiences.
Check the site tags
A first quick check was to ensure that the relevant search words ‘Picture Cards’ appeared in the Title, description and keyword tags, this is unlikely to have a quick effect but every little helps!
Write a news story on the site
In this case a story did already exist, but we checked through and tweaked a couple of wordings to make sure it would respond to a search for news on picture cards. Most important is to make sure that the keywords are mentioned in the title.
Pay per Click Advertising
The immediate and easy way of making sure you are on the first page on google is to pay for it. In this case we ran a seven day campaign to ensure PocketComms were listed in the adboxes on the first page of results when searching for ‘Picture Cards’. This would be expensive for a long term campaign but ideal for a short term response for an immediate buzz of publicity.
Blog it
If you have a blog then now’s the time to write somthing, in our case I blogged about PocketComms, as already mentioned, both because I was pleased that one of our clients was doing well and wanted to let everyone know, but importantly because it meant that I could mention the all important keywords in my post, especially the title. If you haven’t got a blog then . . . . time to start one ready for next time, or ask a friend to blog on your behalf.
Stumble, Delicious, Digg
If you have something you need to get out there, then make sure you use Digg and Stumble it. This was our best and most immediate effect within the organic listings on google, within two hours we had a number four listing for ‘Picture Cards’ for the news story on the site and a number five listing for our blog post. It doesn’t last that long, about two days but it was ideal in these particular circumstances. People also use all three of these solutions as direct methods of finding content.
Social Networking
As another way of promoting this good news, I also posted the link to my Facebook feed so that all my friends would pick up on it, a useful additonal tool to help get the message out.
Well I hope these few ideas may help you if you have a story break in not quite the way that fits your current search profile. However, the most important thing is to plan for anything like this where possible. If you can control the story break or are aware in advance that it might, then make sure you have already prepreared your websites search engine profile accordingly. Crystal ball anyone?