PR: Using the media to boost SEO with Mez Homayunfard (NEWBIE)

You might not realise it, by PR and SEO go together like jam and scones.

While people like to keep their dishes of communications in neat little pots, the truth is that the lines are very much blurred these days.

If you can write a press release that generates real media coverage, it will boost your SEO efforts with traffic, awareness, and those all important links.

Today I’m talking with Mez Homayunfard, who’s the co founder of Online Marketing Gurus, Australia’s fastest growing search agency for the past three years. Previously the CEO, now he’s the head of partnerships, and he’s an old pal of mine, so welcome to the show, Mez.

A lot of it is focused around building these amazing media opportunities.

That’s what we’re gonna get stuck into today.

Before we do, as you know from listening to previous episodes, we usually start with some interesting SEO or digital marketing related news that you’ve read this week. What have you been reading about?

It’s lovely to speak to you and share my thoughts. As of late, I’ve really been encapsulating myself on the convergence between PR and SEO.

The two, really, the big articles I’ve been looking at recently, one is the SEMrush ranking factors and signals 2.0, which you can download off the semrush.com website.

If you Google Brian Dean, one million URLs analysed, it actually looks at a statistical study. Both of these articles, in fact, look at two statistical studies that look at more than 2.7 million websites, in combination, to look for relationships between different SEO activities and ranking results.

I’ll include links to both of those articles in the show notes so people can check them out.

We’re gonna cover some of the things that those articles talk about today.

Let’s get stuck in and start talking about PR.

Before we do, let me explain what PR is for our listeners who don’t know. You’ve probably heard of press releases.

They’re articles written by companies, small businesses, to announce an event or a win, or something that they deem newsworthy, although, in truth, often they’re not newsworthy at all.

They’re then distributed to media companies in the hope that they’ll get picked up by media outlets and published, either in their print publication or their digital publication.

So, you write a press release about how you’ve got a new car parking space and the Sydney Morning Herald thinks it’s so interesting that they publish it on their front page. That’s the dream.

Rather than reaching out to big media corporations, you reach out to prominent personalities who have a similar audience to you, and hope that those influential people online will share your content, often, in return for cold, hard cash.

Well, I haven’t got any news, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be something that just happened. It could be an opinion or maybe you’re giving your tips on what’s gonna happen in SEO in 2018. Even things like that, the media will pick up those stories.

They’ll credit you, and then obviously you get the benefit of that credit.

We just discussed this on the episode with Ross Tavendale about domain authority. If you want a refresher on domain authority and domain trust, and how that’s passed from site to site, go and have a listen to that episode.

Google doesn’t want us to have unnatural link profiles or go out and pay someone on Fiver to build links for us. The truth is, that for a big business, and small business, building and earning links is hard. Once as a small business, you’ve ticked off the directories. You’ve got a link from your mom’s cooking blog and your cousin’s site about hedgehogs, you’ve run out of opportunities, right, Mez?

It can be really tough to find backlinking opportunities.

One of my favourite tools is Ahrefs, which I’m sure you know very, very well.

For those that don’t, by the way, it’s spelled A-H-R-E-F-S .com, a bit of a geeky name, because it’s a reference to having a link. What this tool actually allows you to do is look at the backlinks of different websites, and what I always suggest for small businesses who can’t afford an agency to do it and are wanting to learn fundamentally how to do it and apply it themselves at the earlier stages, is look at the guys who are ranking in the top three spots of Google, four spots of Google. Put them in Ahrefs and see where are these guys getting their links from.

A lot of the time, by doing that you can find cool and easy ways, and easy backlinks that you can get.

I think this is one of the mindsets that I like to get our clients out of, is that everyone has these preconceived notions, and they say, “Well, no follow links are not good for SEO,” or “Forum links are not good for SEO.”

It really underplays just how smart Google’s algorithm is, and Google’s algorithm understands that the different industries and different websites, what may be natural for one website to have a backlink may not be for another. And what we’re finding more and more is that online is becoming a place where communities are being built. Forums for different niches, there are gonna be these really cool opportunities to target these sites, which traditionally somebody would say, “You shouldn’t put links on a forum.”

Where it’s like, well, actually, this is a real natural way that people are engaging with the brand, and it’s actually a very good place to get links, for instance, for a site within that niche, if that makes sense.

And also, we talked a little bit, touched on citations, and just getting a mention on other sites.

Yes, it’s not direct link, but if you are constantly being mentioned in a particular area, whether you get a link or not, that’s just associating you with what you do, associating your brand within your area of expertise.

I do think that that just builds up a profile of who you are on the internet and it all helps boost your traffic, awareness, conversions, the whole kit and caboodle.

We’ve talked about forums and directories, and other sites. I’m a small business and I want to get in the media. Where the hell do I start?

This Webfluential platform seems like a much better one, almost like a marketplace for ideas and influencers. Sound fantastic.

They’re obviously written by utter muppets, and I wonder why they don’t hire a decent copywriter. It is hard, though, isn’t it? What are your suggestions for actually making an influencer take notice of your content?

For me, I really believe that these new platforms, and they’re sort of working off an Uber-like model of connecting customers and service providers together, unlocks significant value, and really help you to avoid the normal strength in numbers approach to PR, which is just to email as many people as you can, because you’re right, it is annoying. People don’t want to be spammed 100 times a week, asking you to promote their stuff when there’s no real incentive, and they haven’t seeked you out.

What I mean by that is, if I interact with famous person one on their blog, and I read it, and I’m the first to comment, and I share their content, by the time I turn around and say, “I wrote this, you might be interested.” They’re much more likely to be interested, whereas with brands, I think it can be a bit harder to build those relationships. It’s more about, often, influencers are paid to produce the content. What are your thoughts on that?

Obviously, with a small business, you still have that aspect of the director being the main person within the business who deals with the suppliers and that interpersonal aspect does break down one of those barriers, that when you start having bigger businesses, it becomes so much more complex, so much more bureaucracy, and people start demanding very, very large fees for any type of content promotion.

I’ve run PR campaigns where the PR person has helped write the media release, released it out into the world, chased up connections and relationships, but it just hasn’t happened.

The same, obviously, is true of SEO. There are no guarantees. You pay your money, but there’s no guarantee that you’re gonna get your link. What guarantees can you offer your clients, or do you even go outreach?

What you can guarantee to your client, is obviously, that you agree to do the scope of work that you guys agree on initially, and you should keep your prospective supply honest, and ask them upfront, “What is your strategy? What are you going to do? How much time are you going to spend doing that?” And all of that should be properly and rigorously documented before you start. The guarantee that your vendor should give you is that they’re going to execute as per that particular scope, and that you’re actually going to get what you pay for.

We will do that. But to guarantee an outcome or a media mention, that is a very, very big red flag that somebody’s doing something dodgy.

There are really easy tools you can use to find that at. Be fast and be consistent with your content production. Leverage technology where you can, and scalable technologies like Webfluential and other platforms. If you’re consistently consistent with these three or four things, you’ll get phenomenal growth out of your business. You’ll get great mentions on real websites, and you’ll really turbocharge your SEO efforts.

She asks the type of questions I need as copywriter to keep up to date with the latest practises, so that I can give the right advice to my clients and produce content that delivers results.” Thank you very much. That’s fantastic review. If you enjoy the show, please don’t forget to leave a five star rating and review on iTunes or Snapchat, or wherever you heard this pod. It will help others find this show and learn more about SEO. I’ll also give you a shout-out. Of course, you can check the show notes for this podcast at therecipeforseosuccess.com, where you can learn more about Mez, check out all those links, and leave a comment about the show.