By integrating SEO metrics, PR and communications professionals can significantly enhance their measurement strategies in today’s digital environment.
The traditional “funnel” approach that starts with brand awareness is outdated in a world where the customer journey often begins with a simple Google search.
Learning from SEO experts and focusing on useful and trustworthy content will help PR professionals better understand and reach their audience.
In this article, we'll show you how to incorporate 12 key SEO metrics into your digital PR measurement program, starting with thorough audience and keyword research, and progressing to advanced analytics and user engagement strategies.
1. Start with audience research
Audience research tells you who your customers are, what they are looking for, and where you can reach them.
For example, using SparkToro V2, you can see that between 119,000 and 151,000 people search for “electric vehicles” each month. The audience research tool shows you the websites your users visit, the keywords they use, and the demographics of your users.
2. Conduct Keyword Research
Once you understand who your target audience is, you need to conduct keyword research to gauge search interest in your topic or search term.
For example, Google Trends tells PR professionals and SEOs what search terms people are searching for, and both groups can use this data to gauge search interest in a particular topic before creating related content.
You can also use our free Trends Explore tool: enter a query and it will give you a list of topics and search terms.
If a relevant topic appears in the drop-down list, click it to display the data, otherwise use your search term.
The topics are more reliable as they capture exact phrases and acronyms and cover all languages.
The Trends Explore tool shows you “growing” and top search interest for related topics and queries.
“Trending” topics and queries have seen the largest increase in search interest compared to the previous period. The percentage increase in search interest is displayed next to each topic or search term.
“Breakout” searches have increased by over 5,000% in a given time period. They are typically driven by breaking news or internet memes.
Top topics or queries are the topics or queries with the highest search volume within the selected time period. These are indexed and normalized values between 1 and 100.
3. Monitor search share
Google Trends also allows you to measure search share, which is an important PR metric because it correlates with the share of website traffic.
For example, you can compare search share for up to five topics or terms, such as electric car brands.
This shows that electric vehicle brands Tesla, Ford, Toyota and Chevrolet have seen their search share decrease over the past 12 months, while BMW's share has increased.
4. Compare release views
PR professionals must be wondering how many release views they have. Some of these views may be coming from bots, spiders, and crawlers, including Googlebot.
Alternatively, you can use SparkToro's audience research tool, which estimates:
- 12 million people visit prnewswire.com every month.
- 6.2 million people visit businesswire.com every month.
- 3.4 million people visit globenewswire.com each month.
- Two million people visit newsdirect.com every month.
5. Count link clicks
PR professionals should also wonder how many “link clicks” their press releases are getting. It’s unclear whether some press release distribution services count link clicks from bots, spiders, and crawlers, including Googlebot.
That’s why we recommend using Google’s Campaign URL Builder, which adds campaign parameters to your URL to track clicks on links to your landing pages.
Simply enter the website URL of your PR campaign landing page. Then fill in the fields marked with an asterisk. A campaign URL will be generated. You can use this URL in your anchor text or shorten it with Bitly.
6. Track events
PR professionals should also use Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to track “events” that measure specific behavioral interactions on their website.
For example, looking at events over the past 90 days, PainePublishing.com saw 835 users scroll to the bottom of the page 1,450 times and 616 people read 2,153 blogs.
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7. Measure important events
As we mentioned earlier about why the move from “Conversions” to “Key Events” in GA4 was groundbreaking, conversions were renamed to “Key Events” and we now have a new term to describe the most important interactions on your website.
So a PR professional for a news or education site might consider the following as a key event:
- Scroll down to 90% of the blog post or article.
- Play at least 50% of your product video.
- Complete the tutorial.
A PR professional at a lead generation site might consider the following events as important events:
- Download the white paper.
- Subscribe to our newsletter.
- Fill out the registration form.
A PR professional at an e-commerce company might consider the following events as key events:
- Begin the checkout process.
- Add the product to your shopping cart.
- I'm going shopping.
8. Increase your website traffic
SEO managers and agencies should continue to use “organic search traffic” as a metric, while communications professionals can use “referral traffic” and “organic social traffic” as PR metrics.
GA4 reports on the websites users were visiting immediately before arriving at your site and shows the domain names of these sites as sources of traffic.
The referral channel measures users who come to your website via an “editorial” link on another website (e.g. blog or news site).
Organic social is a channel where users come to your website via a non-advertised link on a social site like Facebook or X.
For example, referral traffic is the second-highest source of new users to PainePublishing.com, and organic social is the fourth-highest.
9. Increased User Engagement
PR and communications professionals, as well as SEOs, should add “increased user engagement” as a metric to their websites.
In GA4, the old Universal Analytics (UA) metrics “Bounce Rate” and “Time on Site” are replaced with “User Engagement” and “Engagement Time”.
Bounce rate was a fundamentally flawed way of measuring engagement: if someone visited your website, scrolled 90% of a blog post or article, and left without visiting any other pages, that session was considered a bounce (single page impression) by UA.
But in GA4, engagement rate is the percentage of sessions that last more than 10 seconds, have at least two pageviews, or have a significant event.
10. Increase brand awareness
If your company or client’s goal is “increase brand awareness”, you should use GA4’s Business Goals collection.
- Demographics Details Report is a pre-built detailed report that provides key characteristics about the users who use your website or app, such as their language, interests, location, age, and gender.
- Pages and screens reporting gives PR professionals data on the pages users visit on the website and the screens they open on the mobile app, letting them see where their users are going across both platforms.
11. Generate leads
If your company or client’s goal is to “generate leads”, you should also use GA4’s Business Goals collection.
It includes a Landing Page report that helps you understand how visitors interact with your website. This report shows you the first page your visitors land on when they arrive at your website, and also tells you how many visitors landed on each page.
This information can help PR and SEO professionals identify which landing pages are performing well and which need improvement.
12. Boost online sales
If your company or client’s goal is to “drive online sales”, you should also use GA4’s Business Goals collection.
- The E-commerce purchase report shows you the products or services being sold.
- The Buying Process report shows you how many users dropped off at each step of your sales funnel.
- The checkout journey report gives you a detailed view of the number and percentage of users who started and completed each step of the sales funnel on your ecommerce site.
Now, instead of incorporating all 12 SEO metrics into your PR measurement program, you could choose to incorporate some of them. When deciding which metrics to employ, it might help to invite your SEO and PR teams to a “lunch bag.”
For some organizations, this may still be as awkward as a middle school dance. But for a growing number of businesses, things are already changing, with tectonic shifts bringing SEO and PR even closer together.
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