In the first part of Public Relations For SEO: The Complete Guide, we talked about how to convince journalists that your topic is newsworthy by properly “positioning” your product or service, and then delved into the basics of writing a press release. Part 2 continues with strategies for targeting journalists and tips for scheduling your announcement.

Pick A Strategy To Target Journalists

You can think of the press as being a pyramid, with the most influential publications at the top and the numbers of publications increasing (with declining influence) as you move down the pyramid. Below is the pyramid we constructed for FindHow’s launch planning; if you map out one for yourself, it might look different and include things like particular industry trade publications or influential newsletters:

Figure 3 – The Pyramid of Media Influence

There is a sort of implied “pecking order:” if the Wall Street Journal sees that Wired Magazine has already covered something well, they might be less likely to cover it; however, if Wired sees something in the WSJ, rest assured, they are very likely to cover it.

However, if the majority in a lower tier are covering something, that can be used to lever up interest by media outlets in higher levels. Some like the “bottom-up” approach, which can work well if you have plenty of resources and are in it for the long haul.

It’s easy to also see why a top-down approach can be effective – people, even journalists, are often easily swayed by others, and opinions and trends are often validated by the top. So, if the Wall Street Journal carries an article on a topic, it’s much easier for you to get coverage lower in the pyramid, because you can use the example to gain credibility with journalists, and also because, frankly, journalists read the media as well — and busy journalists, even in traditional media outlets, will often simply rewrite articles they read.

We decided that we would spread efforts around between the top three tiers, hedging our bets (had we not gotten any coverage by AP or the Chicago Tribune, as we did, at least we would have had some tier-three coverage).

Follow-On Effects

I was shocked at how many articles continued to dribble out further down the pyramid for months after the launch of FindHow. Many of these were clearly complete rip-offs of articles that had been issued during the first week or two of the campaign — all rewritten, but believe me, as the PR person, you can tell!

Some local TV stations did short 5-minute pieces on the “How-To” space featuring FindHow and its competitors — not prompted by our press release, but undoubtedly by a journalist reading one of the articles in major publications we obtained early on, and deciding to do a piece on the space.

Assemble Your List of Journalists to Target

I would recommend assembling this list in advance, but it will be a living document.

Bulldog Reporter maintains lists of journalist contact information and is one great source, I am sure there are others:

In my case, I found some extensive lists just using Google searches. I’d suggest just taking two or three prominent writers and searching on their names together in Google, with “filetype:xls” appended to the query. You’d be surprised how often there are Excel files that someone else has already assembled with Press contact information, including phone numbers (for whatever reason, nonprofits seem to assemble these a lot).

Worst-case, you can poke around a particular journalist’s media company website, find the main phone number and have the operator connect you — this almost always works.

Research Each Journalist

You need to read whatever the journalist has written recently, ideally going back at least six months, and also their bio or LinkedIn profile, if available. Wow, you may think — that sounds like a lot of work!

Let me give you an example where this paid off in spades. The ultimate journalist that every tech marketer would kill to have an audience with has got to be, hands-down, Walter Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal. When we were launching FindHow, I thought, well, it’s a new search engine, that’s pretty newsworthy, and as they say in hockey, ‘you can’t score if you don’t shoot,’ so I read everything Walt had written for the last six months.

In one of the articles, he mentioned “the burning of the Gaspee.” This really got my attention, as it refers to the burning of a British ship by Rhode Islanders *well before* the Boston Tea Party occurred. It’s something that is celebrated yearly in Warwick, Rhode Island (not far from where I live), but almost no one outside the state is aware of it. So, this stuck out like a sore thumb. Why would he mention this obscure incident in such an offhand way?

Then, I dug into his biography and found that he had started out his career as a writer for the Providence Journal in Rhode Island — here was my angle! I sent him an email pointing out that I was a Rhode Islander and would he be willing to talk about this new Search Engine we were launching. His response was (I’m paraphrasing here) “sure, I’ll talk to anyone from Rhode Island any time — come down to Washington D.C. and meet me in my office.”

This resulted in an hour-and-fifteen-minute meeting where he gave me a great lecture on Nathanael Greene’s role in the Revolution (Walt is a huge Revolutionary War buff) for half of it, and the other half of it, he listened to my pitch and gave me great feedback.

As it turned out, his assistant put out an article on the how-to space the week before our meeting occurred but before our launch (I’m convinced due to the attention I brought to the topic), so essentially, they had already covered the space, and we didn’t get any coverage. But, I got to pitch the #1 guy; and, you’ll see in part 3 of this series of articles how that actually helped boost my credibility with other journalists. All because I simply read what he had written.

So, during your planning phase, read each journalist’s biography if you can find it, and their recent writings – and keep any notes on this in a tracking spreadsheet, it will come in very handy during the actual pitching process.

Schedule Your Announcement

When FindHow was 100% ready to launch, we made the difficult decision of delaying the launch by two months. This may seem crazy — that’s two months worth of traffic we missed out on, we were two months later to market, and so on!

But, by “scheduling a launch date” and positioning the site as being in “limited beta” until then, we had plenty of time to execute on  a highly effective PR campaign and pitch numerous media outlets on covering the launch.

In phone pitches, I was able to tell journalists that the site was in a very exclusive limited beta and I could give them access to it ahead of the launch if they would like to check it out. By waiting to start our PR push until the site was rock-solid (and essentially slipping our launch date to accommodate the PR efforts), we were assured that journalists would have a smooth, trouble free experience.

Feedback ranged from ideas regarding sources of trustworthy content we should consider including, to topic areas to add, to layout and usability tweaks that simplified the user experience. Journalists are sharp people and have been around the block – they make great beta testers; leverage them!

Flexibility Is Key

Allowing the PR effort to drive the announcement date is also *critically important* from a flexibility standpoint.  In FindHow’s case, we were initially shooting for a particular announcement date, until we found out that a little company called Apple was launching a little product called the iPhone 3G on that day.

It doesn’t take a Genius (so to speak) to figure out that FindHow wasn’t going to get much attention on that day, or for a few days after, so as soon as we became aware of this, we quickly changed our announcement date to three days later than Apple’s launch.  If we had not had the flexibility to do this, we probably would have gotten 90% less coverage than we got, because literally every journalist on the planet was working *only* on an iPhone article for release on that first date, or the day after.

So when planning your announcement and PR campaign, be aware of what other events might be taking place around the same time as your projected announcement date – holidays, known upcoming geopolitical events, the Olympics, and so on, can put a real crimp in your results.

This concludes Public Relations for SEO:  The Complete Guide on How To Target Journalists, where we provided strategies for targeting journalists and tips for scheduling your announcement. Finally, we’ll conclude the series with how to pitch journalists and how to work it just before, on and after the announcement of your release.

Series Recap:

• Part 1: Public Relations For SEO: The Complete Guide
• Part 2: Public Relations For SEO:  How To Target Journalists
• Part 3: Public Relations For SEO: How To Pitch Journalists

A few years ago, I launched a website called FindHow, and we gave it a full-court press from a PR standpoint. In this series of articles, I’ll run through all the best practices we leveraged. Before we start, the results we garnered for our launch are shown below.

History: How Public Relations Resulted In 18,000+ Links

In the first month of FindHow’s existence, it surpassed 15,000 unique visitors and eventually grew to around the 100,000 uniques mark. After about five months, the Public Relations effort had resulted in a total of around 18,000 links to the site, primarily because of prominent media mentions that boosted the site’s credibility and aided word of mouth:

Figure 1 – Result: Prominent Media Mentions, Traffic, and Links

The six Major Public Relations Steps that we followed, which can improve your SEO rankings and increase conversions are listed below. This article will cover the first two, and subsequent articles will cover the rest.

1. Have Something To Say… About A Trend
2. Write Your Press Release
3. Pick A Strategy To Target Journalists
4. Schedule Your Announcement
5. Pitch Journalists
6. Work It Just Before, On, And After The Announcement

Have Something To Say… About A Trend

If you have not read “Positioning: The Battle for the Mind” by Ries & Trout, you should run, not walk, to your Kindle and download it.  They make the point that when positioning a product, service or company, the most important thing is not the company or the product name itself — it’s the category that it sits in and the trend that it relates to.

Unless you’re Dean Kamen with the Segway, the press is not going to want to talk about your product, service or website if it’s in a class by itself. It’s far better to convince them that there is a big trend going on, which you happen to be at the forefront of. You may (heaven forbid) even want to mention competitors to prove there is really a trend.

Be Newsworthy & “First” Where Possible

Ries and Trout point out that the best position to take in the mind is “first,” although it’s not the only position (you can position yourself as “the alternative,” for example, like 7-Up, the “UnCola”).

When planning the launch of FindHow, we decided that we would position it as a search engine, but clearly, it wasn’t the first one; it was 15 years too late for that.

How could we be first? Ries and Trout point out that markets fragment and become verticals over time; so, we decided to position it as the first “How-To” search engine (like the first “Lite” beer).

This allowed us to have our cake and eat it, too, because we could pitch it both in the context of the growth of the search engine market, and also, in the context of the crowded “How-To” website field. Also, new search engines aren’t announced every day, so clearly, such a thing must be newsworthy.

Ironically, several journalists pointed out to us during our effort that, since it uses a taxonomy as well as a search capability, FindHow could also be termed a “Directory” (we’ve since taken their advice and repositioned it as a paid directory).

You may not be launching something new or innovative, but almost any product or service can be tied into a trend, where the trend itself is current and newsworthy.

Write Your Press Release

What is a press release? Essentially, it’s a short document created by a company, talking about something newsworthy, and then distributed through a press release distribution service.

In the old, pre-Internet days, this usually meant the service would fax your release to hundreds of newspaper and magazine offices, or even directly to editors and journalists. The last 20 years or so have seen an evolution toward electronic distribution, with press release services also sending them out through online news venues such as Yahoo! News.

A second, more accurate definition of a press release might more properly be:

“An organization’s take on some (hopefully) newsworthy event, put together in such a way that busy journalists might just republish it, or paraphrase it, as their own article.”

Have A Topic For Your Announcement

There are numerous listings of ideas for press releases on the Web; here are examples of some I’ve been involved in over the last 15 years:

• Announcement of New Website (“New Website Helps (Customer Type) (Solve Some Kind of Problem)”)
• New Product or Service Announcement
• Executive Joins a Company as a New Hire
• Partnership Announcement

One that plays very well is survey announcements. The media loves to be able to quote surveys;  just make sure, if you do one, that it’s substantial. One that is a survey of 30 people is not going to fly; but a survey of 450 people that actually has information on accuracy of the survey will carry more weight.

Capture The Key Problem, Benefit & Audience In Your Headline & Subheading

Try to capture the problem, the benefit and the audience in the title. In FindHow’s launch release, the title and subheading were:

“Consumers Struggle to Find Reliable Information as Poor-Quality Instructional Content Floods the Internet”

“FindHow, the First How-To Search Engine, Brings Trust Back Into the Equation for Consumers Seeking Instructions for Accomplishing Everyday Tasks”

You may not be launching a search engine, but try to think of how your announcement is newsworthy. If you are a law firm putting out a new website that has some articles on bankruptcy, it may be as simple as announcing something like:

“Law Firm Announces New Resource for Homeowners Considering Bankruptcy.”

Always Include A Quote In The Release

Journalists love to use quotes. At a minimum, get a quote from an executive or the head of the company; even better, you might try obtaining quotes from third parties such as partners or customers of the company – this enhances credibility. My favorite verb, rarely obtained, is “delighted,” as in “We are delighted that….”

Incidentally, language in quotes can be a fascinating guide to how close two companies are. If the partner or customer is merely “pleased,” it usually means they’re merely humoring the other company with a quote. If they’re “delighted,” then there is usually a very strong relationship.

Don’t Go Overboard With That  Anchor Text!

Because a release can be copied dozens or even hundreds of times, you really have a great opportunity to shoot yourself in the foot if you try to get cute with anchor text in press releases. For the most part, I’d advise sticking with the brand or website name or a naked URL, and leave it at that.

If It’s A Major Announcement, Include A Media Kit

You want to make the journalist’s work as easy as possible. A press kit (media kit) can allow you to include many things that you can’t fit into a press release. For FindHow, we included sections on: Mission, Customer Problems, Quotes from Users, Quotes from the Founders, Company Background, Market Statistics, Competitor Overview, FindHow’s Strengths and Weaknesses, the Upcoming Launch Release itself, and Artwork.

I mention Artwork in particular, because to make the journalist’s job as simple as possible, you can make artwork available at a particular URL, making it much more likely that a product shot, logo or a screenshot will get included in an article.

Be sure to include multiple formats (preferably both .PNG and .TIF). If you aren’t investing time and resources in a media kit, consider at least including information on where to find artwork in emails that you send journalists. This proved key for us — and we got FindHow’s logo shown in several articles as a result :

Figure 2 – It’s Critical to Make Artwork Easily Available in Different Sizes and Formats

Which Wire Service Should You Select for Your Release?

The top wire services are PRNewswire, Businesswire, PRWeb, and Marketwire. I have personally issued press releases using Marketwire, PRWeb and PRNewswire.

Although I would not say I have enough activity or evidence to definitively recommend any over any others, I have had some good success recently with PRNewswire, which appears to be a pretty professional, respectable and effective newswire service.

Note that PRNewswire does have a low-cost option called iReach, I chose instead to join PRNewswire for the yearly $195 fee, which allows for more reach and media targeting options (in my opinion, the yearly fee also helps to keep the wrong crowd out, lending additional credibility to the service). The yearly membership option may only make sense for you if you are doing a number of releases; in my case I’ve found the added flexibility in targeting to be well worth it.

PRNewswire has a somewhat confusing variety of options and pricing, but my favorite is their state-targeting option where you can target all media outlets in one state very inexpensively — and that option comes with nationwide wire distribution, as well. This has proved an inexpensive and effective option for both getting the word out about important announcements and garnering some links in the process.

I have issued some recent press releases for clients over the last year via PRNewswire which typically resulted in over 300 links from over 100 unique domains (not that links are the point, but they are one useful measurement of effectiveness).

Yes, these links will decay over time as pages roll off of sites. But, for example, copies of FindHow’s original launch release, after four-and-a-half-years, still exists in 18 places with links back to the site.

Your mileage with these services may vary. When selecting one, I would be wary of anyone that leads with “SEO” in their marketing. They all mention it to some degree, but selecting someone who shouts it from the hilltops does not seem like a very wise strategy if you like to “future-proof” your SEO efforts.

A Very Important Post-Release Step: “Nofollow” Any Links!

Most marketers, once they have put out a press release, are eager to list it on their corporate website. Be careful how you do this (and not just with press releases; it applies to press mentions, as well). While I am not a believer that Google respects “nofollow” for PageRank flowing purposes (I think Google ignores it), I do believe that it is utilized for detecting and discounting paid links and “reciprocal links.”

Think about it — you’ve put together a press release that has a link to your website, and now your press release service has hosted it on their site. If you link to their page hosting your release, you just created a reciprocal link, so you’re unlikely to gain any PageRank or Anchor Text value from them. So, make sure your standard practice on your press page is to “nofollow” all links to any external pages.

Make Sure What You Are Actually Announcing Is Credible

This bears mentioning: if your company website does not have a privacy policy, terms of service, a phone number, or a list of executives, how credible is it going to be? Even a new company should try to present itself as credibly as possible. Journalists can smell a fake a mile away, so make sure to be authentic!  Also, it’s difficult to emphasize enough just how important “fit and finish” is.

In FindHow’s case, we spent a lot of time polishing its appearance in a thousand little ways, even to the extent of hunting over and over through iStockPhoto for just the right pictures to license, sharpening them and making ever so slight color corrections and so on…but as a result we had a site we could proudly pitch to journalists, and its look and feel really lent credibility to the story.

This concludes the first part of  Public Relations For SEO: The Complete Guide, where I told you how to convince journalists that your topic is newsworthy by properly “positioning” your product or service, and then delved into the basics of writing a press release.

Series Recap: 

• Part 1: Public Relations For SEO: The Complete Guide
• Part 2: Public Relations For SEO:  How To Target Journalists
• Part 3: Public Relations For SEO: How To Pitch Journalists

In Part 1 and Part 2, we talked about how to convince journalists that your topic is newsworthy,  the basics of writing a press release, strategies for targeting journalists and tips for scheduling your announcement. Here, we conclude with tips for pitching journalists and how to work it before, during and after the announcement of your release.

Pitching Journalists

Before you start, understand two things.

First, journalists are human beings – try to put yourself in their place to understand where they are coming from. Hundreds of people are constantly bothering them to try to get their news covered, their editor is probably hounding them for material, and often, they’d really rather be taking their wife or husband out to dinner. So, be respectful of their time and frustrations.

Second, you have one goal and one goal only: to get the journalist on the phone. This requires calling over, and over, and over again until you get lucky enough to catch them at their desk.

Image via Shutterstock, used under license.

When you have them on the phone, you should establish what you’re calling about, but also ask them open-ended questions about what sorts of things they are looking to cover.

With FindHow’s launch, I had one fellow, for instance, that was spending almost all of his time covering a very prominent trial, which we discussed at length. Another discussed Little League, a mutual interest, with me for about 20 minutes on a call. You need to engage people on the level they are willing and interested in being engaged, but understand that the goal of your call is to get a meeting.

So in short: get them on the phone, engage with them, and try to get a physical meeting.

You can use electronic materials as a fallback, but I would caution you to give journalists as little material initially as possible. I only very sparingly sent out our press kit, and only when I was already assured I was not going to get a meeting. The press kit essentially answered every question a journalist might have, but it wasn’t going to pitch them for me – and if they read it, why would they ever ask for a meeting?

So, in some cases, think of what you’re doing as being like advertising, or writing a resume – you only need to give enough information to tantalize them into wanting to hear more – from you directly.

Our campaign consisted of me calling roughly 50 journalists repeatedly until I caught them at their desks, in some cases meeting with them and then taking them through a funnel where they tried the beta and looked at some of our press kit materials. Note it took numerous phone calls. This comes with the territory – don’t think you can send a bunch of emails and it’s going to happen – it’s not. You need to use the phone.

Journalists Are Busy — Help Them Do Their Job

The more material you can give a writer that they can pull from, the easier it will be for them to write an article. It’s not uncommon for writers to pull portions directly out of a press release or a press kit.

Think like a Washington lobbyist who is writing legislation for a congressperson to propose — just do as much of the work for them as possible — it’s human nature to want to get any job done quickly with a minimal amount of work, so make it easy for them.

Validate The Trend By Disclosing Competitors

The crowded field helped us to validate the site with journalists (i.e., we weren’t crazy; there was a real trend here). To bolster the validity of the trend, we put graphs of the growth of How-To queries in our press kit, and even listed all of our competitors and their (and our) strengths and weaknesses.

That’s Crazy, Why Would I Mention My Competitors?

Why mention competitors, you may ask? Well, would you rather there be an article on you, competitor B, and competitor C talking about an important trend you all represent, or would you rather there be no article at all? Walter Mossberg, when thumbing through our press kit with me, made a remark to the effect (I’m paraphrasing), “hmm, strengths and weaknesses, and competitors… you don’t see this sort of thing much… very good.” So, I have it on good authority that this will help you stand out.

Speak Their Lingo

Here are three key examples of journalist lingo you need to understand, both for their actual use, and to demonstrate that you have some sort of an understanding of the world of PR.

“On a Deadline”

These are two key pieces of lingo you need to understand, both for their actual use, and to demonstrate that you have some sort of an understanding of the world of PR.

When a journalist is “on a deadline,” it means they are working furiously on a piece that they have to finish by a certain time. If you call a journalist and are lucky enough to get them at their desk, always ask if they are “on a deadline,” and if so, can they talk for a few minutes at another time, and then schedule a time with them — journalists really appreciate this, and it shows you are somewhat of a professional and not someone completely out of left field who will be difficult to work with.

“Embargo”

When you’re issuing a press release but are first circulating it to some select journalists far ahead of time to see who will bite, you should mark it as under “Embargo.”

Understand that journalists do not sign NDA’s, but most respect the informal concept of an embargo, i.e., they are looking at this press release but know not to report on it until it is issued. Every draft press release we sent to an individual journalist included the following in very large bold letters above the release title:

                  “EMBARGO UNTIL JUNE 11, 2008”

We also included a disclaimer, in bold, at the top of every email about it: “This Press Release is Under Embargo Until Issuance, Currently Scheduled for June 11, 2008.”

However, this is only informally adhered to by journalists. Significantly, we had one online news outlet, that shall remain nameless, that swore they would adhere to our embargo but jumped the gun and put their article out at 10:08 PM the night before our launch!

This was aggravating, but fortunately, none of the larger media outlets noticed it, or they might have thought, “I’m not going to cover that if some online news site has already covered it.”

My sense is: the further you go down the pyramid, the less embargoes are respected. Try asking a blogger what an embargo is, and they might look at you like you have two heads – so you may want to leave bloggers out of your initial media push if you are using a strategy of giving the press a heads-up before a press release.

“Our Little Secret” Image courtesy of Bradd Libby

“Exclusives”

Occasionally, if you get a journalist interested enough to talk with you, they may ask for an “Exclusive.” This means that they would have the exclusive rights to write about it, and essentially, your promise that they will be the first out with the news on the item.  Journalists like this because you are guaranteeing them the “scoop” on their competition.

Now, there are “exclusives” and there are “exclusives.” If the New York Times asks for an exclusive, you don’t necessarily have to promise that you won’t approach any other media outlets at all; you can push back and tell them you can give them an exclusive in terms of not approaching the Wall Street Journal until the day after the announcement. The WSJ is probably the only competitor the NY Times really cares about.

On the other hand, if USAToday wants an exclusive, you can promise them you won’t talk to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Keep in mind that media competitiveness is kind of like an Ivy League football game — the Dartmouth/Harvard Game is “The Big Game” for Dartmouth, but it’s definitely not for Harvard, everyone has different perceptions of competitors.

Just be sure if you negotiate an exclusive that you and the journalist are on the same page about what it means, so you don’t destroy your credibility in future campaigns.

Don’t be afraid to utilize this tactic, though, if you are in a very niche-y, boring space where exclusives can be to your advantage.

I’m reminded of a friend, Ron, who got in hot water once from his higher-ups for giving one publication an exclusive on a new product announcement (for an Uninterruptible Power Supply – truly riveting news – not!).  In the years since, I’ve come to realize – that was a fantastic strategy, because you know what?  No one cares about Uninterruptible Power Supplies – they are extremely boring! One article in a major publication in that case was a fantastic result!

So, don’t be afraid to use this tactic if you have something with very limited, narrow interest appeal.

Journalists Are Like Penguins – Help Them Bump Each Other

Do you know how Penguins decide whether it’s safe to jump in the water? (Killer whales being their concern). They all bunch up together and start tipping back and forth slightly, bumping each other, until the whole crowd is seething with tiny bumping going on — then eventually one of them falls into the water. The penguins on the edge then lean over a little and look to see if the one that fell in has been eaten or is doing fine. If he is ok, they all jump in.

The press is exactly like that. Journalists are much more courageous to step out and cover something, putting their reputation on the line, if someone else has already.

When I got a meeting scheduled with Walter Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal, a few weeks out, I made sure to slip this fact in when talking with journalists going forward — and got an instant credibility boost with all of them. Even though he never ended up writing about FindHow himself, I am convinced his willingness to meet with me at all conferred huge credibility with the other journalists I spoke with.

Ask Journalists For Advice

I asked several of them for advice on how to pitch Walter Mossberg and had some really interesting and lengthy conversations where they told me their philosophies on how they like to be pitched.

Another approach was to ask a journalist who else they thought I should be pitching – and I got several warm leads as a result where I was told I could use their name when contacting someone. People love helping, so give Journalists the opportunity to help you

Use The “Journalists Are Like Penguins” Concept to Set Up A One-Day Press Tour

Let’s say you live in Atlanta. Every time you pitch a journalist based out of San Francisco, ask them if they’re willing to meet in person (because you “happen to be coming out there for some other interviews during the week of such-and-such”).

If they say “sure,” commit to it, call all the other journalists you’ve been talking to, let them know you’re flying out to meet this important competitor of theirs, get a commitment from them to meet with you as well, and buy the ticket. A little one-day press tour is totally worth the price of a ticket, and you can just take a red-eye back and avoid paying for a hotel.

“Work it” Just Before, During & After the Announcement

The AP journalist I had been pitching prior to the launch of FindHow was very close to committing to write something, but not quite — he had a lot going on, and he was careful not to really make a commitment to me (although he had given me some great advice on how to pitch Walter Mossberg).

On the day of the launch, I still did not know where he really stood. However, The Chicago Tribune, and some other outlets, came out with pieces covering FindHow and some competitors that morning.

I called the AP journalist and let him know that we were starting to get a lot of coverage including in the Chicago Tribune. This apparently pushed him over the edge, and he followed suit with a short article, which only talked about FindHow, and not our competitors. This was a major coup, and I am convinced it would not have happened without that follow-up.

After The Launch

Months after the launch, I continued to contact journalists on and off, pointing out to them the great coverage we had received and that there was a real trend going on here. One of them was a journalist with the Technology beat for Agence France-Presse (AP, Reuters, and AFP are the big three of newswire services).

He was sufficiently impressed by our coverage by his competitor/colleague over at the AP that he used a quote from us in a piece he was doing on the financial crisis in the fall of 2008. This resulted in another widely circulated article titled Web Traffic Jam as People Search for Financial News. This was an angle we never would have considered, but because we continued to maintain contact with the journalist, when the right article came along, he gave us a great mention.

The Media’s Dirty Little Secret

Occasional coverage continued to dribble in for another 12 months on the strength of the initial articles. As the articles came out, it was very clear that some of them were just paraphrased versions of the original articles. So, if you’re doing any article rewriting, I suppose you can take some solace knowing that the media does it, as well.

In some cases, the paraphrasing was fairly blatant; in others, you could see that they used the original structure but mostly rewrote from scratch. Well, at least they weren’t spinning, and we were happy to take what we could get!

Roundups Are Much Easier To Get Coverage On

Some of the best coverage we obtained was in the nature of “roundups,” i.e., articles listing multiple companies on how-to sites. People like lists and collections of resources, so we actively pitched roundups to journalists wherever possible.

While it may seem preferable to get an article entirely devoted to your own company, there’s a very low-probability. What’s best: getting one or two articles devoted to your company, or eight articles that mention it along with others? The second approach had an added bonus for us — being mentioned along with other well-known sites further legitimized and reinforced FindHow’s brand as a trusted resource.

Final Results

The first month of FindHow’s existence, it surpassed 15,000 unique visitors, and eventually grew to around the 100,000 uniques mark. After about five months, the Public Relations effort had resulted in a total of around 18,000 links to the site, primarily because of prominent media mentions that boosted the site’s credibility and aided word of mouth.

Conclusion

Every release you do doesn’t have to have this level of planning and effort — but how much effort is required to ring up the nearest regional newspaper and ask for the Features Editor? How much effort is it to drop a note to your local Patch person? Cultivating relationships with the media, even on a simple local level, can yield results down the road for you, as well. After all, who knows what clients you’ll be working for or what announcements you may have to pitch in six months or a year?

Before launching each press release, you should evaluate what level of effort is necessary and appropriate to leverage the announcement so you can have results that are worth the investment.

These techniques that we used to launch FindHow really have nothing to do with online marketing per se; they’re just classic marketing techniques, and human nature is the one constant in this ever changing technology landscape. Investing in your PR skills will continue to pay dividends going forward, regardless of Google (or anyone else’s) algorithm changes. So, get started!

Series Recap: 

• Part 1: Public Relations For SEO: The Complete Guide
• Part 2: Public Relations For SEO:  How To Target Journalists
• Part 3: Public Relations For SEO: How To Pitch Journalists

A few weeks ago at SMX East, there were some great presentations on these topics, and I finally realized that I have many major reservations about the proliferation and use of these standards, on many levels (mostly from a publisher perspective; for end-users they are generally a very positive development).

What Are These Standards?

They sound complicated, but in layman’s terms, I would say: think of them as being similar to additional meta-tags on a page, similar to a meta-description or meta-keywords, but often in XML format, which convey certain structured information about various objects.

Like meta-tags, these are intended to be machine-readable, but not necessarily presentable to humans in a browser. Much of the rich information showing up in search engine results (such as reviews, prices, etc.) are being enabled by publishers (i.e., website owners) exposing their data using these standards.

Figure 1 shows some structured data that Google displays in its search results already. Search for [schema.org], [microformats], or [open graph], if you’d like to learn more.

Figure 1 – Example of Structured Markup Showing up in Search Results

Why These Are Bad For Publishers From A Search Standpoint

By showing rich information in the search results, Google and others can get users to navigate to the information they need more quickly. Another way of thinking about this is, they are essentially denying publishers the navigational clicks that users would have given them, had they navigated to the site and then had to poke around.

For example, showing a Movie showtime in a SERP denies the publisher the opportunity to try to get the viewer to purchase a ticket for pickup at the box office; the user may see the showtime and then move on to their next task, simply buying the ticket at the theater.

But Aren’t Publishers Who Implement Microformats Getting More Traffic?

Yes, this seems to be the consensus, although it’s not clear why. It could be that the search engines are intentionally favoring pages that expose information in this way (which seems likely), or it could also be that (as someone in the audience at one of the SMX East talks brought up), the use of these schemas may simply make the publisher do a better job of organizing and exposing their information.

For instance, if you’re using schema markup that exposes name, address, and phone number, you’re unlikely to forget including your phone number (it acts as a sort of checklist) and it will likely make you also expose the phone number in your HTML for users to see.

Either way, publishers who use structured data markup are reporting higher organic traffic; but think about it for  a minute; clearly, this must be at the expense of others who are not using them and are experiencing lower traffic as a result.

What worries me is: what happens when everyone (or at least the top 10 search results) are all using structured data markup? At that point, an argument for higher traffic will not hold water — it’s no advantage if everyone is doing it.

Microformats Make It Possible For Anyone To Steal Your Content

Microformats make your information that much more easily scraped and parsed by sites that you don’t want taking your information, not just by search engines – scrapers, even competitors who want to monitor your pricing, and so on.

Why is it OK for a search engine to show my pricing information in a SERP, but it’s not OK for my competitor to show it on their website?

Microformats, by freely allowing search engines to show information provided in them, seem to be on a legal slippery slope – how are you supposed to delineate between accepted uses and non-accepted uses, when there is no mechanism for doing so?

Where Does It Stop?

Anyone who’s familiar with schemas from the IT world, such as SNMP, DMI, USB, etc., can attest to their usefulness, but these are schemas created for very specific purposes.

The problem with using schemas to describe information about objects on the Internet is: the entire world is essentially exposed on the Internet. The Internet has information about recipes, tress, celebrities, maybe even eventually, the freckle on your left finger.

If the industry pushes towards structuring information on the Internet, what that really is accomplishing is structuring data about everything in the world. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the full hierarchy on schema.org — it looks like a slippery slope to me with no end in sight, this hierarchy will very likely continue to be fleshed out and expanded over time.

Microformats Are Anti-Human & An Admission Of Failure

Yes, you read that right. According to Genesis, God had Adam name all of the animals. He didn’t tell Adam to name, catalog, index, organize, and label every object in the Garden down to the level of tree 5 is a parent of branch 6 which is a parent of twig 4 which is a parent of leaf 3 which has the properties green and serrated.

I was always under the impression that the search engines were soaking up all the Ph.Ds in the fields of machine learning and artificial intelligence so they could have computers figure things out for us.

For instance, I would have thought that someone at Google would, by now, have written a program to examine a webpage, determine that it’s a recipe, and parse it out and figure out the ingredients, steps, and times. Instead, it seems that Google’s solution is instead, hey, it would be great if you would just mark up and label all the information in your recipes – thanks.

I thought that’s what computers were for in the first place, figuring stuff out! Computers should infer meaning, not have humans label meaning.

The phrase Semantic Web, which is used to refer to these schema’s role, is, in my opinion, the biggest technology misnomer of all time — there’s nothing semantic about them. It should be called the we failed to understand actual meaning so we’re going have everyone label everything instead Web.

The best Google can do with all these Ph.Ds is to tell us: hey everyone, please mark up everything in the world because that will make things so much easier for us.

Really? Why did you bother hiring all those people, is that the best you guys can come up with?

But Your CMS Will Take Care of All That, You Don’t Have To Do It Yourself

You can argue that it’s not a waste of human effort because your CMS will take care of this. While that’s somewhat true, engineers created the CMS to be aware of whatever the particular schema was.

Your DBA or Web Developer worked to integrate your  back-end data in a structured way with the CMS. And for the particular schema at hand to be developed, people from all over the world had to fly to Paris, or wherever, for some meetings, and argue and haggle over what properties the object would have, and where it would sit in the hierarchy. This is all human effort.

Microformats Divorce Machine Readable Data From Human Readable Data

If you think about it, by exposing data on your Web page for a machine to read, which you are not showing to a human, it’s almost like cloaking — you’re presenting different information to a spider than you are to the user. Of course, you should show the user the same data, but in a nice presentable HTML format.

How is this different from cloaking? In fact, as search engines get smarter at parsing this data, I’m sure some bright folks will start to put checks in place — hey, this guy is saying one thing to us but saying something different to humans.

Then publishers will have to start worrying about running reports to identify which pages on a website have schema information that doesn’t  match the rest of the content on the page. More complexity we didn’t need.

Microformats Are Redundant! Microformats Are Redundant!

Why why list the same data multiple times on a page in different formats? While you’re at it, why don’t you throw a bunch of hreflang tags on your page? Maybe you can get it to be four or five times as long as it needs to be with as much junk as possible on it; that should be great for your page load speed time!

The great thing about the HTML standard was, it included everything that was sufficient, but only those things that were necessary – why are we now moving toward saying the same thing on a page over and over again, in all these different formats?

In A World of Microformats, Robots.Txt Is Not Enough

It’s important that major improvements in one area be matched by improvements in supporting areas. For instance, now that Google has Universal Search, wouldn’t it be great if the AdWords Keyword Tool actually told you something about Universal Results? (Fail!). That’s a minor example of a supporting area that failed to keep up with a megatrend.

With schemas, the key supporting area that is failing to keep up, in my opinion, is the robots.txt format.

Somehow, search engines appear to have gotten society (and in some cases, courts) to consider your “robots.txt file as being the equivalent of some sort of machine-readable legal agreement.

Personally, I view this as a ridiculous position — I’m sure the major search engines are constantly crawling sites whose Terms and Conditions expressly forbid using a program to read the site — but search engines have used robots.txt as a fig leaf for either showing or not showing content in SERPs on a Yes/No basis.

Now that Microformats are proliferating and we’re being indoctrinated that if something is structured, it can be shown in a SERP, what is to prevent the search engine from showing anything that’s marked up in this way in the SERP? Why not mark all the content as paragraph 1, paragraph 2, and paragraph 3, and just give them the whole thing?

The robots.txt format, in my opinion, needs to evolve so publishers can specify how their information, on a granular basis, can be used, not just whether their information can be used. Ideally, robots.txt should be a fragmented thing that lives on each page, and each tiny piece of content should be able to specify the publisher’s intent for its usage.

A History Lesson – SGML

Remember SGML? Most of you don’t. SGML was (maybe still is, I don’t know) a structured markup language that was put together for a variety of purposes, but when I encountered it in the early 90′s it seemed to be driven primarily by the technical writing community, for the purpose of making manuals and spec sheets machine readable.

I was in the semiconductor industry at the time, and SGML was simultaneously all the rage for the technical writing community as well as sort of the bane of it — because it was a huge, bloated standard that appeared to have been designed by some out-of-control committees that went way over the top.

Fortunately, HTML, which is sort of a tiny nephew to SGML, used some of  the conventions of SGML, but was created as a much more simplified markup language for describing simpler hypertext documents. Then, when Tim Berners-Lee conceived the Internet at CERN, all you really needed was a title tag, some content, a few bold and paragraph tags, and — boom — you could have a webpage.

What’s going on with this Schema stuff is a return to the SGML approach — management by committee, huge bloated hierarchical class/property standards, and an Internet that is going to become unnecessarily complex.

If You’re A Large Company, You Need To Drive These Standards

Some of these standards, and decisions about their adoption, are actually going to involve life-and-death decisions for companies. If you don’t believe me, go back in time and ask FTP Software, the provider of a popular TCP/IP stack for Microsoft Windows, what they thought when Microsoft decided to include its own TCP/IP stack in Windows!

If you’re a travel provider, you should be worried about search engines increasingly providing travel search information right on the search results page – so you probably should be worried about any schemas being worked on in the field of travel information.

What about insurance providers? Real Estate? Credit Reports? If you don’t want to get disintermediated by a large search engine, you might want to get involved in the standards process… and not always to make it successful.

This is sort of the dirty little secret of the standards world you won’t read about in news articles, but many standards committee members often actually have a fiduciary responsibility to their company to make sure that any standard that is ratified is a failure, or leaves out key pieces of data so their company can still continue to dominate its market space.

Don’t believe me? Get involved in a standards committee involving a dominant market player and just observe their behavior!

A Positive Unintended Consequence

This was mentioned by one of the panelists: once the entire world has been categorized and marked up, it will be much easier to make a new search engine, because there won’t be much it will have to actually understand anymore.

As these schemas proliferate, presumably some interesting startups will be created that leverage this data in interesting ways; ten years from now we will no doubt be surprised at another two or three big players that have sprung up from nothing around this megatrend.

Conclusion

So, in short: in my opinion, from a publisher’s perspective, these emerging structured data markup standards allow search engines, competitors,  and scrapers to more easily steal your content; may in the long run deny you clicks, result in unnecessary page bloat, unnecessarily complicate things; and are setting the industry back twenty-five years in terms of making humans structure data rather than having computers infer structure.

However, it looks like they are great for end-users and are inevitable, so you’d better get on the bandwagon!

I believe that categorizing keywords into the finest groupings that make semantic sense is the right way to do it; often I’ll have a category with 2, 10, or perhaps 30 keywords at the most. Later, when some of the categories are turned into actual campaigns, this tight organization and relevance will tend to pay off with higher quality scores.

Since Google Adwords takes into account the relevance of keywords to the creative, obviously grouping very diverse keywords will result in low relevance, so this is why relatively fine categorization is important.

Often, however, I find myself with too many keywords to handle; even as little as 5,000 keywords broken down into 300 categories, for instance, is still not a very manageable set.

In these cases, I like to take the keyword categories and bundle the categories themselves into a *secondary* category that represents the “funnel” stage that the keyword category belongs to.

Marketers are told to think of a customer as being in one of various “funnel” stages at any given time, and even if you’re not systematic about it, you probably already think of brand terms as being “lower funnel” and research-type terms as being “upper funnel”.

Most readers are doubtless familiar with models such as “Attention-Interest-Desire-Action”, and other 4, 5, and 6 stage funnels which are pretty standard fare for marketers.

After performing my initial keyword categorization (sort of into micro-categories), I like to categorize the categories themselves into a total of *ten* funnel stages I’ve developed, which are organized around a “problem/solution” mental model.

In Figure 1, I’ve shown individual keywords belonging to each funnel stage for a variety of B-to-C funnels. Later, Figure 2 presents some B-to-B  examples.

These keywords presented could be actual keywords, but I think they are more appropriately thought of as representing *categories* of keywords:

Figure 1 - Business to Consumer Search Funnel Stages

Ten stages may seem like a lot of detail, but organizing keyword categories into these stages:

1. Forces you to really try to understand searcher’s intent.
2. Gives you a sense of where the holes in your keyword research are from a funnel perspective.
3. Resonates with clients or management and is a great way to discuss and understand a business.

For example, after going through this exercise with one client, to my great surprise, they told me that stage 2 (“Suspicion There May Be a Problem“) was almost the sole focus of their existing marketing.

Their strategy is to pull in searchers looking for help identifying their problem, establishing them early as a trusted brand in the eyes of the searcher.  This client has found that organic and offline conversions then naturally follow. Although very much a one-trick pony approach which I would not recommend for most businesses, it works great in their market.

Below is another version of the funnel with examples that are more B-to-B oriented, for those interested in that perspective;  we’ll now run through the funnel stages, explain the thinking behind each of them, and discuss which stages you should consider addressing in your marketing mix.

Figure 2 - Business to Business Search Funnel Stages

Activity Funnel Relates To

This is a very general field of activity, and will often not be a focus of marketing efforts since the customer may not actually be experiencing a problem yet.

However, display advertising that targets field-focused websites or is demographically targeted may be a useful vehicle from a branding perspective in this stage.

Suspicion That There May Be A Problem

This funnel is focused around the mental model of problem-solving; other mental models may make for useful funnels as well, but I’ve found “problems” to be universally applicable.

In this stage, there may be symptoms described but the customer does not understand the nature of the problem, or perhaps they don’t even understand that the symptoms are a problem at all.

It’s a critical stage where you can have great influence on the direction a potential customer will take; we’ll touch on this more later.

Problem Identified

This is an interesting bucket because you may have some latent versus blatant needs that you can separate out; different types of problems may actually fork off into different funnels.

Looking For Solution Alternatives

In this stage, the prospect is trying to understand the variety of approaches available to them. There are many ways to lose weight for instance; diet, exercise, portions, surgery, and so on.

This is fairly early in the research phase and can be ripe fruit for thought leadership content (great for the SEO channel as well). If you’re really lucky and you’re the only solution to a problem (perhaps you’re in a new market) then this stage may barely even exist and prospects may jump directly from stage 3 to stage 5.

Solution Space Has Been Chosen

In this stage, the prospect has decided on a particular approach for solving the problem (for instance, “dieting” to solve a weight problem).

Complicating Issues

This stage perhaps belongs alongside the funnel, but I usually place it in the middle of the research phase. Many people with problems have complicating issues; diabetes (if they are interested in weight loss), a wheelchair-bound spouse (if they are interested in travel), and so on.

Addressing these complicating issues can be a great way of differentiating your product or service and reducing friction for a final sale.

Researching A Specific Solution

Now the prospect is getting *very* specific about a particular member of the solution space (“Low-Carb Diets” in the case of a Weight Loss/Dieting funnel for instance).

Researching A Specific Brand

At this stage, the prospect is getting very serious and is educating themselves about specific providers.

Remember, brand terms are well known in the industry to convert at a higher rate as generic terms (twice the rate on average in my experience), so addressing this funnel stage should be a critical component of any online marketing effort.

Conversion Imminent

Terms that include phrases like “coupon code”, “pricing”, “cheap”, are akin to flashing red lights with a siren screaming “transaction about to occur!!!”

Spending a lot of time building out variations in this funnel section is usually well rewarded. Google Suggest is a great place to find ways that potential customers are raising their hands in these ways.

Post Conversion

Often, a neglected funnel stage, this is where you will find customers searching for things like “repairs”, “replacement parts”, “add-ons”, “upgrades”, “warranties”, and “support”.

You may or may not have offerings that address concerns in this funnel stage, but it’s important to think about them.

If you’re a travel company, trip insurance may not be something your customers will actively seek out often, and paid search campaigns targeting that concept may not be worthwhile.

If, however, your paid search keyword research turns up the concept, and you then prompt your company to put together some sort of revenue-sharing deal with a trip insurance provider to integrate their product into your cart, I would say the time spent researching funnel stage #10 was well worth it.

Which Stages Should You Target?

As most articles you’ve read on this topic probably state, you should target all of them. This is not very helpful advice though – often in marketing we have to prioritize our efforts.

If I absolutely had to prioritize the top ones to focus on initially, I would say #9, #8, #5, and #2 in that order.

Funnel Stages #8 and #9, “RESEARCHING A SPECIFIC BRAND” and “CONVERSION IMMINENT” are self-evidently critical; how are you going to leverage this great funnel if you don’t catch potential customer at the end of it?

I am, however, a big believer in avoiding cannibalization from organic search conversions, so my preference is to consider targeting competitor brand terms  before I would work on cannibalizing my own.

Funnel Stage #5, “SOLUTION SPACE HAS BEEN CHOSEN” is square in the middle of the research phase, and catches customers who are partially educated on the problem and are still early enough in the funnel to nudge in your direction.

Funnel Stage #2, “SUSPICION THERE MAY BE A PROBLEM” is important because it’s an opportunity for you to disturb the prospect’s equilibrium, a critical step in any sales process.

Much like Don Draper stated in his famous “Carousel” pitch about the term “new”, with problem defining keywords, you “create an itch, and simply put your product in there as a sort of ‘calamine lotion’”. Funnel step #2 is essentially the “itch” stage.

This stage, where the potential customer suspects but does not yet fully understand that they may have a problem, is a powerful leverage point for influencing searchers in your direction. Think of searchers as meteors, heading for earth – a slight nudge much earlier in their trajectory can have as much influence as a strong shove later in the funnel.

Conclusion

Very fine categorization of keywords can be helpful in ascertaining customer intent, organizing your efforts, and suggesting actual paid search campaigns you might run.

I have found these ten funnel stages in particular are a convenient and useful way for me to organize very large numbers of refined categories of keywords, derive insights from them, and create campaigns targeting various phases of the sales funnel.

If anyone has any other useful mental models for constructing a funnel besides the “problem/solution” approach I’ve presented here, or any thoughts on which funnel stages to prioritize and how – by all means, comment below.

When bidding on competitor brand terms, you don’t have to worry about cannibalization of your own organic results; these are terms for which you probably weren’t going to rank anyway. If you were, that means you’re using competitor brand terms on your own pages – a risky proposition from a legal standpoint.

Yes, the FTC does have some regulatory language about mentioning competitors for the purposes of a factual comparison, but the risk of doing this poorly and opening yourself up to a lawsuit or a false advertising complaint probably outweighs pursuing strategies involving comparisons.

The Practice Is Fairly Common

As far as paid search goes, in the U.S. at least, my understanding is that it has been generally accepted in the online marketing industry for several years now that it’s OK to *bid* on competitor brand terms as longs as the competitor’s terms don’t show up *in your creatives* (i.e. the ad text itself).

Run some brand-name searches yourself and you’ll see plenty of examples where this appears to be happening.

Google AdWords has copious information on this topic, the easiest place to find them is here:

• Google’s Trademark Advertising Policies

I strongly encourage you to to read all of them.

By my reading of Google’s policies, it seems that in the U.S. at least, if you bid on competitor brand terms, Google’s policy is not to investigate complaints, as long as you don’t include any trademarked terms in your creatives.

It’s important to note that Google’s policies (and local law) vary by country. Of course, Google’s policies are one thing; they don’t prevent a competitor from suing you however, so proceed at your own risk.

Disclaimer: I’m no lawyer, so you should get your own legal advice and research these issues to your own satisfaction before proceeding with any of the ideas in this article. Also, if you’re going to use competitor brand terms on other platforms such as Bing/Yahoo or elsewhere, you should fully investigate their policies first as well.

Caution: This Is Still Somewhat Up In The Air

Notably, a case involving Rosetta Stone was recently revived on appeal, so the overall question of the legality of bidding on competitor trademarks is still somewhat fuzzy.

If the courts lead to a reversal on this, then it could create a huge, painful mess for the industry and spawn numerous lawsuits, given the prevalence of the practice in the last few years. SearchEngineLand’s Pamela Parker has been doing a great job covering this:

• Question of Whether It’s Legal To Use Trademarks As Keywords Revived On Appeal

What is a Trademark?

Per the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO for short) , a trademark is:

” a word, phrase, symbol or design, or a combination thereof, that identifies and distinguishes the source of the goods of one party from those of others….you can establish rights in a mark based on use of the mark in commerce, without a registration….Common law rights arise from actual use of a mark…”

• See: USPTO Trademark FAQs

Just because a competitor has not registered a phrase as a trademark with the U.S. Government doesn’t mean the phrase isn’t their trademark; it still might be considered an unregistered trademark.

Something to look for is whether they use the “TM” mark in association with something rather than the “Registered Trademark” symbol (the circle with an R).

If they are not putting “TM” (or “SM” for a “Service Mark”), then they aren’t doing a very good job of protecting their rights in that mark, an important fact to note if there is ever any court case around it (most marketing organizations are adamant about using “R”, “TM”, and “SM” the first time a trademark is used on any piece of collateral for this reason).

The bottom line is that if you register a trademark, it’s much easier to prove that you have rights in it. Google, for instance, has  a process you can follow if someone is using your trademark in their creatives, and if you can send evidence that your trademark is a registered one, that will go a long way to resolving a dispute in your favor. (Twitter famously uses trademark registrations as a factor in resolving situations of Twitter-squatting as well.)

If you’d like to see what a registration certificate looks like, you can do a trademark search yourself (per my instructions in the next section), then go to an individual record and click on the “TDR” button at the top, then see if you can find the “Registration Certificate”.

It should look something like the one below (full disclosure: I added the color version of the Google logo since the USPTO’s scanned black and white version was choppy and frankly, ugly.) Marks are generally submitted in black and white – this particular certificate looks like a re-registration that was issued about a week ago for the term [google].  I would not be surprised if there is another record in there somewhere in the system for the full color logo version however:

Figure 1: Google's Trademark Registration Certificate

How To Do Your Own Trademark Searches

If you’d like to see whether a competitor has registered a trademark, you can do some searching yourself. It’s important to note that the USPTO allows trademarks to be obtained for different classes of goods and services.

For instance, Hershey Ice Cream can have a trademark on the use of the word “Hershey” in association with ice cream, while Hershey (the large one you’re probably more familiar with) can have a trademark on use of the word in association with chocolate:

1. Go to http://www.uspto.gov/
2. Select “Trademarks->Trademark Search”
3. Select “Basic Word Search” (a “Word Mark” is just a phrase; a “Design Mark” is a stylized phrase or picture-based logo. If someone trademarks a word in a particular logo style but doesn’t register it as a Word Mark, then they possibly open themselves up to would-be infringers that just use a different logo style).
4. Search on the term.
5. “Live” means a trademark, or its application, is “Live”; “Dead” means either the application has expired or the trademark has expired.

Try it yourself for “iphone”; I just did and the search resulted in 37 records, some live and some dead.  The second-oldest is the Cisco-owned trademark that Steve Jobs famously convinced Cisco to license to Apple (see figure 2):

Figure 2: iPhone Trademark Record at the USPTO

4 Different Types Of Competitor Terms To Consider

Now that you have some sense of what terms your competitor has bothered to trademark and which they haven’t, there are a wide variety of terms worth exploring from a keyword research standpoint:

1.  The competitor’s company name

This is pretty much a no-brainer, many end-users typing company names are either deep into the research phase of the buying funnel; when they start investigating individual vendors, they are pretty close to converting.

2.  The competitor’s product names

Also a no-brainer, you probably already thought of this one.

3.  The competitor’s website name and variations thereof

Don’t forget that many people use browser toolbars to perform searches, and rather than typing Web addresses into the address bar, the often type them into the search bar (many people confuse the two). So you’ll find that your competitor’s website actually shows up as a keyword.

Variations worth considering include:

• foo.com
• www.foo.com
• http://www.foo.com
• http;//www.foo.com/

4.  The competitor’s model numbers, SKU numbers, or replacement part numbers

This is a very neat trick; if a potential customer is typing a SKU or Model number, it’s likely that they are even further along in the purchasing funnel than if they typed the generic brand name of the competitor. They have likely already done all their research, know exactly what they want, and they are about to convert.

An easy way to find lists of competitor SKUs (let’s say your competitor is “foo”) is to perform the following searches; if it’s a BtoB industry, distributors and resellers often put pricing lists up on their websites, and often large Government deals require publication of pricing from vendors:

• [foo price list]
• [foo pricing]
• [foo prices filetype:xls]

Don’t forget discontinued products. If you can find any old pricing lists and diff them against newer ones, any discontinued product names or numbers can be a treasure trove (and may even deserve their own creatives). B-to-B customers especially will search for old product numbers to identify a replacement product when it wears out.

ISBN numbers, UPC codes, or industry-specific product codes might be worth some research as well, if applicable.

Do Model Numbers, SKUs & Part Numbers Constitute A Trademark?

The answer is: perhaps, but in many situations, probably not. I couldn’t find much on the USPTO’s website on this, but I found a few interesting articles detailing some court cases and aspects of this question by one law firm and one legal services firm, it seems that it largely depends on how the number is used:

• Selling Letters and Numbers: A Court Stops a Company from Claiming Rights in Part Numbers And Why Businesses Should Care
• Trademark Examples: Slogans/Model Numbers/Taglines

One particular aspect I have a problem with on this is, it’s hard for me to see how someone can put “TM” in reference to a SKU in every document in which it’s used, since the whole idea is that a SKU number is a number that resellers, distributors, etc. can look up in a database and display.

So  it seems to me that it would be impracticable to show that you tried to protect your rights in a SKU or Part number when it’s all over the Web everywhere without “TM” on it.

However, if a number is used as a sort of a brand name that consumers would recognize, it appears that you actually *can* trademark it.

Here are two interesting examples:

Dale Earnhardt, Inc.,  has trademarked the number “1″ for a pretty wide variety of products including license plate holders, which seems pretty ridiculous if you think about it (aren’t something like 30-50 million drivers in the U.S. infringing this trademark every day?):

• Dale Earnhardt, Inc.”s Trademark for the Number 1

Levi-Strauss has a registered trademark for “501″ (which actually makes a lot of sense, since it really does function as a very recognizable trademark/brand name for their line of blue jeans):

• Levi Strauss’s Trademark for the Number 501

Check Keywords For Alternate Meanings Before Using

I would recommend using phrase match; that way, if a part number is 2139283423, you’ll also pick up some great lower-funnel variations like [2139283423 cheap], [2139283423 price] and so on.

However, if you’re trying to attract traffic focused on a competitor’s SKU (say, a steak knife set), and one of the variations it attracts traffic on is [2139283423 battery], that might be an indication that the term means something in another industry.

For this reason, it’s  important to test all keywords out in both Google Suggest and Google Search. If all the Google suggest searches seem to be related to the product or service you want to bid on, and the search results all seem to be related to it, then you have  a good candidate.

In a real-world example, a search of “ruby tuesday” clearly brings up the restaurant, which is great if that’s who you’re targeting, but a significant number of search results, and presumably searchers, are searching for the lyrics for the Rolling Stones song title “Ruby Tuesday”. That term may not be a great one to go after (or you could perhaps manage the situation by using negatives like [lyrics] and so on).

Often if you look in Google suggest, you can see whether the Model or SKU number means something in another industry right off the bat. Try typing the number, a space, and then try every letter of the alphabet to see what comes up.

Let’s say we’re a manufacturer of smartphones and we want to bid on Samsung’s “Stratosphere” Android smartphone. One of its SKU numbers is [i405]. Figure 2 shows the result of checking that term out in both Google Suggest and Google Search:

Google's Trademark Registration Certificate (source: USPTO)

Samsung does show up as a variation, but it’s easy to tell that many people searching on that term are interested in traffic conditions on the 405 highway in Los Angeles (I don’t know whey they bother searching, current traveling time is almost always “4..Oh..5..hours” ;-)

Checking against Google suggest can be a lot of work, but Ubersuggest is one way to speed the process. Don’t neglect doing the actual searches though, often a search will show query diversity not reflected in Google Suggest.

Typically, if you have a 6 to 9 character SKU number, it’s usually long enough to be unique, but sometimes you’ll run into another manufacturer in an unrelated field that uses a similar SKU numbering system.

As always, running Search Query Reports and put appropriate negatives in place is an important best practice regardless of the type of keywords you’re targeting.

Be Careful With Your Creatives

You might think this goes without saying as it should always apply to your paid search efforts, but I think it bears pointing out.  While it’s important to exclude competitor terms from your creatives, you should also make sure that any creatives you use are neither *misleading* nor *confusing*.

You shouldn’t trick searchers into coming to your website, even inadvertently. You certainly don’t want to attract any false advertising complaints, or create any fodder that could be used against you later in any legal proceeding.

For example, I would not personally be comfortable bidding on a competitors part number, and then using the vague creative “Replacement Parts: Best Prices Here”. I think a reasonable person would expect that if they clicked on that ad, they would be likely to be able to purchase the competitors part at my website.

A creative focused instead on the customer problem that my product or service solves, or perhaps describing my own offering in some specific way, would probably be much clearer.

Besides, telling the truth and being clear are just plain good business practices anyway! So write your creatives in such a way that they accurately represent the landing page, taking into account the keyword being searched on and the searcher’s likely intent.

What Results To Expect

Brand terms, and SKU/Models, on average, should have a very high click-through rate, perhaps twice the normal average.  They should also convert at a higher rate than the typical keyword.

In the ideal world, if you were targeting 800 competitor SKU numbers, you’d have 800 campaigns, each with one keyword and one ad group, and would include the SKU or Model in the creative, for maximum relevance, highest click-through rate, highest quality score, and lowest CPC after the AdWords auction adjusts for quality score.

In reality, you should probably not use the SKU or Model in the creative, even if a competitor has not trademarked those terms. Doing so is still more risky, in my opinion, from a legal standpoint, than just using the keywords as bidding targets. You’re likely to want to organize keywords together for convenience anyway, perhaps resulting in a few campaigns, a few ad groups, and a few creatives.

However, the low quality score you may experience as a result should be more than balanced by the fact that many of these terms are very long-tail in nature.

In my experience, the AdWords Keyword Traffic Estimator won’t return estimates for many of these types of term because the numbers are so low;  as a result, they’re relatively uncompetitive and inexpensive. If you have numerous competitors and competitor SKU numbers, the volumes should add up to a substantial number.

If you have high impression volume and high positions just about everywhere on your existing keywords, that may  indicate that increasing the budget or bids on existing keywords is not going to help much – what you need are more keywords.

If you run an analysis on keywords based on the categories above, you will often find that there is additional opportunity, on the order of 10-30% of your spend, available in those keywords. So, if you compete in a fragmented industry with many players, this strategy may be a useful way to expand an account to cover some relatively high-converting long-tail terms.

What About Your Own Terms?

Surprisingly, when you do this, you’ll often notice that your competitor isn’t even bidding on their own Website Address, Model Numbers, Part Numbers, or SKU numbers.

Are you doing so with your own? Doing so may be worthwhile, but there is also an argument for cannibalizing your competitors’ organic search traffic prior to cannibalizing your own organic traffic.

Be Careful Out There!

Again, none of this constitutes legal advice, you’re on your own with what you do. If you do decide to pursue this approach, then if a competitor complains about a particular keyword or set of keywords you are advertising against, the best policy, in my opinion, would probably be to simply stop using those keywords immediately.

If a competitor is bidding on your terms, why not at least complain, even if you’re on unclear legal grounds?

The ROI of writing up a threatening letter, putting a stamp on it, and sending it,  is probably pretty high if you can get your competitor to knock some high-converting keywords out of their campaign (unless of course, you’re awakening a sleeping giant by doing so – in which case – maybe you should just live with it).

Keep Up On The Issues As They Evolve

Shameless (but appropriate) plug for SearchEngineLand: Pamela Parker has been doing a great job covering this evolving area. If you’re thinking of pursuing a strategy like this, you’d be wise to read any SearchEngineLand coverage, going forward, particularly regarding the ongoing RosettaStone appeal.

Editor Postscript: This post was updated on 5/1/2012 to include the “Be Careful With Your Creatives” section.

-    Jean de La Fontaine, 1668

It seems that every initial conversation with a prospect, or a new client, seems to start out as follows:

Me: “What are your business goals?” Client: “I want more {clicks, actions, conversions} at a lower cost”.

Well, of course, this barely even needs articulation, everyone wants those things. Actually, those “goals” are really a means to an end, not the end itself – marketing goals if you will, not business goals. These goals are universally focused on of course; the trick is in how one goes about it.

However, of all three (clicks, actions, and conversions) if your strategy is to optimize for clicks or actions, your primary goal should be to move towards the third metric: tracking conversions.

The Natural Progression Of Sophistication

There is a progression in online marketing in terms of sophistication of tracking business goals (the “ends” as opposed to the “means”), depending on what you can track and tie back to your marketing efforts.

In Paid Search or its cousin Display Advertising, the progression of “ends” and “means” usually falls along these lines:

Click to enlarge

Flying Blind

If you’re doing paid search and are optimizing keywords to a cost-per-click basis, I have news for you; the key question you should be asking is not “should I invest in a bid optimization platform so I can take my campaigns to the next level?”.

The correct question is instead: “why am I flying blind in a bunch of fog?”

Perhaps you should invest in an altimeter prior to installing a jet engine!

What Can You Reasonably Do If You’re Only Optimizing CPC?

If you’re optimizing to a CPC standpoint, then the following is all you can reasonably do from an optimization standpoint:

1. Make sure you have done thorough keyword research
2. Structure your campaigns well
3. Set your bids based on what you can afford
4. Do some creative testing, and
5. Make sure you put negatives in place that make sense to you based on your knowledge of the business and the output of your search query reports.

Ultimately, you will still have no idea which keywords are really working for you other than using your intuition and knowledge of the business.

Benefits Of Shifting To Optimize For Actions Or Conversions

By all means, spend some time on the basics, but taking your tracking to the next level should be at the top of your list.

It could be, for instance, that one keyword has a very high conversion rate and should be bid way up over your average CPC, while others that convert poorly should be bid way down because they’re really not worth that much to you. You will never know this if you don’t get proper tracking in place.

Plus, knowing which keywords are converting well will guide keyword expansion efforts, isolation of top performers into their own ad groups, and so on. There are many things you can do to take your campaigns to the next level, but all of them require actually measuring results in order to have data-driven improvements.

Tracking Is Boring & Hard, But Is The Key To Success

Tracking is: difficult, annoying, technical, easy to mess up, boring, and very uninteresting to the brain of a marketer. However, having your tracking properly set up and aligning your tracking with your business goals, is the most critical success factor for paid search campaign improvement.

I don’t have sophisticated study I can quote to you to prove this, but I have seen this over – and over  - and over – and over, so take my experience as anecdotal or “clinical” evidence (others with supporting or contrary experience, please comment).

Most Web developers and marketers are not adept at setting up tracking. If you sell products through an e-commerce platform that you’ve integrated with, ask your e-commerce platform vendor for some help on tracking – it may be as simple as paying them for a few consulting hours. If you have Web developers on staff, have them slog through all the available documentation from Google, they can probably figure it out.

Some marketers use Adwords tracking pixels, some use Google Analytics tracking pixels, some use both (one credits conversions to the last click, the other credits conversions to the first click).  There are advantages and disadvantages to both – see the following help guide for a comparison.

Whatever you do, pick at least one approach and implement it, and start tracking either actions or conversions (i.e. track and optimize *at least* on a Cost-per-Action basis).

Tracking “Actions” Instead Of “Conversions”

If you can’t track product sales, but are tracking signups, registrations, or downloads, then you’ll have to put a value on each type of action.

You might analyze your funnel for instance and determine that 3 out of 100 signups result in a conversion. Well, you could for instance, value those signups at 3/100 of the average value of a conversion. It’s not an exact science, but it’s a start.

Think of actions as being fractional conversions. In fact, if you’re selling products on an e-commerce basis but also have signups occurring, you can track both actual conversions and fractional conversions for the other types of actions.

This way, you can ensure that you’re giving some attention to keywords earlier in your sales funnel, rather than spending only on final converters.

Taking Your Game To The Next Level

If you can, try to track actual dollar amounts of sales being driven by each keyword; then you can optimize your paid search keywords to a Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) goal.

If you can break out the dollar amounts of each sale by product, then you can actually tie it back to net margin dollars earned and understand that certain keywords drive more net margin than others.

This may be challenging, in that you have to get tweak your e-commerce cart solution to pass the sale amount as part of the tracking, but the effort is well worth it.

The Ultimate In Sophistication

Don’t forget that the advertiser with the highest lifetime value per customer ultimately sets the CPCs in the auction.

If one advertiser is shooting for a one-product sale, while another is taking into account that they are acquiring customers who will later buy associated products, or will make in-app purchases, or will renew a subscription again in another 12 months with a certain probability, the advertiser taking more into account will typically be able to “afford” a keyword more than the less sophisticated one.

Are your competitors involved in a subscription-based business, where your business model is a one-time sale? Are your competitors selling higher-ASP or luxury products, where your products are lower end?

If all of your competitors are using Paid Search advertising, and the keywords are just “too expensive” for you, the problem is one of the following:

1. Whoever did your paid search campaign did not know what they are doing
2. Your competitors have a different business model (for instance, subsidizing one business with leads from another, such as airlines selling vacations in order to drive plane utilization up)
3. Your business’ cost structure or product pricing is misaligned with your competitors
4. Your competitors are thinking in terms of net margin dollars or LTV and you are not

I can tell you this – if all of your competitors are bidding on a keyword and you find it too expensive, it’s not that your competitors are idiots – there is some disconnect you need to ferret out.

More sophisticated marketers could be driving you out of the market for certain keywords that you could otherwise afford, if you only truly knew how valuable they really are to you.

Also, if you are relying on a trusted partner doing your paid search for you, all on a pure CPC basis, who is not suggesting you take your game to the next level but is simply happy to continue spending money on your behalf …you need to have a conversation with them about tracking cost-per-action or cost-per-conversion, or find another partner.

You can’t attain any ends without employing the right means, so consider the end and get moving!

The problem with valuing links

Some years ago, several SEOs calculated and published PageRank tables based on Brin and Page’s original paper. However, I couldn’t find any evidence of anyone ever doing measurements to check or calibrate their tables; you can easily find some if you do a Google image search on “google pagerank table.”

Most of them appear to show that each level is worth 5.5 times the previous level—for example, a PR5 link is worth 5.5 PR4 links and so on.

To verify this, it seems to be extremely difficult to figure out how or why an individual page has a particular PageRank, short of spidering the entire web yourself and reproducing the PageRank calculations yourself, or using a tool such as LinkScape or Majestic-SEO.

A clever trick we can use

However, there is a way to examine entire websites (or at least, their home pages); Google already provides PageRank to us of a sort, via their Toolbar PageRank metric. Google has also already spidered the entire web for us. With a simple Google query, it is trivial to figure out how many backlinks a website has (the industry-standard notation of brackets means that you should type in every character you see between the brackets when doing your search):

["searchengineland.com" –site:searchengineland.com]

This query will return all web pages that reference “searchengineland.com” that are not located on searchengineland.com domain itself. This includes web pages that have links to the home page as well as web pages with links to deeper pages. It also includes references to the website that are not a link (i.e. if someone references searchengineland.com in an article but does not make it a hyperlink), but many in the SEO industry speculate that the search engines then convert that into a link and count it, which I am also assuming here.

The theory

Knowing that Brin and Page’s original PageRank paper specifies PageRank is a logarithmic measurement, I then theorized that a graph of website home pages’ toolbar PageRanks versus the log of the number of backlinks to those sites should be roughly linear, could give us insight into the value of links at different levels of PageRank, and could perhaps aid us in building a PageRank table based on actual measurements.

One might argue that for small websites, the PageRank of links coming to them might diverge significantly from the average (for instance, a small website may have a few PR8 links and get a big boost in PageRank), but intuitively, large sites should not diverge from the average by too much. The larger you get, the more you should resemble the average website—if you have millions of links, they can’t all be PR8 links and are more likely, on average, to be similar to the “average” link profile of the entire web.

So, I decided to simply measure the Toolbar PageRank of 50 websites and to plot it against the number of backlinks that they each have, on a logarithmic graph. One would think this graph would exist somewhere in the industry but I have never seen one (if you know of anyone who has done this before or any papers, please comment below).

What I got was the following remarkable graph:

Toolbar PageRank versus number of backlinks

Testing the theory

Any good theory should have some predictive value, so, armed with the equation for a linear fit to this graph, I checked how many links there are to a co-worker’s new website (it’s a great place to Buy Baby Announcements) and found it had 177. The equation predicts the website, or at least, its home page, should have a PageRank of 2.6, and sure enough its Toolbar PageRank shows as 2.

Try it yourself with a few sites: take the log of the number of backlinks to a website, multiply by 1.4063, subtract .4747, round the result down, and check that against its toolbar PageRank.

A caveat:It’s important to note that a site may be ~1-2 PageRanks above or below its calculated value depending on the average PageRank of the links coming to it, i.e. if you are doing a great job and have very high-PR links, your site will be above its predicted PageRank. Quite often though, this simple equation is surprisingly accurate.

An interesting observation

The high-toolbar-PageRank sites that were below the line (i.e. whose reported PageRank seemed lower than it should be based on their links) included Dailymotion and Wikipedia—notably, both user-generated content sites. High-PR sites that were above the line included usa.gov and cnn.com. This is certainly not a significant sample but suggests some further study on UGC sites versus news, government, or .edu sites is probably worthwhile. It could also argue for a “hidden variable” in the numbers such as TrustRank (Google discloses on their website they use 200+ variables in their organic ranking algorithm on their website so this seems highly likely).

So, how much is a link worth?

Well, we can’t say what a PR1 link or a PR2 link is worth in absolute terms, since the equation measures the “average” value of links on the web. However, the slope of the equation is the same regardless of how you value a PR1 link, so we can say with some confidence that each level link is worth (drum roll please…..) 5.14 times the previous level. Those old-time SEOs armed with the PageRank paper calculations were not too far off with their estimates of 5.5 after all!

“Average” number of links required to reach each toolbar PageRank level

So, per actual measurement, a PR3 link is worth 5.14 PR2 links, a PR7 link is worth 5.14 PR6 links, and so on. And as it turns out, the SEOs of years gone by that calculated their PageRank charts weren’t too far off with numbers like 60 million or 80 million links to become a PR10 site. On a log scale, those are really close to 28 million. Note that all the PR 10 sites came in above the curve, so for instance, one made it with only 11 million links—but all of this is close enough for our purposes.

This is of great significance to link-building campaigns—if you have a choice between sending an email to ten webmasters requesting 10 potential PR4 links, versus two webmasters requesting a single PR6 link, it actually is more efficient to spend significant time crafting your email for the PR6 link as it is worth 5 x 5 = 25 PR4 links.

Future posts will dig closer towards placing actual monetary value on links. Hopefully this series will inspire others in the industry to do some analyses in this area which sorely needs the attention!

Postscript: Caveats and assumptions

If Google reported toolbar PageRank to an additional decimal point, then it would probably show that some sites are really 10.1, 10.5, 10.9 etc (think about it—two PR10 sites clearly don’t have identical PRs). The only effect of accounting for this would be to shift the Y-intercept up; if you assume all the PR10 sites were really “average” PR 10 sites, then they should be, on average, PR10.58—halfway to 11 on a log scale. All the PR3 sites would be assumed to be PR3.58, and so on. Although the graph as shown does not reflect this assumption, the equation disclosed does include this adjustment—and either way, it has no affect on the slope which gave us the “each level is worth 5.14 times the last level” factor.

This entire exercise also assumes that Toolbar PageRank actually means something (it’s still rather vague, and the industry has no clear consensus on this point). It also assumes that Google’s “520,211 results found” metric is actually reasonably reliable.

Finally, some PageRank 10 sites that were considered were excluded if they would obviously warp the calculations, such as Adobe (due to its Reader) and Mozilla.com.