Picket Signs, Drums and SEO

By Rob Discher, Vice President

For what seems like the past six months, we’ve had a group of protestors waving picket signs and banging buckets outside our office every morning. They’re angry, it seems, about something. Or maybe they’re just interested in collecting the $10/hour they rack up for braving the frigid Austin winter outside the Omni building. Either way, they’re remarkably consistent. Come 8 am CT, the chants fire up, the drum sticks start connecting with the cheap plastic receptacles and the sings start bobbing up and down.

Here’s the problem – despite all the noise and commotion, I don’t think anyone in our office could tell you what these people are asking for? What are they so pissed about? What’s moving them to this point of action? What is their desired outcome?

I joked with someone in the elevator last week that these protestors needed a PR firm. I was only half kidding. We had both just walked past the blaring drums and shouts, coffee and laptops in hand. I asked my fellow elevator-mate if she knew what the protests were about. After months of walking past the picketers, neither of us had an answer.

What does this have to do with PR? Is Edelman breaking into the organized protest business? No, we’re not opening up a new practice group, but at a fundamental level, the argument about noise versus clarity is incredibly relevant.

Think of all the pitches, press releases, events, blog posts and speeches you’ve written over the past year for a client. Think of the last time you picked up a phone (I know, old school) and called a reporter.

…or pitched a blogger on an event you wanted them to attend;

…or hit up a third party to sign an op-ed.

How central was that action to what your client really wants to be known for? I say this as someone who has spent years chasing down client deliverables assigned on a whim, some of them well thought through, most of them well-intentioned, but not all of them with logical ties back to our initial mandate.

This is why I’m excited about SEO and why at some level, it’s relevant to every piece of work that comes through our doors.

First, a little background. One of my college economics professors hammered us on the concept that economics was more a model for looking at life than a way to dissect FED rates and fiscal policy. We were encouraged to use concepts like opportunity cost and sunk cost to weigh decisions in everyday life. When do you consider something “done” and move on? What do specific actions…specific uses of your time…REALLY cost you? Where else could those resources have gone? The older I get, the more the economics mindset makes sense.

Search Engine Optimization has a similar potential. Right now, most people look at SEO in terms of linguistics, as copy on a web page or an inbound links strategy. The full potential for SEO goes well beyond that tactical approach, and it’s a lesson our friendly protestors with their lack of message clarity could use next time they hit the corner of Brazos and 8th.

SEO is rooted in the ability to discover what a company really wants to be known for and where its competitive advantage sits. You start the SEO journey by landing on a set of keywords… short and long tail phrases that the company stands behind…and you build the campaign around them. You pull together paid and organic search strategies, and you begin to see all the places that these key terms should be living – places that previously were the domain of a scattered strategic exercise or a one-off campaign.

What started as a site linguistics exercise now impacts the press releases you’re sending out. The content for the blog you help write for a CEO comes not from his late night rambling emails but from an intentional set of concepts you’re working to build the company’s reputation around. Pitches to reporters and bloggers are influenced by the topics you’re looking to drive traffic around and the credibility your site gains via the “vote” you get from that outlet writing about you.

These campaigns are more effective, more measurable and better aligned with business objectives….yes…but more simply, these campaigns based around a strong keyword strategy, founded in SEO best practices, are clearer. They’re cleaner. They’re better defined. They’re the equivalent of the well-spoken friend in an elevator calmly and simply explaining a situation, contrasted by the screaming protestor whose messages and tactics send you in a thousand different mental directions.

It’s time we start thinking a bit differently about SEO...and maybe about our picket line strategy.