Hi, and welcome back. In this lecture, we're going to look at how digital PR activity can affect your website. It's quite an important lecture because online search results can really define your brand. So it's really essential that as a business, you take control of your online presence. leads that come naturally to your website via Google Search are eight times more likely to result in a sale than leads that come through outbound activity? We'll start by introducing search engine optimization.

Search Engine Optimization is simply the process of making it easier for people to find your website online. It's about increasing the quantity and quality of traffic that comes to a website from search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing. This is important because every day almost 4 billion searches are conducted on Google, which means search engines like Google can send loads of valuable customers to your website. But you have to work hard to capture that traffic. For example, if I'm looking to buy organic coffee beans, I might search on Google for a supplier. And I'd probably type buy organic coffee beans into the search bar.

Now you can see that there are a few ads, which we'll ignore for now. And we'll go to the first organic or natural search results. And you'll see that this website appears at the top, I'm actually most likely to click on the site because there's quite a lot of evidence that shows that around 30% of searchers will click on the first results around 15% will click on the second and around 10% will click on the third. By the time you get to the 10th position, you're only getting around 2% of the clicks. So search engine optimization is important because only one website can appear at the top of the search results. And that website will get the lion's share of traffic.

And because people search online when they're already interested in buying the traffic that comes via organic search results tends to be quite valuable. In fact, it has an eight times highest chance of converting into leads and customers It's therefore worth your while to work hard to be that one website that ranks as far up the search results as possible. So I hope now you can understand why companies spend so much money on search engine optimization. But what does that have to do with digital PR? Well, if you're going to understand that, you need to first understand how SEO works. How does Google determine which website ranks first for which keyword search engines and we'll talk about Google but this really applies to all search engines.

Search engines want to make sure that users see only the most accurate relevant results when they enter queries into the search bar. To do this, they use what's called spiders or crawlers to examine the content of each webpage on the internet. And to get an idea of what it's all about. In order to decide which pages rank with which search terms. Google's algorithm looks at over 200 signals from your website and others competing for the same terms. The algorithm looks at two types of signals or factors.

Unsighted signals, such as the quality of your content, the keywords you use in your headings and how quickly your website loads off site signals, which are links from other websites across the web. Google's algorithm uses these links to determine how trustworthy and valuable your website is. And there are three important factors that the algorithm considers quantity. How many links are pointing to your site or your page quality, how authoritative and trustworthy the websites are that link to your site, and link type, whether the websites have a valuable followed links, or nofollow links, which are still valuable, but just not as much as followed. So arguably, the most important part of SEO is generating links from other sites across the web, as Google takes these links as endorsements of your website, and they play a major role in the ranking algorithm. But what does that have to do with digital PR?

Well, by now it should be obvious. The best way to generate There's hallowed External links is through PR, the moral authority of the link, the better, and the best websites to get those links from a media sites and blogs. In many instances, good PR is the only way to get links from a media site. The more links you can accumulate, the more thorough search of your site becomes, and the more likely it is to climb up the search rankings. But that's not the only benefit of links from media sites. Those links often send lots of traffic directly to your website, which is always good for business.

Even if you can't generate a link, there's still value in getting the media to talk about your company. If you're being mentioned in publications and blogs, Google has told us that these mentions can help to boost your rankings. That isn't going to be the case if you don't have an SEO strategy in place already. But it's worth going for them even if you can't get a link. And finally, sometimes your website simply cannot compete for certain search terms is Just too competitive. In those instances, digital PR is your best bet.

Remember when we talked about digital PR being about managing the online presence of your brand? Well, in these instances where you can't compete for rankings, you want to target those sites that do rank for those search terms, and get your brand mentioned on those sites. To recap, online search results have a meaningful impact on your brand's reputation and success. Digital PR contributes to your own SEO strategy by building valuable backlinks to your website, a key SEO ranking factor and securing brand mentions in some of the websites that rank on page one for key terms. So now that you understand the basics of SEO and how your digital PR efforts can really support your SEO strategy, you'll hopefully understand the importance of link building. We'll cover all the how tos in terms of generating links using the media at a later section in the course.

But first we're going to lay the groundwork by doing some background research and planning. Before we move on to that section though, please don't forget to write a review of the course. so far.