Learn how a Fortune 1000 company wins in their hyper-competitive marketplace with innovative strategies and a Search Experience Optimization alignment.
Through a series of case studies, these industry experts present how Paychex developed a winning SEO content strategy built upon a foundation of cross-functional cooperation.
Here's what you'll get from attending:
- Why SEO has a multiplier effect when properly leveraged across an organization
- How to align Development, Marketing & PR, and the C-Suite in SEO
- How Paychex leveraged its need for relevance to achieve extraordinary results
5. Search Experience Framework
Usability
Is your site fast, responsive,
engaging, shareable, crawlable,
and indexable?
01
Relevance
You establish relevance with great
content that inspires, educates,
informs, and entertains.
02
Authority
Earned links, company online
reputation, article references,
citations, co-citations, etc.
03
6. Usability in the URA SEO Framework
Usability is all about providing a fast and responsive experience for users
(bots and humans) that enables a flexible foundation for an awesome
content strategy.
Disciplines Involved:
• Systems Administrators
• Designers
• UX/UI
• Developers/Coders
7. Relevance in the URA SEO Framework
Relevance is all about addressing the needs of the user and creating an engaging,
educational, and/or entertaining experience that fulfills the intended purpose.
Disciplines Involved:
• Content Strategists
• Content Writers Producers
• Copywriters
• Social Media
• Video Production
• Podcasters
• Marketers/Advertisers
8. Authority in the URA SEO Framework
Authority is all about user engagement and reaping the rewards of creating
a delightful experience by way of earned links, earned notoriety, and earned
social media signals.
Disciplines Involved:
• Public Relations
• C-Suite
• Social Media Team
• External Bloggers
9. What does Democratization Look Like?
9
• Social
• Promotion
• Industry Outreach
• Drives Corporate Priorities
• Company Vision
• Voice of the Company
• Proper Merchandising
• Content Best Practices
• Building Content for the User
• Proper Coding
• Responsive Design
• Server Uptime and Speed
• Adapting to Tech Advancements
• Audits
• Analysis
• Education
• Staying up-to-date
10. How Does Democratization Happen?
1. Start the Conversation
2. Find Common Goals
3. Foster Cooperation on Projects
4. Share the Spotlight
5. Rinse and Repeat
14. Founded
1971 in
Rochester,
New York
135 offices in
39 States
Germany &
Brazil
#1 Small Business
Payroll Provider
#2 Mid-Market
Payroll Provider
10M Employees
Paid
#1
Retirement
Recordkeeper-
70k plans
TOP
ASO/PEO for
Small Business
>850k Worksite
Employees
25. CASE #1
Small Business Week
@ericabizz
1. Pool your resources
2. Set the strategy together
26. T H E
R E S U L T S
@ericabizz
• SlideShare – 3.5k views
• The Washington Post – DA: 98 /
1.5M daily visitors
• Gene Marks – 88,719 Twitter
followers
• Inc.com –DA: 93 / 3M Monthly Visits
• Smallbizdaily – DA: 55
Give some background history to how my relationship with PR came about
Not an overnight relationship, 3 years in the making. I approached it all wrong in the beginning so I’m hoping you can avoid those pitfalls
Offer up some tips that I learned along the way to help build a relationship with your PR team
I have some examples of projects we’ve worked on together on to amplify our content, build influencer relationships, and increase brand awareness, mentions and links
PR does not role up under Marketing
Right off the bat caused problems because we reported to different people meaning
-Different budget
-Different resources
-Different goals/objectives
When I first proposed outreach I was told I had to get permission from the PR team—didn’t understand because I thought this fell under SEO
“why wouldn’t PR let me do my job?”
They felt I was stepping on their toes and I felt they were stepping on mine
Flew under the radar..hired agency
Guest blogging-no bylines
Trying to avoid the PR review
Couldn’t byline
GET BUY-IN-without it, you will never build a true partnership.
PR needs to understand where you’re coming from and what benefits they’ll get out of the relationship.
Realize that you both have something to bring to the table:
PR:
-Internal Connections-ties with SMEs
-access to information first (compliance)
-relationships already built with the media
-Understands and knows how to pitch
SEO:
-different set up data, able to help them vet out sites based on spam score, DA, site traffic, backlink portofolio, etc.
-Able to show what impact outreach has on bottom line-web traffic, rankings
Share:
Lists-share your list of sites you want to engage with as well as top influencers. Able to see overlap, but also gaps
Tools-grant access to all of the tools, we have access to the data so should they
Resources-we have very small team so sharing resources is crucial.
Knowledge- share knowledge of SEO, PR doing seo and didn’t even know it. Educate them on SEO best practices
-PR links, boiler plate
-optimize titles/meta for search
-optimize PR before they go out
-technical SEO
Establish who does what, what makes the most sense from an organizational standpoint. Should the SEO reach out to the CEO, probably not.
Who pitches who
Break list into tiers
Who bylines--We don’t guest blog often but when we do we have a vetting process. My team writes the content, PR works with the internal SME on reviews and securing bylines
Who writes
The more you know about what each other is doing the less likely you are to duplicate efforts. This also helps build the relationship. Don’t work on something and then go silent.
I invite PR to all of our content meetings, I include them on our strategy meetings. We set up a “content council” to align all content efforts in the organization
Develop a cadence of communication. Meet weekly.
Example: when an opportunity presents itself for a “guest blog” I always include PR, and vice versa
I’m onboarding a new agency to help with content, I’ve included them in the vetting process
We are launching a new content hub and worked with them to establish technical requirements
This is the most important tip.
Make sure to monitor all activity to prove the value of the relationship and to continue to drive progress.
Celebrate success and let the larger team know what you’re up to.
PR always “owned” content and coverage for small business week and this was the first year we came together to execute a campaign.
This year’s campaign centered around summer being a prosperous time for small businesses. Used data from our SBJI that showed historical trend of employment growth that wasn’t just seasonal. We created an infographic, distributed a news release, and created a summer-long campaign
Brought Erica into the fold from an SEO and Content perspective
Created a Summer of Small Business series for Paychex.com article section as a way to start testing the waters for the content hub that’s now in development
EB:
Paid syndication
Offered writers to assist with article series
TVA:
We also brought in SurePayroll, one of our subsidiaries that has a blog, to help us with disseminating the content
Did separate blog posts based on our content
Pitched content to media, and used content for byline opportunities
Our partner companies got involved too – Biz2Credit
Working with a lot of different teams, important to bring everyone together at the front end, and give everyone a voice so they can benefit from the campaign
In addition to our “promotional” partners, worked closely with our data scientists to analyze data and trends for the infographic, and what was really at the heart of the whole campaign
Our counterparts at SurePayroll have more experience than we do when it comes to this sort of thing, so they offered valuable insight and helped steer us in the right direction
Social – in this case, not only helped amplify the content Having him at the table from the beginning, he could provide insight into what would resonate in our social channels, how to frame it and design it.
Key Takeaway:
Content truly is at the heart of what we do. It’s not SEO, it’s not PR, it’s content. And when you have good content, and utilize all the teams you can to amplify it, SEO and PR will always benefit.
Results -
Second most viewed infographic on our slideshare channel – 3,117 views
1st is HCR related, and has been on the site for more than a year
Biz2Credit- Inc. Colum, Gene Marks washington post blog , SurePayroll – smallbizdaily byline (with link back to paychex)
Gene on Twitter – 88,719 followers, Wash Post Daily visitors – 1,505,548
Inc daily visitors –
Smallbizdaily -
5 SoSB artilcles on .com
After working together, we realized that industry bloggers = untapped potential, how do we pool resources to target
In the HR space, there’s about 2 dozen bloggers that are very influential, especially as we start targeting the mid-market space
Since neither of us was targeting this group, we decided to approach it together, along with our social media group
With one of the three major trade shows Paychex participates in right around the corner – SHRM - we decided that would be a great way to start interacting with this group
Identified a list of bloggers that would be at SHRM, created profiles, split into tiers-PR took tier 1, SEO took tier 2
Divide and conquer
Team up and live tweet the event-be conscious of mentioning and engaging with influencers
Target sessions that our key influencers were participating in
Retweeted and favorited their tweets
Get in the content game, create content specifically from the event-able to reference or mention influencers one last time
We’ve made online connections with our target influencers
They are following us personally, as well as Paychex
They are retweeting us
Learned just how interconnected they are
Already had connection with Steve Boese – HR Executive Magazine, HR Happy Hour, HR Tech Co-Chair, best buds with Trish McFarlane
Trish McFarlane – Blogger, CEO of HR Advisory firm, Co-founder of WomenofHR.com with Jennifer Payne
Solidified 3-part series on Women of HR around American Business Women’s Day
At HR Tech last week, one of our key influencers moderated a panel that one of our executives participated in – if we hadn’t started this initiative wouldn’t have known who he was
Created 3 content pieces for paychex.com, referencing influencers
Of note – We’re still in the beginning stages of this initiative, and we are expanding our efforts for more day-to-day interaction. For now, a lot of our success is anecdotal, but as we continue to grow this initiative, we’re confident we’ll have start to see quantifiable results.
Some of these examples of how we continue to work together on a day to day basis to achieve small wins in the outreach space
Add image of PR media list tool
[TVA] 1. Share contact lists-PR shared media list and EB gave access to Buzzstream-we both knew who each other wanted/needed to target, no overlap
2. But then we realized overlap is ok, as long as you are communicating about it. Need to make sure you’re working as team, otherwise reflects poorly
PR uses our content to pitch
2. Reference influencers in content
[TVA] Background - PR Team’s worked with him in the past as part of his small business influencers program. Not much else
Example 1 [EB]-Ramon Ray-targeted small business influencer
In 2014 we reached out to Ramon Ray for a quote
June 2015-Ramon was on a panel with colleague, met in person, what’s next?
September 2015-did an interview –PR was on the phone
[TVA] now has an opening to build a partnership – working to solidify ongoing contribution, and see how we may be able to work with him on snap polling – what does he want to know from SBOs
Example 2
[EB] business news daily is creeping in on organic S.O.V.
Published an article, linked to an article from business news daily editor
Reached out for permission
She said of course, and tweeted ‘thanks’
[TVA]-able to build relationship with Biz news daily – In the past had a really solid relationship with BND, recently they haven’t been interested in the story ideas we’ve been pitching. This gives us a way back in.
Off-page presence:
SmallBizDaily – opportunity landed by SEO, PR executed
HRO Today, Employee Benefit Advisor, CPA Practice Advisor, HR Magazine (print edition) – PR pitched publication using an article from paychex.com
WomenofHR – opportunity landed through relationships built at SHRM
Not sure where to begin?
We work with a lot of associations and alliances …they are craving content
--Since Tracy has left, will need to work on re-creating the partnership with PR
Teaming up with our social team we are trying to put a standard process in place for interacting and building relationships with influencers
So far, we’ve come up with our top list of influencers and sites that we want to target based on our own set of criteria.
NOTE: Buzzstream has a discovery tool in beta to help search for influencers, but you can see their engagement and activity levels as well as who they influence and who influences them.
We’ve pooled them together and narrowed down the list to make it more maintainable.
We’ve put all of twitter and blog feeds into one location. We are using Dynamic Signal
Now, we assembling a larger team to amplify our efforts.
We will create a calendar for the year with events such as podcasts, webinars, twitter chats, conferences, etc. where we can monitor and cover from a social perspective and create content accordingly.
Find Common Ground-What’s in it for them? Educate PR that the lines are starting to blurring. There are over 33 million results with PR & SEO in Google…this is definitely a thing
Figure out what they are doing and how you can help them.
Pull the data-pull a report to show PR how they are influencing SEO and web traffic
Can you help attribute what PR activity is driving traffic to the main site. Can you build a dashboard for them to take to their boss. Can you help them optimize their PR?
3. Include them-invite them to your next strategy meeting, give them access to tools that will benefit them The more they know and the more they feel included they will want to help