Public relations – definition

Not everyone can explain what PR means, and it is worth knowing this concept. In short, it is a communication strategy that allows you to build a relationship between the company and its environment. They are not only customers, but also the local community and employees. It is also interesting that there is no single definition explaining what exactly this area does. The oldest ones, from the 1920s, focus primarily on the information function. Over time, other aspects were also taken into account, including analytical and consultative. One of the most popular definitions today is that of the American Public Relations Association. It puts emphasis on building relationships and commitment, and not only on creating opinions and publicity for the company.

PR and marketing – what are the differences?

In addition to explaining what PR is, you also need to distinguish between it and marketing. They are not the same, although the areas complement each other. Public relations is closely related to the company’s information policy, its relations with the environment, culture and management. In turn, marketing focuses on those activities related to the market and customers that are to increase the production process and create demand. This area is mainly aimed at meeting the needs of consumers and at the same time increasing the company’s revenues

PR is a narrower concept. It supports the marketing strategy, and sometimes it is also its important element and indirectly increases the interest in the offered products or services. Therefore, public relations can complement marketing and jointly achieve the goals set by the company. It facilitates building trust in the company, and this is important when it comes to making purchasing decisions. This PR largely creates its image, as well as informs about current events, which may be, for example, entering new markets, expanding operations or introducing new products to the offer.

Why is PR sometimes confused with marketing? This may be influenced by the fact that it is used as a communication tool between the enterprise and the community. It is therefore crucial to distinguish between the tasks carried out by these two areas. This is important especially from the perspective of entrepreneurs, because only then is it possible to develop an effective strategy ensuring success on the market.

Public relations – what for?

Well-thought-out, well-conducted PR activities mean that the company ceases to be anonymous. It gains recognition and thus can achieve its goals, and especially increase profits. Thanks to public relations, you can effectively distinguish yourself from the competition and gradually build a positive image, while gaining the trust of an increasing number of people. By combining this area in a skillful way with marketing, you can get closer to customers and meet their expectations. This is conducive to creating good opinions and associations.

There are still many companies that neglect PR. Sometimes this is due to a limited budget, but sometimes it is related to a misperception of this type of activity. There are people who wrongly equate public relations with lies and manipulation. Literally translated, the term means public relations. This area includes all activities that allow for contact with the environment and creating positive associations in the context of the company. They are aimed at two groups:

– Internal recipients – includes people within a given organization. This includes supervisory board, management, employees, shareholders, trade unions. In this case, PR is primarily used to integrate and motivate the entire team, but also to increase awareness of the mission, identity and goals of the company.
– External recipients – includes all people who are not directly related to the organization. These are mainly clients (including potential ones), media and various institutions.

In addition to the information and image function, PR also performs several others:

– coordination – allows to harmonize the activities undertaken in the company,
– stabilization – in crisis situations it helps to stabilize relations with the environment,
– persuasive – strengthens the positive attitude of recipients towards the company,
– contact – allows you to maintain good contacts with the environment,
– preventive – prevents problems from developing on a larger scale, allows them to be solved at an early stage.

Public relations activities

In fact, PR activities are very diverse. The most important are:

– Media relations – in other words, cooperation with the media. It is public relations that deals with maintaining contact with journalists, thanks to which information about the company, its achievements, etc. appear in the press, television and other channels. events.
– Crisis management – actions carried out in sudden, difficult and unexpected situations that may adversely affect the company’s image. Their goal is not to cover up the truth, but to take action that will remove the effects of the crisis or reduce them as much as possible.
– Corporate Identity (CI) – in other words, creating the identity of the organization. This area includes all activities that allow to build and consolidate a strictly defined way of perceiving the company among recipients. Attention to detail and consistency play an important role here. CI means, for example, logos, stamps, business cards or colors used by the company.
– Own publications – all publications issued by the company relating to its daily operations. It is not only leaflets and folders, but also financial reports, annual reports and even a website.
– Lobbying – activities aimed at gaining the favor of the media, authorities and other interested parties. They can be conducted both on a local and national scale. Lobbying helps to disseminate ideas important to the company.

In order for PR to help a company, it must be based on a carefully prepared strategy. Each step should be well thought out as a seemingly small mistake usually costs a lot. It should be noted that public relations activities are based on dialogue, i.e. two-way communication. This distinguishes this area from regular advertising which is one-sided and does not expect feedback. Currently, PR participates in communication with clients and is helpful at every stage of the company’s activity. It provides a lot of support during its establishment and building awareness, as well as later, when introducing new products to the market, conducting social campaigns and rebranding.

Public relations goals

The goals of PR can be divided into:

– strategic,
– operational.

A specific image of the company is a strategic goal. It determines the state that should be achieved by implementing the developed plan. Motivates and shows the correct course of action. An example of such a goal may be to improve the opinion about an organization in the industry or to strengthen the relationship between it and customers. Strategic goals focus on managing problems, image and relationships. They mostly influence and complement each other.

The operational goals are more precise, and their implementation facilitates the achievement of the set strategic goals. They are formulated taking into account the SMART principle, that is:
S – Specified,
M – Measurable,
A – Ambitious,
R – Realistic,
T – Time-Bound.

An example of an operational goal is to increase the number of members of the company’s loyalty program by 40% within 6 months. Each must be worded in such a way as to be detailed and, at the same time, measurable. It is also important that the operational goals motivate the company to act and develop. However, when establishing them, you need to make sure that you have the tools to implement them.

Formulating the goals that the company is to achieve through PR in the right way is important, because it is on this that the subsequent measurement of their effects depends. For the evaluation, you need tools that allow you to track the progress of organized campaigns and give you access to various statistics. Which are worth using? It largely depends on what exactly the company wants to achieve through public relations activities. For example, Google Analytics or Brand24 may prove useful (especially for media monitoring). When verifying the effects, certain indicators should be taken into account, such as:

– the number of mentions of the company, both on official channels and on internet forums, blogs, etc.,
– range of published content,
– traffic on the corporate website.

There is no single, strictly defined method for analyzing the effects of PR, which can be quite a problem for companies. In addition, this area is gradually entering other areas, supplementing them (e.g. marketing), and this is an additional obstacle. Although analyzing the effectiveness of public relations is not always easy, it is worth taking on this task to see if the company is actually going in the right direction.

Keep in mind that PR plays a very important role. Currently, the reputation and perception of the company are extremely valuable. Often they are the ones that largely allow you to achieve success in the industry, and one mistake is enough to lose your position that has been built for many months or years.

Hey Google, I’m here!

When Google recognizes our website, it is necessary to take steps to identify those elements that its users may find useful. The steps to encourage web crawlers to go on our side are mostly found in Google’s guides and webmaster manuals.

Basic activities focus on sharing your website and allowing traffic on it – both machine-made and human-made. Then, it is worth indicating the area with which the search engine should associate our site – e.g. by including keywords related to the industry within it. In the meantime, it’s also important to create access to a place where Google stores everything about our domain – Google Search Console. And then… then a more advanced part begins that should be discussed with a specialist!

But first, let’s focus on the basics and start positioning our site on Google!

Hey Googlebot, you’ve got Allow here

Positioning your site should start with the admission of web robots to your site. For old seo enthusiasts it is obvious, but for people who have not had any previous contact with robots, this issue may be interesting.

Internet crawler / indexer – a program whose task is to collect information about everything that is available on the Internet. There are different types of robots that specialize in collecting various data.

Googlebot performs a crawl – it goes through the links on the pages and indexes its content. The frequency of Googlebot visits to websites varies – visits may be repeated every few hours or every few days. Without crawling, it is not possible to display the page in search results.

Most of the web robots obey the rules imposed on them by the website. Information on this is contained in the robots.txt file and the “robots” tag located in the HEAD section of the page’s code.

Why is this information so important? When creating a page, in most cases you disable the ability to index your site, preventing robots from entering the page. Such action makes sense – an unfinished page, full of “lorem ipsum” or pictures of sweet kittens playing the role of place holders – will not be found in the search results by accident and will not mislead the potential customer. At the time of commissioning the website, the guidelines for web robots should be changed, but this is not always the case.

These types of mistakes are not uncommon and do not only happen to small players. In 2009, Skoda’s promotional campaign was widely discussed, in which the Internet search engine played one of the key roles. In the commercial, which was aired on television, it was encouraged to search for “Yeti kidnaps”. Problem? Access to the content on the page for robots was blocked in the robots.txt file.

The content of the result description is automatic information that appears when crawlers are not allowed to access the content. This situation is not conducive to website positioning, and the popularity of the slogan was used by the brand’s competition, quickly jumping over the website advertised on TV in Google.

Titles and descriptions

Page unlocked? Time for a title and description! The elements of the <head> section – title and description are the first fragment of your website that users encounter.

Both elements are also important, although it is assumed that the description (meta description) is of less importance from the SEO point of view. The title not only appears in search results, it also appears at the top of the browser tab.

The <title> element should contain information relevant to web robots and users. Keywords assigned to a given subpage have the highest priority here, and other information may follow them – for example, for industries such as road assistance it will be a contact phone.

The content of the title should be 65-100 characters long. Both values are approximate – for titles, this is where the number of pixels the title has been created is concerned. Google displays titles and lengths of about 460-600 pixels (depending on the size of the device we use), and in the case of longer ones – cuts the part and leaves a triangle, as you can see in the screen above. To make sure that the most important part of your title – your keyword – fits in the result, place it right at the beginning.

When it comes to <meta name = “description” content = “…”>, things are a bit different – its main goal is to encourage the user of the search engine to look at the site. When preparing a description, it is worth focusing on those aspects that make the website stand out from the competition. It is worth using the appropriate passwords – in the case of online stores, it will be e.g. information about free / immediate shipping. Call To Action should also be installed in the description – a password that will encourage you to take action – “Check now!”, “Find out more now!” and so on…

The description is limited to approx. 160 characters. When it’s too long, Google limits it to the appropriate size, leaving three dots at the end. The content of the description is available in the code of the website, but it is not displayed directly on it – its main purpose is to present the website in search engine search results.

During the process of positioning a website, analyzing titles and descriptions, and if necessary, changing them, it is one of the first steps that a positioner takes. Changing the above does not require technical skills, and in the case of popular CMSs, it is limited to placing appropriate content in dedicated places, usually marked as “title, description for search engines”.

Introduce yourself… or else Google will do it

In the absence of a title and description, Google decides what will be displayed instead of them. Unfortunately, sometimes Google also takes over when both tags are properly completed. In such cases, text fragments from the page appear in the SERPs containing the words and phrases searched by the user.

The lack of properly prepared title and description prevents the search engine from showing the most important keywords and finding the site in the right places in the search results. This hinders the procedure of positioning a website and associating it with a specific topic.

The presentation of topics and phrases important for our website and business also takes place through appropriate content. Content is as important to robots as it is to those more human users of the site. Each of them has their own preferences regarding its presentation… Robots like a well-described structure – texts with different headings – h1 as title and h2, h3,… as subheadings; subsequent paragraphs placed in the <p> tag, and the most important elements (keywords!) highlighted with <strong>. Additional description of it with the help of structured data will make the robot filter the content of the page faster (and more probably!). On the other hand, the web user will appreciate the structure of the text – its length, font size, breakdown into paragraphs, clarity of graphics and all other elements that will help accelerate the consumption and assimilation of the content.

Both aspects can be neatly combined, which usually has a positive effect on the visibility of the site in search results. Well-written and html-described text is popular among website visitors, and sometimes they even pass it on. Such action also stimulates its popularity among web robots, which translates directly into more frequent visits to the website and high positions.

What is website positioning?

Positioning is primarily emphasizing the advantages of a website, while eliminating all its disadvantages, in order to achieve the highest possible position in the search engine. Website optimization is nothing more than adapting to the rules that prevail in the Google search engine environment. It is these rules that are key to the order of the results displayed on the query.

Sounds simple and logical? Unfortunately, it is not – the above-described basic steps to be included in the Google index can be compared to putting the first track while learning to write – the title of a calligraphy master from this position is still far away. The following actions should be taken after the website is published and made available:

– optimization of its operation in terms of speed and efficiency,
– improvement of functionality, elimination of technical errors,
– appropriate description of the content of the positioned website – also using structural data,
– content analysis, creation and modification,
– activities aimed at extending the database of links pointing to our website,
– analysis of the effectiveness of these activities, and in the case of low effectiveness – changing the approach and building an improved strategy.

Positioning a website is a process dependent on many factors, including not only changes in the search engine algorithm, but also the specificity of the industry in which the promoted business or budget operates. Gaining SERP peaks requires consistency and constant control – the search engine is an extremely vital organism that is constantly being modified. Unfortunately, this causes uncertainty as to the stability of the position – which in the absence of appropriate and prudent actions – may result in spectacular mishaps.

In the case of positioning, it is worth relying on current knowledge and experience that allows you to develop an effective and safe strategy.