The PR Message: Write for Google, Not for Fun

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Claire Thompson, freelance PR Consultant, Waves PR: First report from the thupr event on Natural SEO, on writing for Google, not for fun.

A decade ago, at the height of the dotcom boom, on the verge of a dotcom bust, I was freelancing at Gnash Communications, where First Tuesday was busily linking dotcoms with funding in something akin to a gold-rush, and Lastminute.com was launched.

In the background was a whippersnapper company, an anarchic, exciting challenger: Google.

Today, as firmly entrenched on our desktops as Microsoft itself (if not more so), Google’s the company that gets away with it.

It’s the company that’s changing our behaviours, despite being as transparent as an opaque thing. With good reason. As we saw at Friday’s thupr (the tools that help us, PR) event on SEO, just finding things online has become a cutthroat business, so much so that no one person has any idea about the entire Google algorithm (the factors that Google uses to decide where on its search list we belong). If they did, we’re told, their lives would be in grave danger.

With the algorithm changing daily, writing for the reader should, in theory, be the important factor in what we write. In reality, however, Google is run by computers and computers are, strictly speaking, stupid.

I have every faith that at some point the very clever geeks at Google will crack the ‘semantic web’, will find a mathematical way to resolve which things together go to make a whole (take, for example, freelance PR, journalism, analysts, speeches, events - words which go to make up just part of what PR is and does). In the meantime it’s a balancing act.

Listening to Daniel Cartwright of Adfero, the modern face of ‘churnalism’, describing how the company spends three months breaking the spirit of new journalists to help them learn how to write for search engines, was soul destroying. Artistry and compelling copy have given way to more factual, keyword driven texts, churned out to appeal to search engines by banks of rooky writers paid £15k a year.

His talk was terrific, but terrifying. The key message was to dumb it down/play it straight.

Malcolm McLaren died last week. The Sun’s lively obituary headlined: ‘King of Punk Dead’ (now changed). The BBC faithfully reported ‘Tributes for Sex Pistols Malcolm McLaren’. The simple, accessible title won with the search engines. Common sense, but not much fun!

As anticipated, clear, brief, simple were the key messages. Forget rich language. Forget fun headlines. Daniel’s talk was all stuff that I thought I knew already, but had secretly hoped there was a way around. On-line writing bears more relation to copywriting skills than traditional journalism.

So Google’s murdered rich writing. It would be hard to make a more compelling case for using rich content (video, cartoons, imagery) to spice up websites.

The bright spot on the horizon for PR communicators is that ‘press release’ type content really doesn’t need to be on a third party site to be considered authoritative. Which is, of course, why companies like Adfero exist. Hosting content on the owners site is (theoretically) perfect, so there’s a healthy degree of anarchism there. (Note: yes, there are values in authority and links – more on that later.)

The idea that experts can be identified as experts based on what they produce rather than what a third party says is an expert means maybe the web can still be the giant slayer, the ‘level playing field’ it was once hailed as.

And Nichola Stott demonstrated that the fifth position (or thereabouts) on page is the one our eyes are most drawn to. This fills me with hope that, even if Google can’t yet crack the entire language code numerically, maybe, just maybe, there’s still some room to have a little fun too.

But for the most part, when it comes to writing for the web, Google’s no longer working to find us. We’re working to be found by Google.

A market controlling behemoth may be a far cry from the beanbag toting, funky, geek culture that Google set out with – but where would we be without it?

Tags: journalism, PR, public relations

communications, PR practise, thupr | claireatwaves | April 13, 2010 12:55 pm

2 Comments

By Nichola Stott, April 13, 2010 @ 8:46 pm

Excellent write-up Claire.

I just wanted to clarify my comment on the hottest positions in the full context of the question to make sure there is no misunderstanding. As we were discussing the whole search results page and how it is composed of many different types of result, including paid search, news, local etc. in this case we were talking about click distribution where paid search appears at the top of the page. So in effect the first couple of “natural” results tend to be where the eye naturally falls, which are often around the fourth and fifth listing, as many popular commercial searches tend to have around 3 paid listings at the top.

You might find this eyetracking study to be interesting further reading – though in this case the example looks at plain organic listings and it is from 2006. Interesting nonetheless:http://www.seoresearcher.com/distribution-of-clicks-on-googles-serps-and-eye-tracking-analysis.htm