12 SEO Metrics to Add to Your Digital PR Measurement Program

PR and communications professionals can greatly improve their measurement strategies in today’s digital landscape by integrating SEO metrics.

The traditional “funnel” approach, which starts with brand awareness, is outdated in a world where customer journeys often begin with a simple Google search.

By learning from SEO professionals and their focus on useful, reliable content, PR professionals can better understand and reach their target audiences.

This article outlines how to incorporate 12 essential SEO metrics into a digital PR measurement program, starting with thorough audience and keyword research and progressing to advanced analytics and user engagement strategies.

1. Start with audience research

Target group research shows who customers are, what they are looking for and where they can be reached.

For example, you can use SparkToro V2 to discover that 119,000-151,000 people search for “electric car” every month. The audience research tool shows you the websites they visit, the keywords they use and their demographics.

2. Perform keyword research

Once you understand who your target audience is, you should conduct keyword research to gauge search interest for a topic or search term.

For example, Google Trends tells PR people and SEOs what search terms people are searching for. Both groups can use this data to gauge search interest in a particular topic before creating relevant content.

We can also use the free Trends Explore tool. As you type your query, you will see a list of topics and search terms.

If a relevant topic appears in the drop-down list, click on it to view the data. Otherwise, use the keyword.

Topics are more reliable because they pull in the exact phrase and acronyms and cover all languages.

The Trends Explore tool shows “rising” and top search interest for related topics and queries.

“Rising” topics and queries have the largest increase in search interest over the previous period. The percentage increase in search interest is next to each topic or search term.

“Breakout” searches have increased by over 5,000% percent in the given time frame. Typically these have been driven by breaking news stories or internet memes.

Top topics or queries have the highest search volume within the selected period. These are indexed and normalized values ​​from 1-100.

3. Monitor share of search

Google Trends also allows you to measure share of search, which has become an important PR metric because it correlates with a larger share of website traffic.

For example, you can compare the share of searches for up to five topics or terms such as brands of electric vehicles.

This shows that the Tesla, Ford, Toyota and Chevy brands of electric vehicles have seen their share of searches fall over the past 12 months, while BMW has seen its share rise.

4. Compare release views

PR people should question how many “release impressions” they get. Some of these views may come from bots, spiders and crawlers – including Googlebot.

Alternatively, they could use SparkToro’s audience research tool, which estimates:

• 12 million people visit prnewswire.com every month.
• 6.2 million people visit businesswire.com every month.
• 3.4 million people visit globenewswire.com every month.
• 2 million people visit newsdirect.com every month.

5. Count link clicks

PR people should also question how many “link clicks” their press releases are getting. It is unclear whether some press release distribution services count clicks on links from bots, spiders and crawlers – including Googlebot.

So I recommend using Google’s Campaign URL Builder, which adds campaign parameters to your URLs to track link clicks to a landing page.

Simply enter the URL of the landing page for your PR campaign. Then fill in fields marked with an asterisk. A campaign URL is generated for you. You can use this URL in your anchor text or shorten it with Bitly.

6. Track events

PR professionals should also use Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to track “events,” which measure specific behavioral interactions on their site.

For example, looking at events over the past 90 days, PainePublishing.com shows that 835 users scrolled to the bottom of pages 1,450 times and 616 read 2,153 blogs.

7. Measure key events

As I mentioned in Why the switch from ‘conversions’ to ‘key events’ in GA4 is a game changer, conversions have been renamed “key events” so there is a new term for the most important interactions on your website.

So PR people at news or education sites might consider these as key events:

• Scroll to 90% of a blog post or article.
• Play at least 50% of a product video.
• Complete a tutorial.

PR people on lead generation sites can consider these as key events:

• Download a white paper.
• Sign up for a newsletter.
• Complete a registration form.

PR people at e-commerce companies can consider these as key events:

• Begin the payment process.
• Add merchandise to cart.
• Make a purchase.

8. Increase website traffic

While SEO managers and agencies should continue to use “organic search traffic” as metrics, communications professionals can use “referral traffic” and “organic social traffic” as PR metrics.

GA4 reports the websites users were on just before arriving at your site and lists the domain names of those websites as sources of traffic.

The referral channel measures users who arrived at your site via “editorial” links on other sites (eg blogs and news sites).

Organic social is the channel by which users arrive at your site through non-advertising links on social sites like Facebook or X.

For example, referral traffic is the second highest source of new users for PainePublishing.com, and organic social is the fourth.

9. Improve user engagement

PR and communications professionals—as well as SEOs—should add “improve user engagement” to their websites as metrics.

In GA4, “user engagement” and “engagement time” replace the old “bounce rate” and “time on site” metrics in Universal Analytics (UA).

Now, bounce rate was a fundamentally flawed way to measure engagement. If someone visited your site, scrolled to 90% of a blog post or article, and left without visiting any other pages, then that session was a bounce (single page impression) in UA.

But in GA4, the engagement rate is the percentage of sessions that last longer than 10 seconds, have at least two page views, or have an important event.

10. Increase brand awareness

If your business or client’s goal is to “increase brand awareness”, then you should use GA4’s Business Objects collection.

• The Demographic Details report is a pre-built detailed report that provides key characteristics about the people using a website or app, including a user’s language, interests, location, age, and gender.
• The Pages and Screens report shows PR people data about the pages users visited on their website and the screens users opened on their mobile app, so they can see where people are going across both platforms.

11. Generate leads

If your business or client’s goal is to “generate leads”, then you should also use GA4’s business goal collection.

It includes a landing page report that helps you understand how visitors interact with your site. It shows the first page visitors arrive at when visiting a website and indicates the number of visitors landing on each page.

This information can help PR people and SEOs identify which landing pages are performing well and which need improvement.

12. Drive online sales

If your business or client’s goal is to “drive online sales”, then you should also use GA4’s collection of business goals.

• The E-commerce Purchases report shows you which products or services are being sold.
• The Purchase Journey report shows how many users drop out at each stage of the sales funnel.
• The Checkout Journey Report details the number and percentage of users who initiated and completed each subsequent step of the sales funnel on an e-commerce website.

Now, you may be able to incorporate some, but not all, of the 12 SEO metrics into your PR measurement program. If you want to figure out which ones to adopt, it might help to invite your SEO and PR teams to a brown bag lunch.

For some organizations, this can still be as awkward as a middle school dance. But for a growing number of companies, the landscape has already changed, and tectonic forces are pushing SEO and PR closer together.