Hosting a virtual press centre on a site is a great way to get coverage, here is how to provide one

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James, and this is the podcast for you if you know that there's value locked up in your organization, if you could just find simple and cost-effective ways to communicate that. This is a podcast which shares tools and technologies and best practices that I've learned from running a public relations firm for over 25 years, but also being an entrepreneur on 3 continents. So let's talk today about websites. Websites are the fundamental building block of any communications strategy, but they're also not that easy to get right. So we're going to talk about how to improve performance of a website, and more importantly, how to get a virtual press office up and running on your website so that the media, if they're interested in what you're doing, can find out all the information all the releases and all the images quickly, and actually without even troubling you. The website is really the cornerstone of any marketing program. But the challenge is that a website often gets built and then left to its own devices. And one of the first questions that I ask clients when we're talking to them about public relations is, the metrics about their website, because people will often say, how will public relations impact my business? And my response is, tell me about what your web traffic is like now. And I do that because when people have read about a company or seen them on TV or heard them on the radio, the first thing they do is go to a search engine to look for that company. And then the next thing is they'll click on the link to go to the website. So, the website has a number of metrics, and I'm going to go through that and give you a tool as well where you can analyse the performance of your own website, both against itself in absolute terms, but also in relative terms against your competition. But I'm also going to then talk about some ideas and some tools for improving the performance of your website, and then look at the online press centres that are available as plug-and-play, so that you don't have to try and build out whole new platforms of content management systems. So let's just first of all look at the metrics that we've got on our website. We're all familiar with this idea of page views, but how many of us then look at the average time spent on a website? So the average time spent on a website will give us a clue to how interesting our website is. And also give us a sense then of which pieces of content are being most valuable. Now, one of the issues that we've got, of course, with a website is the speed that it takes to download it first. So what we have to look at is the total time on the website divided by the total number of visitors to website, and that gives us a time on site. But the speed to download can be checked by a tool called gtmetrix.com, and that gives us an analysis of how long it's taking to load a website. Because the view is that if a website is taking a long time to load, then it's not going to be very productive. People are going to get off it quite quickly, and I'll give you a statistic about that later. But when people come onto the website, if they only look at one page, regardless of how long they're there, that's going to give us the bounce rate. So if someone comes to the website and they only look at one page and then leave, you could have a high bounce rate, because what we need to do is to get people to click through to more than one page. Now it can be alarming to see a very high bounce rate. For example, my website bounce rate's about 43%, which means that 43% of visitors are coming and only viewing the homepage and leaving again. So there may be bots that are, that are checking out my website, for example. There may be people that have found out about East West PR on a website, and then when they visit the website, it's not what they're looking for. But the bounce rate is one of the first things that we need to look at. So, there is no right or wrong to what the bounce rate should or should not be. So, what we are really looking for is a trend over time. So, on our own website, what we can do is measure the bounce rate and see whether it's getting higher or lower. It is possible to see some industry average benchmarks by looking, for example, on Google Analytics. Now today, for example, I had 1,363 page visits, and in September I've had some 75,000 sessions. In other words, people have opened multiple pages on my website and spent seemingly quite a lot of time. In May, I had 135,000 sessions. That's people coming and opening a session on my website. But there's a snag. Actually, I didn't get that many inquiries. So I'm doing something right, and I think that's because over 25 years I've had the same domain name, and so I'm listed on a lot of directories. I have a lot of content. But then when I look at my GTmetrix score on eastwestpr.com, my page speed is a B. Not an A, and it's taking just under four seconds to load fully, which is not too bad. But I have too many images and they're too large. So it's suggesting, for example, that I consolidate the images into one and then make them thinner by compressing them. But my yellow slow score, my Y slow score. Is D, out of an A to F, because my website is making a lot of HTTP requests and looking for a lot of domain name setting lookups. In other words, I've got links to other websites and other pages, and that is making the search engines run around and bring back more data to display the full page. In fact, there are some 70 requests being made when someone looks at my one home page. So I can find this out by looking at GTmetrix. I can look at Google Analytics as well, and that can give me the average time spent on the website. And they can also tell me the user behavior. And this is interesting because what I can then see is how many people are coming to the homepage and then how many are going to different pages. So I can see, for example, that 34 people went to my blog, a particular blog post that we've written. I can see that 27 people have clicked through to the podcast and listened to a podcast. A specific podcast has a specific page URL. So if I've got some 1,363 visitors to my website and I know that 35 have gone to a specific page, then I know that there's some validity to what I've got on there. But I need to then take that person to the next page, to the funnel. So that's the work I need to do. There's another tool called the Yandex Metrica, and this also is free. Along with Google Analytics. And what we have to do is to put the code into the website host pages so that we can extract the data. So we can see by geography, we can see by pages, we can see by device, we can even see then by the software that they're using. But there are lots of improvements that I need to make, and I'll share some of these improvements that I'm going to be looking at myself so you can see whether they're useful for your website. So each web page should have at least 3 internal links pointing to it, because what we need to do is to increase the interconnectivity of the web pages. Because if we have a high bounce rate, People come to the website, but that's because we haven't taken them to another page within the website. So I need to increase my links. It also helps Google apparently to make it easier to understand what the page is about because they reference to other pages. What we also need to do is to have some anchor text. In other words, text that describes what the website or the page is offering. Now, the website hierarchy— I've just been reducing the number of items I've got in my menu because if there are too many, a bit like going to a restaurant, if there are too many items on the menu, we all go a bit blur and we order what we know. So there's a view that you should have 3 to 7 categories, which are the number of the top drop-down boxes. And one view is to use what they call a hamburger menu, which is that you just have 3 different items on the menu to keep it nice and simple. We need to make sure that the URLs, in other words, the name of the pages, can be read by humans. So whenever I do a blog post, I try and make a sentence that could be read both by humans and the bots that are indexing them. If it's possible to have a search bar at the top of each page, that's great. I've been trying to find with Zoho where to do that. On a WordPress site, I think that's much easier. In the past, I used to have a little Google search box which would search my, search my web page. We can also include alt text in images, and one of the things I try and do is to give the image a name. And I've just embedded a video on my website, and I'm allowed to then give an alternative text to that video. So this website speed— there is a 15-second rule. I'm well under that with 4 seconds. Research has shown that a site with a page load time of 6 seconds has a 106% higher bounce rate than a site that loads with just 1 second. Well, if you can load with 1 second, I guess that, that would be amazing. But what it does mean is that obviously the slower it is, the more people will leave. Now, the paradox seems to me that you're supposed to create more valuable content, but that content must be light in terms of size. It must be linked, And it must be easy to search. So this, of course, becomes the challenge. We have more content in order to be easier to be found, but the more content we have, the harder it is to manage it. We need to create powerful headlines because 80% of viewers only read the headlines. And I guess that makes sense if you think of the way we look at newspapers. Only 20% of people actually read the text. Or another way of looking at that is that if they look at your website, they 80% of what they read is the headline. We need to provide accurate information and an index. And this is where I want to look at the media press center. Now, in the past, we used to create a virtual press office. In fact, there was a company who had a website called Virtual Press Office, started by a couple of young Englishmen who lived in New York. We've all moved on from those days, although that was 20 years ago. There are a couple of options for you to think about. One is called Vuelio. Vuelio, that's V-U-E-L-I-O.com. And Vuelio have full press centers which allow you to publish your press releases and images and collateral of all kinds. First of all, send them as press releases, but then to have them as an optimized, customized, and integrated press center on your website, which means that then when the media want to come and find it, they would give their details and you'd be able to track who they are. Now, this could be very useful if you're sending out a press release and you then say to people, come here to receive, for example, the images, because if you send images, they're often blocked or filtered or result in the press release going to spam. So links to a press center are a nice way around that. Now, Vuelio has a number of online tools as well, a bit like Cision, much like Cision. You can publish your press releases, you can send them to media lists, you can manage inquiries, you can start to build calendars and reports as well. Another one is called Press Area, and they have a sister site called Press PR Shots, and they've been providing online media centres and what we call digital asset management solutions to businesses for over 20 years. Their clients include companies like Marks& Spencer. Now, there are a number of things to look for when you're looking at a press centre. For example, is it a fully branded press room? Is it standalone, and is the domain name going to be the same as your company one? Because What you don't want is for the media to go to a third-party press domain name. The other things then are looking at things like how much digital assets, um, in terms of storage. And this is obviously how they manage to do different prices. So for example, with PressArea, you can have up to 500 gigabytes on the base package, or up to unlimited if you go for their unlimited package. You can also look at integrations into social media and automatic distribution. Now, if we look at the press area, for example, that's a £395 per month package. The advanced digital asset management package is £750 a month. And there's an unlimited package where you'd need to contact them for pricing. Fuellio don't tell you what the prices are, but possibly quite comparable. So when we look at a website and we look at making it good for public relations, we have the initial attraction for general attention to the company that might be potential staff, might be potential partners, might be potential potential customers. But the media have their own special area. They have their own special needs that are more in-depth and more in detail, and they're more likely to go through to, in effect, a funnel for relationship building with that media. So websites form a fundamental part of anybody's marketing communications. They have to be ready for the, for the big screen, but they also have to be ready for mobile as well. We have to think about speed, we have to think about depth of content, and we have to think about accessibility. So with that, I'd like to maybe think about what you've got, how you make your assets available to the media through your website. If you get that right, it saves you a lot of time, but also it can get you extra coverage because it makes the work for the journalists much easier as well. So So with that, I'd like to thank you for listening to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James. If you've enjoyed this, please do subscribe, do share it, rate it. And in the meantime, you can also go to our website to subscribe to our weekly newsletter called Cognition. And until we meet again, then I'd like to wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and that you get your website to be quick, efficient, And a fundamental part of your public relations program.