Missive Account Director Hannah Devoy outlines the importance of factoring in SEO as part of any PR campaign and identifies the top 10 tech titles UK businesses should be targeting.
As a B2B or B2C tech PR manager, what is your ‘holy grail’ of tech coverage? Glossy front cover article in Wired? Or a prime feature in The Register?
How do you define the best media titles in which to secure coverage? It’s common to use the authority of the publication, audience figures, or maybe you lean towards the title your CEO subscribes to.
But as PR becomes less art and more science, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is now a far greater responsibility for tech PR professionals. The higher your rank in Google, the more web traffic you’re likely to achieve, leading to greater virtual footfall and revenue.
SEO is not an exact science. Google’s search algorithms are a closely-guarded secret, akin to the Coca-Cola recipe, or the Da Vinci code. And to prevent black-hat operators artificially boosting page positions, Google rolls out frequent updates, moving the goal posts time and again.
Even in a fast-changing environment, there is SEO best practice for tech PR. Some basic principles will be continually relevant – the practice of link building being among them.
Link building should be factored into any PR campaign. I’m not suggesting you start badgering journalists for links (we all know how that would end), but if you don’t already, ensure it’s front of mind when you choose your top target publications for media relations and thought leadership activity.
If you succeed in securing an article featuring your company in one of these titles – great. If they include a followed link – even better!
How can you determine your top media titles to support SEO?
Here at Missive, we’ve created a methodology to rank the technology media that has the greatest impact on SEO. Our system factors in domain authority, global and UK site rankings, identifying the publications that score most highly across these and other metrics, with points subtracted for spam scores. This allows us to allocate each title with an individual score; those with the highest scores feature further up on our priority list for tech PR campaigns.
To give you a flavour, here is a list of the top 10 tech titles for UK businesses. We identified English speaking technology trade publications or those with a significant focus on technology and a strong tech-focused audience and ranked them according to our methodology:
- Cnet
- TechCrunch
- Tech Radar
- Ars Technica
- Mashable
- The Register
- Quartz – Quartz is arguably the better title to target if you’re trying to reach a global audience, although The Register performs better in UK rankings and also has a lower spam score.
- ZDNet
- VentureBeat
- Wired
Others to note were The Next Web, which pips Wired when it comes to domain authority and global Alexa rank, but Wired scored higher when we looked at specific UK rankings and its spam score is also lower. Recode also scored well in UK-specific rankings but fared lower on other metrics to bring its overall score down.
Keep an eye on The Missive over the coming weeks and months for further top SEO titles lists featuring national and business publications!
