About Punch

The US, Dubai and Germany

Posted: Tuesday 02 June, 2009

Pete Goold

We seem to have hit a new high with the SEO, attaining #1 spot in both Germany and the UAE for the term ‘PR Agency' and also having now attained #1 spot in the US for ‘UK PR Agency'.

In a relatively short space of time our SEO capabilities have skyrocketed and we're now offering SEO (PR2.0) services to more than half our client base, alongside traditional PR.

What I find most interesting about SEO is that it has traditionally been commoditised by some web agencies, charging (ie) £150 per month across a large customer base and apparently delivering relatively little. I'm the first to admit that our approach to SEO is very much from a laypersons/common sense perspective, rather than that of a techie. Header tags, for example aren't something I'm particularly interested in, which I know will be sacrilege to some. Nevertheless our approach of creating and distributing great content clearly works.

 We've been working with WowVoucherCodes on creating backlinks for a matter of weeks and the site has risen from 18th in Google to 4th for the site's favoured term, voucher codes. and up to the top of the second page for new url set up for Discount Codes.

Similarly Punch client Ratedpeople.com has seen great movement with local builders and local painters up from literally nowhere to sixth and third (at the time of writing) respectively. Finally Reality Digital has shot up to 5th for web community software and sixth for white label social network from 60th and 91st respectively, just a few weeks ago. We're also just building up to the launch of football social media site Extra Footie and about to commence some linkbuilding activity, again alongside PR.

What is absolutely clear is that the PR agency skillset is better suited to SEO than the core web developer skillset as fundamentally it's about content, rather than design, or indeed usability. Whilst we're developing and distributing content that's on message, relevant and interesting, it's far more likely to benefit a client's ranking than a cold link exchange (for example), which seems to be the primariy service offered by many of the SEO agencies that continually contact us to try and sell their services.