SEO + Google + Twitter + News story = Cost effective traffic

Tags: seo, twitter, google

Well, ok, it’s not quite that easy, but this is a story worth sharing.

On Friday, deep in darkest Soho a suspected air conditioning duct caught fire causing mas hysteria on a Friday afternoon. From the office in SE1, the smell was noticeable.

However, searching Google returned no news. “Quick, to Twitter” was the rallying cry. And sure enough, the news, photos and videos were being tweeted. Before long it was a trending topic and the news was breaking through citizen journalists.

“Fantastic” you must be thinking… “but so what?”.

Well, over the last few months I’ve been working on building a site which is technically search engine friendly and also gets crawled regularly thanks to our inclusion in Google News. The result has been shown to date to have quite significant impact. Within moments of releasing a news story, or any kind of new content, it gets ranked in Google and ranked highly.

So as I was putting the finishing touches to my coverage of this fire, running throughout my mind was “I wonder what the impact will be?”.

Published. Live. Tweeted. Google News-ed.

The result, in the space of two hours we got three times as many visits as would normally have occured throughout the whole day, 500% rise in registrations and a fair few new followers.

I think they refer to this as striking while the iron is hot.

In the past I have bleeted on about always staying on top of current affairs, spot the big news story and recognise the potential search impact… then pay for your links. However, through the news you publish you too can benefit without buying a single link.

While this is not the first success which has been achieved through Google News, it does strike a message: with the right groundwork, the right attitude and the right channels - you can reach your audience. This was the very reason I’d put so much effort into the news on the site. Lots of regular content, all of which optimised and ranked highly.

Small businesses take note - this would never have happened in a large organisation as the turn around would have been so long from idea to publication. Take advantage of your size, get the right groundwork in place and you can reap significant benefits.