Internet Marketing Strategy: Keywords that bring both organic and news results

Time Warner and Iron Mountain recently got hit in the press by the loss of 40 back up tapes for 600,000 Time Warner employees. As I explained in a my previous post about the lost data at Time Warner, this news was reported in many news papers, television news and online websites (International Herald Tribune, NY Times, Enterprise IT Planet, Legal Watch News, USA Today, InfoWorld, Information Week, Wired, L.A. Daily News, MSNBC, Boston Herald, and Rocky Mountain News) Yet unless you were specifically searching for these articles you would not see any negative press about the two companies in the organic section of the large search engines. However if you searched on the keywords “Iron Mountain” or “Time Warner” in the general search results, you would see articles about the lost data incident in the news headlines link for the major search engines.

Now for many keywords these news headlines do not appear, for example try searching for “sales and marketing” in Google, you only receive organic results. But if you were to search on the terms “computer security” and “data security” you would find news articles related to the lost data incident at Iron Mountain in the news headlines link. If you look at the organic results for these two keywords no where do you see news related links in the organic results, each term is occupied by a commercial website that has probably optimized their site to get a ranking on the term. The keyword research from Yahoo’s Keyword Selector Tool gives 12839 searches for “data security” and 96002 searches for “computer security”. Both words are highly trafficked words; each is now increasing the publicity for each of the two companies, not in the organic results but in the news headlines.

This publicity will only last for a few days for Time Warner & Iron Mountain, but the damage might be irreparable for certain customers. Learning from this example, a company could use the example to develop a comprehensive Internet marketing strategy and boost their positive online PR results. If I might make a suggestion to a company when they are conducting an ongoing PR campaign, research the keywords in your industry that will produce headlines above the organic search results of the major search engines and make sure your communications professional, internal or agency use the keywords you want to target in the language they use with journalists. If you do get any published articles and the content gets syndicated from the news search engines to the news headlines in the general web search areas, your company will then have a greater chance of getting a link to a favorable article on keywords you are targeting. In this way you might totally circumvent if briefly the top rankings on a page through the news headlines.