Chris Dickey on How to Leverage SEO & PR for Better Online Visibility

I think with search strategy in general, there are a couple of things. It’s starting to become a little more user-friendly, but it’s still a ways out. One big thing is this idea of search intent. The search engine has to make a determination about what the intent is behind any given keyword someone types in. Like, say I’m looking for a pair of running shoes. You just type in “running shoes,” and Google has to figure out—do I want to buy a pair? Do I want to learn about them? Do I want to see photos or videos? They have to make these judgments, and that applies to any keyword out there, whether it’s broad or really niche.

So if you’re building a strategy that’s transactional—when in fact Google is only elevating informational results—you’re going to run into trouble. And what I mean by that is the difference between a click-to-buy result versus a click-to-learn result. If you really start analyzing the SERP, you’ll notice it. Like, this keyword is dominated by e-commerce—nine out of ten organic results are all product pages. Or the opposite: this keyword is nine out of ten informational—articles, guides, explainers.

And people bucket keywords all kinds of ways: by competition, by search volume, by engagement, click-through rate—all of that. But what they really should be bucketing by is search intent. Recognizing the kind of content that Google is choosing to elevate. Once you align your content strategy with that, you can build something way more robust—something that actually has a shot at winning.

Yeah. So what SEO tools do is, they pull up a search result and look for matches from your URL to the URLs showing up on the first page. And that’s basically it. It’s very binary—”Is this your domain? Yes or no.”

What we recognized at Visably—or really as a PR team—was that there are all sorts of conversations happening around your brand that could be from third parties, especially in publishing or E-commerce. I mean, how many times does Amazon show up in search? All the time. They’ve curated landing pages with recommended products, and if you’re one of those products on that page, you’re killing it. If you’re not, you just don’t have that visibility.

So how do you audit for that? What I realized, going through this more as a strategist and agency owner, was that there wasn’t a way to audit that full footprint in search. Traditional SEO tools are only looking for website matches. And if your website doesn’t appear, the software basically says, “Okay, you don’t exist here.” But that couldn’t be further from the truth. The reality is, every single link on that page could be talking about your brand—and you wouldn’t even know it.

And that’s a really important insight. So ultimately, what we see SUV—Search Engine Visibility—as is: What’s the likelihood that a consumer will discover your brand on any given search results page? That likelihood is higher if you’re at the top of the page versus the bottom. It’s higher if you’re in a Featured Snippet, or in other prominent SERP features.

So we look at all those surrounding factors and judge where your content actually exists in the SERP. Stepping back, what Visably is doing is looking not just at the metadata returned in search results, but also at all the content on those pages. We’re crawling a ton of stuff, looking for mentions of your brand.

And what that gives us is a snapshot of what a customer actually sees when they search—because they’re not just looking at titles and snippets, they’re looking at full content. That’s what Visably is doing.

Organic results? Yeah, exactly. And also recognizing that Google elevates all kinds of different SERP features. We’re also looking at those features, because some of them have much higher click-through rates than others—and that’s intentional. They’re trying to create that kind of no-click search experience.

So, we look at all that. We identify where the brand exists, and then we do this other thing that I think is pretty cool—and as far as I know, no one else is doing it. We have a machine learning algorithm that segments and auto-categorizes what kind of result it is.

What I mean by that is, we’ll automatically identify whether something is an E-commerce hit, earned media or PR, brand-owned, or something else entirely. And what’s great about that is we not only show you where your brand is appearing, but we also tell you what channel it falls under—or who’s responsible for that hit.

So for PR teams, for example, we can go into any SERP or set of keyword results and pull out all the PR hits automatically. You don’t have to manually sort through everything. Same thing with E-commerce hits.

And for E-commerce teams that are trying to figure out how to improve merchandising with their partners, they can just audit all the relevant keywords tied to their brand, see where they are—or aren’t—showing up on those landing pages, and cleanly extract a list to take back to those partners. Then they can say, “Hey, let’s figure out how we can merchandise better for these specific landing pages.”

Yeah, the beta is fully functional—and it’s free, which is great. So try it! We’d love feedback. The current version lets you audit one search at a time, focused on branded content. But we’re planning to launch Visably Pro in Q4 this year—October or November.

Vasibly Pro will let you build full campaigns, audit hundreds or thousands of keywords at once, view aggregated data, and drill into any level of detail you want.

Yeah, that’s where it gets interesting—especially for bigger brands playing across multiple verticals. So Visably does two core things. First, we’re a listening service—we measure where your brand shows up organically across search, not just where your website appears. Second, we’re a list-building service. Once we identify those placements, we help you segment, uncover opportunities, spot blind spots, and find under-leveraged partners.

Yeah, exactly. And there’s— I think as a brand manager or a digital agency, what you’re really trying to do is promote product discovery—however it happens. That’s why you have a PR team doing their thing, and an advertising team doing theirs. I think what’s happened in marketing—and I’m sure you’d agree—is that we’re all super specialized now, and super siloed. No one’s really accountable to each other when it comes to KPIs or overall brand value. It’s like, “Oh, as long as I’m delivering my PR hits every month, I’m good,” or, “As long as I’m getting ROI on ad spend, I’m good.”

But when you drill in and say, “Okay, here are the keywords we actually care about,” how do we maximize the touchpoints across the entire SERP? And sure, if you can get your own SEO result—your own website—to rank, great. But is it number one, number two, number three? Why not try to hit every single one of those spots? Fully leverage your PR team, your E-commerce team, and how you’re spending your ad dollars.

Yeah, I’m not sure this would be a textbook definition, but I’d say it’s about changing the goal line—from, “How do I improve my website’s status in search?” to, “How do I improve my brand’s status in search?” It’s really: What’s the likelihood that a customer is going to find your brand on any given SERP?

We look at things like click-through rates and how they cascade depending on the SERP features that are showing up. We do all those calculations automatically once we’ve identified where your brand is showing up, and we give you a pretty good idea of how likely it is that someone will stumble across you.

And again, coming back to the idea of a qualified audience—say someone is searching for “fleece jacket,” and there are 2,500 people a month looking for that exact term. That’s 2,500 potential customers. Now if you add all the variations—different ways people search for fleece jackets—you’re maybe looking at 25,000 potential customers.

So let’s say you put together a unified strategy, and suddenly you’re winning a ton of Share of Voice across those 20 or so keywords. That’s 25,000 potential customers who are likely to find and learn about your brand, no matter where they click on the page.

That’s the goal of marketing, right? How do you fill the funnel? Once they’re in, you can retarget them, get them to sign up for emails, all that stuff. But first, you have to bring them in—and I think search is still the best way to do that.

It’s bigger than PR, but I can give you my own kind of anecdotal experience from a PR angle. What we started doing was really drilling into keyword research. And there aren’t a lot of PR agencies doing that. We had to subscribe to a major SEO platform just to access the keyword data.

Then we started focusing on non-branded keywords—stuff that potential new customers are searching for when they’re looking for products or services. We started narrowing it down based on monthly search volume and how competitive the keywords were—what’s actually attracting customers.

But we had to take it a step further and look at search intent, because there’s no point in focusing on a keyword that doesn’t offer much PR opportunity. Like, for example, we had a client who makes kayaks, and we’d see SERPs filled with “how to kayak,” or “what gear to bring,” or a list of kayaks to buy. Sometimes the entire page would be filled with e-commerce listings, in which case, we had no play.

So once we determine search intent, we’ve now got a really qualified list of PR-friendly keywords. Then we audit that list to figure out what the brand’s footprint looks like—what’s already there, even without us doing anything. And you’ll be surprised surprised— sometimes there’s already some decent presence, so we benchmark it. We pick maybe 25 keywords to focus on, take a snapshot of what the current visibility looks like, and then we start the list-building phase.

From there, we mine all the outlets and writers who are showing up at the top of those searches. And then we just do our PR thing—reaching out, pitching, all that. After a few months, we come back, audit it again, and compare the data side by side. And every single time, we’ve moved up. We’ve increased share of voice and visibility on those pages.

And then it starts to shift how you prioritize media as a PR agency. A lot of the big publishers—like Condé Nast and others—get all the attention, and maybe that’s fine. But if they’re not actually serving a qualified customer, and if the editorial doesn’t live beyond the moment it’s published—like you said earlier—then what’s the long-term value? Search gives you new customers every single day, in perpetuity. That’s a lot more valuable for the client.

Forbes is a great example. We love working with them—we work with them all the time. But you know this: Forbes contributor content doesn’t provide followed links. So if the article doesn’t rank in search, it has really limited value for the client.

Still, PR people tend to focus on vanity metrics. They’ll say, “Forbes gets 14 million unique visits a month,” but that doesn’t mean your article got anywhere near that number. We need to be more precise in how we measure audiences and what we’re delivering to clients.

You just have tomanage expectations about what it’s going to do for you.

I would say, Listen, I get a fair amount of free product, yeah. At this point, I mostly just pay it forward. If someone needs something, I’m like, “Hey man, I got something for you.”

Yeah, we get to play with a lot of fun stuff. So, you were asking about client success—yeah, I’ll give you one example. A Bay Area company called Peak Design that we work with. These guys make all kinds of camera accessories and bags. A couple years ago, they started with accessories—how do you carry your camera, stuff like that.

And then one day they decided they wanted to get into bags. And I think bags kind of blew them up. They did some massive Kickstarters, and we helped them with those. Afterward, to make sure they weren’t just a flash-in-the-pan company, we had to drill into all the different ways people were researching and choosing bags.

So we started doing this work with them, and it was a totally new category—they had zero share of voice before the Kickstarter. We seeded a bunch of bags with the right people, and next thing you know, anyone searching for “messenger bag for work” or “courier bag for the office”—they’re seeing Peak Design at the top. All reviews.

And I know for a fact that drove a ton of awareness and sales. These outlets usually only mention three to five products. They’re not giving you the entire list. So if you’re launching into a brand new category and no one’s heard of you, start with search. Start with what Google is already telling us is relevant. And that’s what we did. I think Peak Design’s bag program quickly overtook everything else they do.