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Public Relations Tips | 4 Writing Methods to Help Your Customers Find You
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With more and more of your customers coming online to talk with, shop, read, and research, being easily accessible online is vital to your company’s success. Customers come online to read about you from other customers, the media, and your own website. With so many places for them to find out about you, ensure that you are monitoring the WOM (word of mouth) being generated about you. Since it’s a bit difficult to control the WOM your company receives online, you can control the content your own site or blog produces. Creating great content on your site can help to influence the other WOM media or bloggers share about you, and it can also help customers to see the whole picture despite some negative WOM they may have read about you elsewhere. This requires that you actively monitor other sources of information and that you are actively participating on your own website.

4 ways to help customers find you first:

1. Use keyword rich copy. Learn what customers are searching for by using Google Alerts and the Google Keyword tool to see what keywords customers are searching for. Though this will give you a large list of keywords customers search for regularly, remember to pay attention to the longer keyword sequences, or the long-tail keywords. These are keywords and phrases that fewer customers search for because of their length. The main thing to remember here is that searches made in an online search engine like Google are often times brand new searches that web users have never searched for before. This is important to remember so that you can avoid competing with the millions of other blogs trying to be found through some of the most searched keywords. It is hard to differentiate yourself as it is, so why not do something small that will make it a bit easier?
   
   
2. Optimize your images. Just like the title and the rest of your website’s copy, you can optimize your image titles. Since search engine spiders (who “crawl” the web, documenting the Internet’s content) cannot “see” images, having a great picture on a website might not do much to help your customers find you. It may help to make their visit more pleasant once they get to your site, but in order to increase your chances of being found in a search engine results page, save your image with the same keyword-rich title you give the webpage or blog post. This will help search engine spiders to see the importance of your image and also help to increase the search engine results that your blog post or website appear in.
   
   
3. Use multiple vehicles to share your information and content. This means creating videos, blog posts, and audio recordings to share your information. With people learning in different ways, a blog post may become more interesting for someone who prefers to hear someone talk rather than read themselves. Creating multiple methods for people to “hear” you can greatly improve your chances of reaching more people.
   
   
4. Share your content. Use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, RSS feeds, etc., to share when your blog is updated or when you add a new video resource. This can also increase your reach. Your target audiences may be on different platforms or different social media sites so use all that are applicable and relevant. Moreover, RSS feeds may be useful to readers who read all of their favorite blogs that way.
   

Overall, remember that your audiences are unique and may have different search methods or preferred methods of consuming content. Make as much available as possible, and incorporate SEO (search engine optimization) tactics (using keywords customers search for) into your website content to increase your chances of being found.