"What has Google Ever Done for PR?"; Share This

In this week's reading of "Share This: The Social Media handbook for PR Professionals", the author mentions the many ways that Google has revolutionized not only the world, but the PR profession in particular. In just our Social Media Principles class alone, we have seen that Google Analytics is one of the many critical tools for success in PR. The other ways to use Google for PR are Google Alerts and Google News. The worldwide phenomenon of Google is used every second by someone on the Earth. Someone on the globe at every point in time is searching something on Google because it is so iconic.

Google Analytics, which is mentioned multiple times throughout the book, is a system of algorithms by Google that can determine statistics which couldn't be accessed otherwise. Information such as SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PPC (Pay-per-click) are now at our disposal. These statistics and analytics are numbers that
have completely changed the way we can use the internet and online networking. Knowing what times of the day people visit our website, how long they stayed on our site, what content they viewed and how long they viewed it and when they viewed it. All of this information is critical to the way we improve and progress as a profession.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is another way that Google has helped the field of PR. SEO is a way to determine what keywords were generated or put into the search engine to find the site. If for example, my site was a Nike Shoe site, I would probably see the key search words, "Tennis shoes, running shoes, kicks, Nike shoes, or workout shoes." This kind of information is also vital to how we will move forward. If the key words that are searched are low in hits or views, then we can adjust the way we want to have our product or site be found. Awareness of the site also comes from this information. The more views, hits and traffic a website has