The company I work for now is a small manufacturer, and we make highly specialized equipment. Competition in our field is stiff, but a large number of our competitors make products that are vastly inferior to ours, not only ineffective but in some cases actually harmful. But the industry is full of bad science and lots of hype, so it is hard for us to compete against our cheap-but-ineffective competitors, because our product is both scientifically sound and also built to last, made in the US from US-manufactured parts, etc., etc., etc. -- so, it is very far from cheap.
Many of our cheap competitors rely heavily on, let’s say, the placebo effect.
Our fledgling “marketing and
pr department”, consisting of me and this venerable and wise gentleman who has many wise ideas but sort of talks very big and very fast so I don't always understand what he means, has this idea (OK, he has this idea) that the way to deal with this market is to dominate the search engines. We need to “accredit” ourselves, he keeps saying, by gaining results in the search engines. I am not entirely sure where he's going with this, but I do admit, it seems to be a pretty good idea.
So the idea is to increase our company’s standings in the search engines for certain keywords, as far as I understand it. If someone searches on certain key terms, some of which are probably fairly unexpected, we want articles that mention our product favorably to come up near the top.
It would also help if these articles did people’s research for them. As it is, we do get a fair number of people calling in to ask questions about our product—and these are very educated people, who have really done their homework. We want to expand the number of people who do this. We want more of our potential customers, in doing the most basic of research, to realize that our product is indeed what they need. Rather than going out and buying something cheap, we want them to realize they need us. So we have to be among the first results in the search engines if people look up products of our type—some of our competitors have very large advertising budgets, and so it’s hard to cut through all that to point out that their products actually produce poison. (This is truth, by the way, not hype.)
Now, I spent a year in 2003-04 building a website and getting it up in the SERPs for a few particular keywords. I got really good at writing copy and using proper link text and clean design. But this is a whole other kettle of fish. So it’s going to take me a bit of research to figure out where to even start.
I have seen other threads on here with online distribution sites for press releases. Is this something that could really help us? We don’t particularly care how our website comes up—we don’t even sell our product, directly, on our website. We just want our articles to come up well. We want people looking for products in our category to find out about our company, and more importantly, find out about the bad things about our competitors.
Will PRweb help? What distribution channels should I seek out? Should I try to focus attention on the issue of our dangerous competitors by sending press releases to news outlets? How should I go about this?
Any suggestions are welcome, as is discussion: I’m just trying to figure out where to start in this.
TiA:
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Optimizing For A Non-web-based Company 
