Friday 10 May 2019

Why use a PRgloo Newsroom when your IT team can do it for you?

Why use a PRgloo Newsroom when your IT team can do it for you?: 2K Games Website

It's a question we often get asked and so we thought we'd share our thoughts and responses with you. 

PRgloo provides newsrooms for large brands such as Vision Express, Mitie, Nationwide Building Society, Network Rail and the Scottish Government supported by a powerful, secure, easy to use content management tool and integrated media management platform.

The approach is simple: we build the newsroom using your stylesheets, design, accessibility and responsiveness standards. The content is then managed via PRgloo’s intuitive content management system which is integrated with a host of other communication tools such as:

  • Journalist & stakeholder contact databases
  • Media rich, branded email distribution tools for press releases and newsletters
  • Digital asset management library
  • Enquiry & issue management tools
  • Social media publication & sharing tools

Customers can instantly publish, edit and remove content; schedule its publication and distribution; enhance it with assets such as pictures and videos, and share it on social media channels. Teams can work in collaboration ensuring there are no bottlenecks or delays if someone is unavailable making it an excellent tool for business continuity.

Newsroom Examples

Why use a PRgloo Newsroom?

If you have an in-house team or an agency who takes care of your corporate website, you may wonder what the advantages of having a PRgloo newsroom are. Why not simply design, build and host these pages using the same tools and agencies as the rest of the corporate site? The answer is that whilst there are many advantages to doing this, having a specialized provider of newsrooms is a benefit for many reasons.

Increase in traffic and awareness of your brand

Newsrooms built using standard systems typically focus on having engaging design, updated content and a good search engine/strategy so that when someone searches for information your website pops up highly on search results. That’s all great as far as it goes, but it does rely on your core audience searching for this content in the first place. Unless you’re lucky enough to be a brand who makes the news just by sneezing, it is unlikely that this will be enough; especially if you’re promoting new products and themes which you want to raise awareness of. It doesn’t answer the question of how you’re going to get your key audience to search for things you want them to search for when you want them to search for them.

So, what’s the alternative? You could go for paid content promotion – but this tends not to work well for journalists who see this type of interaction as ‘marketing’. You could create a ‘sign up for news’ form, but that’s a massive GDPR headache and tends to be pretty low value for the communications team as it gets populated quickly with competitors, people looking for work etc. Or you could go for PRgloo: we build newsrooms which have all the great design and SEO of the corporate site, but we then supercharge them with high impact email distribution and an integrated journalist database.

When our customers craft their stories, they also craft tailored distribution lists of journalists and key stakeholders to send them to. The platform then publishes this content to the newsroom and distributes it via email at the exact same time. Journalists and stakeholders who would otherwise have been unaware of this news are prompted to find out more by clicking back to the newsroom to view the story, contact the team, download assets for use in their publications and generally get to know the brand. More often than not, they also explore the wider corporate site. In this way the PRgloo platform transforms an otherwise static set of pages into a popular destination for information gatherers and key stakeholders and creates new, valuable audiences for your brand.

Fantastic search promoting your domain not ours

Far from having a negative impact on your search engine optimization and search strategy overall, customers who use PRgloo should see an uplift in content being found and indexed. The rules of SEO are, however, constantly evolving as technology changes and search engines modify their algorithms for ranking websites against each other. Our approach is flexible to suit the different requirements and budgets of each of our customers and their social media strategy and we enjoy working with our customers to get things just right for you.  The basic SEO optimisations that our newsroom provides “out of the box” are:

  • Newsrooms are all placed on a subdomain such as news.arlafoods.co.uk. Google does not care if your newsroom appears on a subdomain or a sub directory (here’s google explaining that they don’t care which way you do it) provided it is full of good and interesting content and is visited often by traffic. Because the PRgloo newsroom sits on your domain, you gain all the SEO boosts which the content and the integrated email distribution generates for you.
  • Every page is given a fully customisable semantic URL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_URL) so that it contains keywords relevant to the content that will be displayed when it is visited
  • Every page has populated metadata for titles, descriptions, keywords and many other meta-tags – although these are becoming increasingly insignificant for SEO
  • Pages have extra data to be read by Twitter and Facebook so that when they are Tweeted or shared to the newsfeed, an appropriately sized hero image, clear summary text and valid hyperlink are all provided so that shares always look great
  • PRgloo sites respond to page requests as fast as possible as search engines now factor page load times into their ranking
  • Add your own analytics to the website. Most of our customers choose to use Google Analytics
  • Make the website fully responsive so that it is a joy to use no matter whether the visitor is using a PC, Mac, tablet or phone, and so that the orientation of their device does not matter
  • Make the website meet as many accessibility guidelines as possible. We aim to pass as many Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) tests as possible, however many guidelines are content and design related so we cannot guarantee to pass all tests; some of this is up to you!
  • Above is an example of the SEO rating of one of our sites (https://press.gocompare.com/) from Google’s site audit tools

What about our existing content?

We will provide automatic redirects for all press releases so that saved links will still work and direct the visitor to the new version and a full content migration plan is included in the costs (provided these can be provided electronically)

What if we want content from the Newsroom to appear on the corporate site?

The PRgloo Customer API is provided for those clients who wish to extract their public website content for use outside of the PRgloo ecosystem with more detail than the standard RSS feeds can provide. To protect our customer’s assets and intellectual property, all calls to the API are authenticated with a unique token which will be provided to you by your account manager.  No charge is made for additional tokens. This API is intended to allow PRgloo customers and their technology partners to extract their published and publicly available press releases and related binary content. You may make a reasonable number of requests (up to 1440 per day) to extract data for storage in external systems, e.g. to republish data from their newsroom to a corporate website in near-real-time.

What about security? 

If you choose the right supplier then your newsroom could be safer than your corporate site. At PRgloo we are CyberEssentials certified and employ an outside company to regularly perform penetration tests on us so that we find vulnerabilities before anyone nasty does. 

Interested in a corporate newsroom?

Give us a call to find our more about how we can integrate template and bespoke newsroom options.