What comes to mind when you think of SEO? Probably not PR… but understanding what PR is in SEO is the key to great results. When it comes to it, businesses often separate PR and SEO. But why is this? Blending PR and SEO together achieves better results as PR promotes the brand and SEO concentrates on ranking and traffic. Even Google’s John Mueller has thrown his hat into the ring on digital PR.
John is the lead of the Search Relations team at Google and has deep knowledge on getting your brand found.
Why combine a PR strategy with SEO
Traditional PR is not going away. It has been around as long as we’ve had a society- to persuade, inform and integrate people together. PR is all about persuasion, from asking people to purchase a product to embracing an idea, PR develops relationships between people and brands.
PR has grown alongside technology, at a fast pace working with digital marketing services to build brand awareness and protect reputation. Working with influencers, creating digital content for social media and websites, as well as pitching stories to journalists are key tactics.
SEO can be said to work the same. It boosts traffic to websites through ranking content in search engine results and this builds brand awareness. Google’s algorithms have really put the focus on showcasing good quality content that answers a query or search term.Your job is to convince them that your content is worthy of being highly ranked.
Understanding how PR and SEO work together
How do we use PR in SEO? For starters, using a complementary strategy can get the best out of both worlds. The intent behind the work is slightly different, but that’s why PR and SEO work so well together to get the best results.
Brand awareness is at the heart of PR and SEO activities:
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PR professionals want a story, a narrative to persuade journalists and outlets to use their content. Newsworthy stories and ideas will make great content.
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SEO professionals use quality content when outreaching to outlets. They want the all-important backlink, but also to have content on quality websites that are relevant to their audiences.
Good quality content that is newsworthy, has the potential to rank for keywords, and be picked up by other sites is the end goal. SEO boosts businesses in an online space that can reach a lot further than traditional PR tactics. The crossover is obvious and combining the approaches will really make a huge impact on your brand awareness.
Make an impact with your PR and SEO
A PR team knows what content makes an impact, what people want to read, and what journalists and editors are looking for, so ensure your digital marketing services use PR tactics to boost SEO output. The work they do builds trust and interest through content creation and placement. The SEO team knows what Google wants and has tactics to ensure the content ranks.
Combine PR and SEO to create the best possible content.
Obviously, journalists and editors care about how well their content performs as many have targets set and ones they need to meet. They constantly must create content that drives traffic to their work and publications. How PR helps with this is that PR professionals can analyse their pieces and pitch new ideas that will resonate with their audience. The SEO professional can investigate the background of the journalist’s website for content gaps and suggest relevant keywords. This will increase the chance of the journalist using this content and seeing the benefits.
Developing social calendars is a great way to ensure you can produce content at a relevant time to pitch to the right place in earned media. The PR team will have forward features and editorial calendars while the SEO team has search engine trends. These tactics tend to crossover, but always check to ensure you deliver the right content at the right time.
Analyse your data for best results
Now that the strategy is in place and you are using the tactics, it’s important to measure the results. Decide in advance which data is most valuable, such as:
· number of visits to the landing page
· email sign-ups
· engagement rate on social media
· bounce rate
· time spent on page
· where visitors go afterwards
· download of key content.
Google Analytics is key to understanding what traffic is coming to your site, how they end up there and what their actions are. It will be clear that your PR -led SEO tactics have paid off as you should see an improvement in trust and links.
Analytics is also extremely important as it can help find what content is of the most interest to your audience. This is useful when pitching ideas to journalists as you want your audience to engage with what you have to say. When readers land on that earned media page, they will find other content that is of interest to them and realise this is very relevant to them.
PR-led SEO helps to create great stories that journalists and editors will want to write about them and link to them. Having your story linked to an authoritative site is so valuable, it creates a great reputation and reliability. This will also make it harder for Competitors to replicate your work.
Next steps
A PR strategy with SEO sounds good, doesn’t it? As we have seen, it’s effective, reliable, and achieves results that are measurable. This can drastically increase brand visibility online and off! Talk to a team that knows how to create campaigns that get you brand awareness and links. Check out our success stories to see what we have achieved for other brands
Drop us a line and see what we can do for you: hello@ambitiouspr.co.uk.
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