Today, the most successful strategies can be seen taking an integrated approach. The biggest example of such a strategy is the integration of both your SEO and PR (public relations) efforts.
Now, you may wonder ā SEO is about rankings, while PR is about the management of a brand's image. What can they possibly do together?
Well, as digital marketing strategies continue to evolve, the lines between the actions and objectives of different teams have started to blur; SEO and PR are no exceptions to this. Both can work hand in hand to expand the online impact of one another.
In other words, here's what we are talking about:
When it comes to moving ahead in the competitive business landscape, online presence and performance are both top priorities for a business. Therefore, pairing your SEO content strategy with your PR efforts can definitely work as a winning combination. When SEO and PR work together in tandem, every message of your brand can capture attention, resulting in greater online visibility, increased brand awareness, and a potential boost in sales.
In this post, we take a closer look at how both SEO and PR can work together and how a solid SEO PR strategy can benefit your brand. Let's begin:
What is PR?
PR is the set of strategies and techniques associated with managing how information about a company or an individual is disseminated to the media and public in general. The principal goals of PR are:
- Maintaining a brand image.
- Disseminating crucial company events or news.
- Putting a positive spin on any negative event.
PR can occur in the form of a company press release, social media posting, news conference, interview with journalists, and much more.
Also, do you know what PR professionals are skilled in?
Creating content that captivates the audience, generates buzz, or becomes newsworthy.
What is SEO?
SEO, short for search engine optimization, refers to the optimization of websites and pages so that they are easily found via Bing, Google, and other search engines.
Simply put, SEO is when you take steps to help a content piece or website rank higher on Google.
Why Is Digital PR Important for SEO
You may already know about traditional PR (newspapers, television, magazines, and radio). But in this post, we are going to talk about the importance of digital PR to SEO.
Digital PR tries to build and establish a trustable brand reputation online, which gives a push to your SEO efforts too. After all, both PR and SEO are about developing authority in some or the other way.
Here’s more on how digital PR benefits SEO:
- Digital PR helps SEO by offering opportunities for valuable mentions and backlinks across multiple channels and mediums. A vital key to increasing organic search rankings is high-quality links, and PR can help provide the same.
- PR also increases awareness of your brand, management, offerings, and company. This, in turn, helps build a solid reputation and authority for your brand.
- When your PR campaign is successful, the trust and authority you gain through it passes to your site. Google takes note of this because the search engine always wants to show its searchers trustworthy, high-quality sites in SERPs.
- Digital PR concentrates on social media and influencer outreach, often resulting in links back to your brand and offerings. The result of it all? You reach more people and build your audience. It can increase your SEO and rankings as well.
How SEO and Digital PR Can Work Together?
Now that we have established how digital PR can benefit your SEO, it's time to double the impact. For this, you need to look for ways to integrate SEO into your PR activity. Here are some SEO PR tactics that help do the same:
1. Use Keyword Research
Something that forms a huge part of an SEO strategy is keyword research.
What is it really?
It is the process of identifying those phrases or words that individuals are searching for. The ones you choose are linked in some specific way to your brand, its offerings, etc.
Keyword research and usage helps a brand produce content that holds relevance to their audience. This, in turn, helps increase the chances of the brand's website achieving a higher ranking in the SERPs.
Now the catch here is, you can provide a list of your research keywords to your PR professionals so that they integrate them into their content too. This way, you utilize keyword research to integrate SEO in your PR activities.
2. Concentrate on Earning High-Quality Links From Digital PR Campaigns
Developing great digital PR campaigns demand effort and time on behalf of your PR team.
The good news is, with every effort your PR team makes, you can let your SEO soar too.
How?
One SEO PR tactic you can follow is to focus on gaining high-quality links from your digital PR campaigns.
Links that result from these campaigns, such as the ones included in renowned news sources, lead back to the landing page of your site.
These links help strengthen your brand's authority, resulting in increased rankings on SERPs.
Interestingly enough, digital PR is a clear winner when you talk of link building tactics. Take a look at the pie chart below:
3. Request Links
A lot of times, when a blog or a news site mentions your events, offerings, management, or brand, they may not include a link back to your site.
If you notice this, you can ask your PR team to contact these blogs and sites and request them to include a link back to your landing page.
But how will you if someone mentions an element of your brand in their content?
It's fairly simple. You can use Hootsuite or Social Mention for the same. Or, you can set up Google Alerts (ideal for small businesses).
4. Collaborate on Content
To integrate SEO into your PR activity, bring both your SEO and digital PR teams together to collaborate on content. It will enhance both your brand's image as well as boost rankings.
How, you may ask?
For instance, both the teams can work on creating interactive content, and then the PR team can get in touch with influencers to help spread the word about your brand's offerings.
5. Focus On Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO is another important element of a solid SEO strategy. It is linked with the actions you take outside your site in a bid to improve your SERP rankings. An example of such an action is link-building.
The great thing is, you can obtain better links by combining your PR knowledge with SEO.
For instance, PR teams often build relationships with famous bloggers and social media influencers with a huge following. Your PR professionals can encourage these bloggers and influencers to share links to your site with their subscribers, dedicated fans, and followers. These links can make your website appear more trustable and authoritative to the search engines, which will, in turn, lead to an increase in your rankings.
Analyze Your SEO PR Activity
Tracking, measuring, and analyzing your SEO PR activity is important to know if you need to re-strategize. It also helps see what's working for your brand.
To check if your tactics are working or not, determine which KPIs and metrics you will track. Select the ones that shed light on what you should know and also help in making improvements to your future campaigns.
Examples of such metrics include:
- Keyword rankings
- Backlinks
- Organic website traffic
- Number of referring domains
- Click-through rates (CTRs)
- Domain authority
Now, the question is, how can you obtain these metrics? Use a free online tool called Google Analytics.
We also recommend that you use DashClicks' Analytics app. It helps you monitor and report on all your marketing campaigns in a single place. You can easily check granular data insights on this best-in-class white label reporting software.
DashClicks White Label SEO Services
Are you a digital marketing agency that lacks the time or the resources to provide result-driven SEO services to your clients? If yes, then you can consider hiring DashClicks' white label SEO services. If you choose these services, you can get your client's site ranked at the number one spot for different search terms in Google.
Wrapping It Up
So far, it's easy to see how SEO and PR can work together as teammates when it comes to gaining positive results for your brand. Ensure you utilize keyword research, focus on building backlinks to your site, and collaborate on content marketing efforts to combine digital PR and SEO. It will help you expand your audience and increase your rankings on SERPs.
Lastly, don't forget to analyze your results. This will help you know what's working and what needs re-strategizing. Good luck!