PR and SEO: Much more than a marriage of necessity

In recent days, I have witnessed PR specialists being sceptical over SEO. Unless you have worked in a full-service digital agency, chances are the two disciplines, PR and SEO, will not have crossed paths. In this blog I want to explain how both complement and enhance each together and how they should form part of your overall digital marketing strategy.

What is SEO?

Is SEO an art or science? I see it as a science: all this data available, helping you to make informed decisions. SEO stands for search engine optimisation. Its purpose is to drive organic traffic to your website. On your website, you will most likely have content such as: product/service pages, blogs, news, videos, events. By optimising your content, you will make them more visible on search results. If your website ranks well on search engine results you will have a better chance of driving relevant traffic to your website. This ultimately results in better quality leads.

What is PR?

I personally like the CIPR’s definition:

“Public Relations is about reputation - the result of what you do, what you say and what others say about you.

Public Relations is the discipline which looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics.”

So how would the disciplines SEO and PR work together?

SEO can be split into three parts, on-page, off-page and technical. For the purposes of this blog, let’s address how both on-page and off-page SEO work with PR.

On-Page SEO - get found on search results

On-page SEO is aptly named and refers to optimising your content on a particular page. Factors to consider will be key words and phrases. These are words which your audience may search for so it’s important to incorporate keywords and phrases and make it sound natural. Be mindful not to overuse keywords.

1. Even though search engines, such as Google identify key words, the content needs to add value to users; this is where PR skills come to good use. Write something unique.

2. Searchable content must be linkable. For example, if you are writing a press release on a company acquisition you could add links to the companies involved and links to the service/product offering.

3. Title tags – PR people will instinctively understand the value of a good title. In search terms, title tags are important because they tell search engines what your content is about. They are used in search engine results, web browsers, as well as social platforms. The rule of thumb is to keep title tags under 60 characters.

4. Always use alt tags in images because this tells search engines what the image is. Also include the subject in the alt text.

For a complete guide to on-page SEO, Moz has a fantastic infographic summarising it here.

Off-Page SEO - to build links

Building links is the core of ‘off-page SEO’. You will often hear SEO techies refer to link building. Digital PR is a brilliant way to achieve this. The idea is to encourage publications to publish your news release and include links to your website. It is preferable to choose publications with a high domain authority (DA). This is a score between 0 - 100 which is used to determine a website’s rank position; the higher the score means the better ability to rank. Use Moz or Ahref to check a DA score; watch out because there is a big discrepancy between them. Generally, the more links you have on your website, the more you will increase your own DA score.

For a guide to off-page SEO, click here

Shattering Content – turning one into many

A lot of publications value exclusivity. Once a press article has been written, you may only be able to use it once, and yet, you might have spent hours or even days perfecting it. Can the content be re-purposed? A former colleague of mine referred to this as “shattering content”. PR can work with the content team to find creative ways to transform one long form article into many things, such as blog posts, case studies, press releases, videos, and social posts.

Amplify Your Reach

The rise of influencer marketing looks set to continue, with specialist influencer marketing agencies very much the norm. Marketers are confident to invest in influencer marketing as part of the marketing mix. The PR team will often have relationships with journalists and mass media. The SEO/content team will have a list of bloggers and influencers. These lists can be shared with each other to amplify your reach.

In conclusion, PR and SEO, when working together in tandem, are a marriage made in heaven. Each complements and enhances the other. A press article, effectively written with SEO in mind will improve the search ranking, in turn broadening the reach of the article. Conversely, an article ignoring SEO will be buried under pages of results, and a potentially great article may never be found.