How Pr and SEO Work Together

13 May 2020

Overview of PR and SEO

With an ever-evolving digital landscape, it’s more important than ever for communication and marketing specialists to find ways to build well-rounded strategies that include a wide range of marketing tactics. Thus, we have been seeing more SEO and PR companies working together to establish greater brand visibility and authority for businesses.

We all know that SEO has to be supplemented with good content. Beyond that, the whole point of SEO is to make your brand more visible, particularly so by using search engines like Google. The aim of PR is not that far off either; it seeks out good press coverage in hopes of maintaining a favourable public image of your brand. It’s not hard to see why these two marketing tactics can work well together. An advantageous public image, accompanied by wide visibility can propel your business’ success tremendously. This article will explore more about the ways in which PR and SEO work together.

Building Authority Through Public Relations

One of the most important ranking factors for Google and other search engines is having good and numerous backlinks. You can read more about how Google ranks websites in our DIY SEO Guide. And guess what? PR articles can provide great backlinks, especially when the articles are published on established news platforms and online magazines or expert columns.

These news sources often have a high domain score, thus being able to significantly boost the credibility and authority of your site. SEO can and should tap into this to gain link equity from reputable news sites. This gets Google trusting your site more and end up ranking it well on search engine results pages (SERP).

Beyond news organisations, PR practitioners often target bloggers and influencers as well. These blogs or social media accounts usually have a large following of readers who are engaged and this could be another perfect avenue for SEOs to exploit. The backlinks embedded in these PR articles can also get referral traffic, as well as increase backlink authority and general visibility. As John Rampton on Forbes stated: “It is possible to piggyback on the prominence and trust of bloggers who attract an audience within an associated niche to yours to increase your SERPs.”

SEO’s research expertise

Next, SEO involves the study of users’ search intent, and through much research, SEOs figure out exactly what consumers are searching for, what they want to see and how to best appeal to them by using the right keywords. This plays right into PR, as PR is all about portraying a favourable brand image to its audiences. To do that effectively, it has to know more about what its consumers are looking for and what they want to see, and they need an accurate analysis of what works, and what doesn’t. It is crucial for PR strategists to understand their target audience, and utilise the information gathered from SEO to inform their PR pitches and brand messaging to better appeal to their audiences.

Through SEO’s research, PR executives can improve their outreach efforts by tailoring or tweaking content to what individuals are searching for. This doesn’t just happen in the stages of crafting the initial content, it works just as well after the PR article is posted, in the evaluation and improvement stage. SEO examines how effective certain keywords are, the click-through rates of your sites and much more. PR practitioners can utilise this valuable trove of insights to revise on their content and strategy to further improve upon their next PR release.

Content, content, content

There is almost no marketing tactic that doesn’t involve content strategies. Be it PR or social media, or SEO, or outdoor advertisements, they all involve the creation of content – textual, graphics, or otherwise. Content is the glue that binds these tactics together.

As seen in the image below, SEOs utilise Google to help advise the keywords that need to be targeted in the content. Related searches are also a great way to build on your initial keyword.

Knowing this can help you frame your PR strategy well by applying the right content to include in your articles. Incorporating these keywords that the SEO team targets into your press releases can boost brand recognition. However, if there are keywords that struggle to get ranked for, creating press releases for high domain authority publications can help capture these rankings, helping SEO in turn. What’s even more attractive about this is that there is a form of “naturalness” when it comes to including links in press releases, much more so than jabbing keywords into unrelated texts published solely for SEO purposes. This combines the job of a PR strategist while improving upon your SEO strategy, killing two birds with one stone.

All in all, marrying PR and SEO efforts can help your business develop a much stronger overall digital marketing strategy to spearhead brand visibility. By sharing valuable information and insight, PR and SEO can work at full potential to create content that is both engaging and highly visible.

They can cooperate to mutually benefit from their relationship but planning them concurrently will be the key to ensuring it works together seamlessly. Work together to create a unified target demographic and then create a master keyword list that can help align your strategies together. Remember to give your audience a seamless SEO and PR experience that actively reinforces what your company is about again and again. As expert content marketing professional Steve Conway aptly said: Stay in control, rank well, and give value to users and algorithms alike.

GENIA is more than just a traditional SEO Company in Singapore. We have a vision to turn every business we work with into a content hub that offers a myriad of branded and curated content that answers every possible search your prospect could make. We turn your website into the primary destination for all searches related to your field.