How can SEO and PR work together?

The Importance of Digital PR to SEO

While traditional PR (television, radio, newspapers, and magazines) still exists and continues to matter to your brand, it is digital PR that receives a lot of your team’s attention today. 

Digital PR strives to establish a trustworthy brand reputation for you online, and this, in turn, can serve your SEO efforts as well. They both are about building authority in one way or another.

Digital PR benefits SEO by providing opportunities for valuable backlinks and mentions across different mediums and channels. It spreads awareness of your company, brand, management, products, services, and anything else important to your business.

These mentions, backlinks, and spreading awareness tactics serve to build your brand’s reputation and authority.

Another way to explain the importance of digital PR to SEO is that an essential key to boosting organic search rankings is high-quality links, and PR can provide these.

To further drive the point home when it comes to the importance of digital PR to SEO, here is a simple example of how it can work.

Say your content marketing team creates a website full of relevant keywords as part of the SEO strategy, with the goal of reaching a higher ranking on SERPs. Visitors to your site may or may not respond, depending on the value of the content.

This is the type of situation where digital PR can help.

When a digital PR campaign receives high levels of attention, resulting in mentions and links on high authority and trustworthy websites, your SEO benefits in the following ways.

Garnishes higher trust and authority

With successful PR campaigns, the garnished trust and authority obtained passes to your website. In turn, Google recognizes these since it prefers to provide searchers with high-authority, trustworthy websites in SERPs.

Improves Keyword Associations

These PR campaigns also improve keyword associations when you are mentioned online, such as in an online magazine.

Google will potentially associate your linked content page with other keywords found in the content of the online magazine’s section where you are mentioned.

Expands Your Audience

Digital PR also focuses on influencer outreach and social media, often resulting in mentions and links back to your brand, product, or services.

These expand your audience and can boost your SEO and rankings also.

5 Tactics Which Integrate SEO into PR Activity

SEO PR Tactics are the new way to achieve positive results.

While it’s now clear that digital PR can be important to your SEO, there are ways you can double that impact. You just need to find ways to integrate SEO into your PR Activity.

To help you get started, here are 5 SEO PR tactics that integrate SEO into your PR activities.

1. Focus on Gaining High-Authority Links from Digital PR Campaigns

Creating content that gets attention, creates a buzz, or becomes highly newsworthy is the skill of PR professionals.

It’s evident that building these digital PR campaigns takes time and effort on the part of your PR team.

With an added focus on the goal of gaining high-authority links, your SEO can also soar with every PR effort made.

Links resulting from these digital PR campaigns, such as those included in reputable news sources, lead back to your website landing page. Other high-authority, trustworthy sites may also link back to your site.

In turn, such links from your digital PR campaigns can bolster your brand’s authority and lead to higher rankings on SERPs.

2. Request Links

Often there are times when a news site or blog may mention your brand, product, service, event, management, or other elements of your business without including a link back to your website.

In such cases, your PR team will want to reach out to these sites or blogs and ask them to make an edit and include a link back to your landing page.

To help you find mentions of your brand in others’ content, utilize one of the tools dedicated to this type of services, such as Social Mention or Hootsuite.

Another option, especially for smaller businesses, is to set up Google Alerts.

3. Utilize Keyword Research

A major part of any SEO strategy is dedicated keyword research.

Keyword research is the act of identifying those words or phrases that people are searching for already. The ones you select for your SEO need to relate to your brand, products, services, or offers in some particular way.

With this valuable information, marketing teams can create content relevant to their targeted audiences and buyer personas and have a better chance of ranking higher up in SERPs.

Your SEO team will need to provide a list of these keywords to the PR team so they can incorporate them into their content as well.

4. Concentrate on Off-Page SEO and Link Building

Link building and off-page SEO are crucial elements of a successful SEO strategy.

Off-page SEO relates to the actions you can take outside of your website to help positively impact SERP rankings, and this includes link-building.

This area is where combining PR knowledge with SEO is highly beneficial and can help you obtain better links.

For example, PR teams often forge relationships with social media influencers who have large followings, as well as popular bloggers. In turn, they can encourage these influencers and bloggers to share links to your website with their dedicated fans, followers, or subscribers.

Links such as these to your website can serve as recommendations. As a result, search engines recognize your site as authoritative and trustworthy, and this can positively impact your rankings. In turn, it also improves your SEO marketing ROI.

5.  Collaborate on Content Marketing Efforts

Producing quality content is essential for both SEO and PR and presents a collaborative opportunity to increase both rankings and your brand’s image.

Bring your SEO and PR teams together to collaborate on your content marketing efforts. Take a look at older content and determine if it can be repurposed or reused in beneficial ways.

For example, a high-performing, a popular blog post can be turned into an infographic to share online or reference in a press release.

You can also create interactive content, and the PR team can reach out to influencers to help spread the word about what you offer.

Your content, then, can serve dual purposes. It can increase SEO and be part of PR campaigns that involve multiple channels, increasing your exposure.

How to Track, Measure, and Analyze your SEO PR Activity

As with all digital marketing efforts, tracking, measuring, and analyzing the results will be helpful and beneficial in showing you where you are achieving success and where you need to re-strategize.

To know if your SEO PR activities are paying off, determine what metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to track. Choose the ones that will tell you what you need to know and help you improve your future campaigns.

These metrics may include:

Organic website traffic

Keyword rankings

Click-through rates (CTRs)

Domain authority

Backlinks

Number of referring domains

One way to obtain these metrics is through Google Analytics. This free online tool makes it easy and can provide you with the valuable information you need to make future decisions.

There are also other online tools to help track important metrics as well, so if you need more, don’t hesitate to add these to your strategy also.