Are your PR and SEO strategies aligned?
In recent years, the lines between PR and SEO have become blurred, as they have similar goals in mind: To attract an audience using tactics that get your brand mentioned in the kinds of places that your target audience are hanging out. In the case of SEO, this meant ranking well in search engine results using tactics such as link building and guest blogging. For PR, it usually meant local and national press, TV and radio.
As separate tools, both SEO and PR can achieve great results, but when they are combined, you can set yourself apart from your competition, who may just be concentrating on the SEO side of things and putting all of their eggs in an organic SEO driven strategy.
Here are some ways in which you can combine your SEO and PR tactics, and what they can bring to your business:
Establish High Authority Relationships
The SEO community is often obsessed with achieving high authority links from sources with a lot of juice with Google and co. Government sites, mainstream media and press and other high authority sources are the Holy Grail, and SEO and PR can be combined here to establish relationships with these sources.
Make contacts with local journalists, reporters, editors and other authority figures and make them your sources when creating content that you feel your readers will be interested in. These kinds of two-way relationships means that you will obtain links from these valuable sources, and Google will sit up and take notice before too long.
Great Content = Better Links
It goes without saying that in recent years, blogging and journalism have become very similar. There are blogs out there that have just as much readership and authority as news outlets, and it is just as difficult to get featured in them as it is in traditional media.
The key here is to create the greatest piece of content that you can create: featuring a great headline, plenty of sources and links to backup what you’re talking about, and a unique take on a subject. When you have all this, you will then be ready to make the pitch, and you can combine SEO and PR to create an outreach campaign to the best blogs and media outlets to earn the best links. On the flipside, you can also create an outreach strategy to link to something on your own blog, so that people are linking directly to you, rather than another site that features your content.
Collecting Data via Competitions and Surveys
Email marketing is one of the most effective ways of bringing in traffic to your website and making connections with customers because once a person opts to give details to you, the permission to contact them is all yours. In terms of PR, this is often used as a way of collecting data by issuing surveys. Another way to capture email address is to hold competitions via your website, or give away something (an eBook perhaps) for free if people choose to sign up.
Once you have an email list, you can create an outreach strategy to create content based on what your readers are saying about a subject, which means your content will be 100% unique to you, and therefore is likely to be extremely useful in obtaining links from high authority websites and sources.
Social Sharing
Social media is having a huge effect on SEO and PR, and the best way to incorporate both into your social networking on sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and co. is to get influential people and businesses to share your content with their own readers, and to mention your work wherever possible. You can achieve this by doing the same with their content, and by starting a dialogue with them via Twitter, Facebook, et al. It all comes back to the relationship building mentioned previously, and can go a long way to sending out the right social signals to the search engines, who in turn will pick up on your standing on social media and reward your content with better rankings.
SEO and PR are their own techniques, but when combined together, they can add extra weight to your marketing campaigns and improve your results on both sides, and with minimal effort. Every business wants to achieve great links, search engine rankings and have brand mentions coming at them from all aspects of the media – from local news to their online social channels. By incorporating both sides into your campaigns, you can achieve some amazing feats.
