While organizations used to be able to let their PR and SEO strategies operate separately from one another, it’s becoming increasingly important for the two to join forces. Both used to be considered two separate methods of gaining visibility and promoting an organization. However, as the digital landscape has evolved and become a central focus of PR work, it’s now essential that PR pros understand how SEO works so that they can utilize it for their organizations.
Knowing how SEO can fit into your PR strategy will elevate your PR game to the next level. Here are six ways the SEO and PR are working together:
- Optimizing links in earned coverage
Having a strong backlink profile is a key contributor to improving search engine rankings. When placing press releases, developing content or working with media on earned coverage, optimizing backlinks can help boost the impact of those placements. PR pros can do this by aligning anchor text – the text that is hyperlinked – with top keywords for the organization.
- Leveraging trending topics
In PR, content calendars are a must for organizing story ideas and pitch topics for the year. Take your content calendar up a notch with a little SEO analysis. What are key events or themes you could plug into that people are likely to search? Throughout the year, pay attention to major trends in keyword searches and topics and consider leveraging in proactive storytelling to boost your SEO.
- Identifying media targets and contacts
Finding the right reporters to tell your story is a constant struggle for many PR pros. One way to alleviate that pain point is by utilizing SEO. Search keywords that relate to the story you want to tell and add those reporters to your media list. This can be done manually in a search engine, or SEO analysis tools such as SEMRush make it easy to identify media contacts based on keyword searches through brand monitoring.
- Aligning messages and keywords to drive traffic and reach your target audience
At the same time, you can leverage SEO to help determine who your audience is and expand your reach to your desired audience. Analyzing your website performance in search engines with various keywords lets you know what audiences you are reaching, as well as where you are less visible. This allows you to better adjust and strategize your keywords in your PR materials to reach your desired audience.
- Building strategic relationships
Similarly, SEO helps support PR relationship building, as analyzing backlinks to your organization’s website can help determine who is already talking about your organization. This can help you determine influencers – including media, bloggers and social media influencers – to build strategic relationships with and leverage for future PR efforts.
- Amplifying content
PR work is tiring work that takes a lot of effort. At the end of the day, you want your work to drive tangible results for your organization, and see that effort have a real impact. Syncing SEO with PR helps increase traffic and visibility of digital content, which boosts awareness for your organization and can help drive business.
SEO and PR go hand-in-hand, as both have the goal of increasing an organization’s visibility among the public. As a PR pro, it’s essential to not only understand what SEO is but also to know how to leverage it in your work to create the most online impact for your organization.