Public Relations and SEO: How to Use This Powerful Combination to Grow Your Business
One of the great things about search engine optimization is that it is multidisciplinary. Effectively executing SEO campaigns requires knowledge in multiple areas of digital marketing, like content creation, web development, reputation management, and even your public relations outreach.
If you’re already doing public relations for your brand or business website, you can harness those same strategies to simultaneously elevate your SEO performance.
Here’s how to combine two of the most powerful (and affordable!) digital marketing strategies to grow your website authority and your organic visibility.
How do public relations and SEO relate?
Public relations is all about getting major media outlets to cover and feature your brand or business in their news coverage. In comparison, SEO is focused on helping web pages rank for relevant keywords in search engines like Google.
So how do these two seemingly different objectives relate?
Content
It takes high-quality content to convince journalists or publishers to feature coverage of your brand or business. Similarly, Google is looking for high-quality content to promote in their search results.
No public relations or SEO strategy can be effective without high-quality content assets on your website. Creating content that provides value to your target audience is the foundation of all effective digital marketing strategies.
Brand authority
Public relations professionals work hard to reach out to editors, journalists, and media professionals with the hope that they will offer coverage of their brand, products, or services. Lots of brand mentions in major publications and news outlets means a wider audience, and more potential customers learning about your brand or business.
Similarly, SEO is focused on elevating your website’s authority in the eyes of Google crawlers. Google measures your website authority in more concrete measurements, like backlinks, direct traffic, and the topical depth of your content. But like PR, SEO is centered around getting more web users aware of your brand.
Backlinks
Although PR professionals are focused primarily on earning a brand mention in a major publication, SEO professionals are all about backlinks.
A brand mention can have loads of PR value, particularly if it’s in a highly authoritative website with large readership or audience. But if that brand mention also includes a link to your website, it brings SEO value as well via its “link equity.” Every time another website links to another, it passes on a portion of its “PageRank,” a proprietary Google metric that quantifies the popularity and authority of a web page.
Google looks at the total backlinks of a website to understand its reputation, authority, and trustworthiness, and uses those backlinks in its ranking algorithm to determine how high to promote web pages in the SERPs. Websites with more backlinks have greater overall ranking potential.
More articles from AllBusiness.com:
- How to Become an Online Expert
- What Is PR? A Big List of Tactics Pros Use
- Public Relations Risk Management
- 16 Creative Ways to Get Press Coverage for Your Small Business
- Choosing a Public Relations Firm
4 PR strategies to pair with SEO
If you already have some experience with public relations strategy, it is not that much more work to connect those efforts with search engine optimization.
And because the benefits of public relations are often temporary, being so tied to the news cycle, bringing SEO into your public relations strategy can help lengthen the rewards of those efforts, bringing link equity and SEO value that can last for years.
1. Monitor brand mentions and turn them into links
Your public relations team is likely reaching out to journalists or influencers on a regular basis to get them to mention your brand name in their content. So if you are already doing the work of media outreach, why not also request that a link be included back to your website in their coverage?
Most writers and journalists who are willing to feature your brand will likely also be willing to link to your website in their mention. But if you don’t ask, they may not make it a priority to include it.
Also, if your team is actively monitoring your brand mentions via a Google Alert or some other type of monitoring software, you also have link-building opportunities.
If you come across another website that mentions your brand name without including a link, you can simply reach out to the webmaster, thanking them for the coverage and asking if they’d include a link to your homepage.
2. Use HARO to earn authoritative backlinks
Many public relations professionals are familiar with the free service from Cision called Help-A-Reporter-Out (HARO). But if you’re not, the service is a daily email platform that allows journalists in their database to submit requests to industry experts for commentary, quotes, products, or potential content features.
If you’re already using HARO as a PR strategy, it can also be a high-quality, white-hat link building strategy. You can design entire HARO link-building campaigns around pages on your website that you’d like to improve ranking positions for.
This is certainly not a quick strategy as it requires actively monitoring HARO requests to find the perfect fit and opportunity for your own website. But, HARO link building can help you get high-quality backlinks that are otherwise very difficult to acquire.
Here is how to get started with HARO.
- Sign up for the free service at helpareporter.com.
- Select the best categories for your industry, e.g., technology, healthcare, etc.
- Monitor your inbox for relevant requests; HARO emails are sent three times a day.
- Pitch your expert commentary, website content, or products with your website link included in your pitch.
- Make it easy for the journalist or publisher to utilize your content in their reporting. If they can copy and paste your response into their article, all the better.
Most HARO pitches will identify the purpose of the article and the publication. Prior to submitting a pitch or response, check the DA of the publication to ensure that it will bring you true SEO value if you receive a link in their coverage.
3. Write press releases and submit for syndication
Press releases can double as both public relations and search engine optimization tools. Although press releases are traditionally used to earn news coverage, when those press releases include a link and are then syndicated across hundreds of websites, they can drive link equity and referral traffic to your website for the long term.
So if you’re not crafting press releases around your newsworthy content, it’s time to get started. If you are crafting and syndicating press releases, make sure links to your website are included in the copy.
Here are some tips for getting the most SEO value out of your press releases:
- Look at your press release as a high-quality SEO article. Be strategic with both your anchor text and the annotation text, or the text that surrounds the anchor text.
- Include information about your brand that outlasts the news cycle. Press releases syndicated across any high domain authority websites will likely rank for your branded searches, or any keyword queries that include your brand name. The shelf life of a press release with journalists is usually only one to two weeks, but for Google searches, press releases can rank in SERP results for years.
- Build links to your press releases. To increase the value of those press releases even more, build links to them! This ultimately increases the link equity those syndications are sending back to your website. This strategy is known as tier 2 link building, and although an extra step in the link building process, it can be very impactful!
4. Run a digital PR campaign
What is digital PR? Well, it’s exactly what I’ve been describing through this article—the powerful combination of digital public relations and SEO.
Digital PR campaigns also incorporate social media strategy to earn even more backlinks and press coverage, making this a powerhouse digital strategy that has a myriad of benefits.
How valuable is digital PR? Well, John Mueller, Search Advocate at Google, says that digital PR is even more important than technical SEO for driving results in the SERPs.
If you have worked with a public relations agency in the past to promote newsworthy events for your business, consider working with an agency that also prioritizes earning SEO value throughout a digital PR campaign. That way, you can ensure that no SEO opportunity goes unnoticed or missed during the course of the campaign.
The power of combining public relations and SEO
The reality is, adding SEO to your public relations work only requires a few extra steps. Taking the extra bit of effort can mean major rewards for the organic SEO performance of your web pages.
Make sure that your public relations team and SEO team are regularly strategizing together, if they aren’t already. Together, both teams can combine and leverage their unique superpowers to reach the same larger goal—more visibility, more authority, and more brand awareness.
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