Why create a PR strategy with SEO

In some shape or form, PR is as old as society to persuade, inform and bring people together. PR develops relationships between people and brands.

It’s essential to consider where people are gaining most of their brand information from: online! PR has grown alongside technology at a fast pace working with digital marketing services to build brand awareness and protect reputation. So, it makes sense to incorporate SEO into the mix, especially for startups that need to secure their brand reputation from their first day of operations.

SEO boosts traffic to websites through ranking content in search engine results and this builds brand awareness. It’s obviously great having amazing content, but it is essentially wasted if no one is being directed to it and viewing it! Google’s algorithms have really put the focus on showcasing good quality content that answers a query or search term. Your job is to convince them that your content is worthy of being highly ranked. If you can show this as a startup, you’re on track to a successful online profile.

Understanding what PR in SEO is

PR and SEO go hand in hand, one can be used without the other but when they are combined, they can achieve the very best results for your startup.  

Brand awareness is at the heart of both PR and SEO activities:

• PR professionals want a story, a narrative to persuade journalists and outlets to use their content. Newsworthy stories and ideas will make great content. 
• SEO professionals use quality content when outreaching to outlets. They want the all-important backlink, but also to have content on quality websites that are relevant to their audiences. 

Creating good quality content that ranks for keywords and be picked up by other sites is the end goal. SEO boosts businesses in an online space that can reach a lot further than traditional PR tactics. The crossover is obvious and combining the approaches will really make a huge impact on your brand awareness. 

Using a PR strategy with SEO

PR teams have vast knowledge on which content is worth reading and how to make content appealing to journalists and editors. Ensure that your digital marketing services use PR tactics to boost SEO output. This builds genuine trust and interest of your content; SEO teams knows what Google wants and have tactics to ensure that the content ranks.

Journalists and editors have targets to meet, so they really do care about the content they are producing and how well it performs. They constantly need to publish content that drives traffic to their work and publications.

PR helps this process with pieces, they know what to pitch and what will resonate with their audience. On the other hand, a SEO professional can investigate the background of the journalist’s website for content gaps and suggest relevant keywords. Combining the two will boost the visibility of the content and be more appealing to the journalist to publish it, as they know it’s more likely to do well.

A great way to ensure you are producing content at a relevant time is to plan out social calendars. Include national days, case studies and industry trends. This will help to pitch to the right place and relevant content to your target audience. The PR team will have forward features and editorial calendars while the SEO team will have keywords and search engine trends. These tactics tend to crossover, but always ensure that you deliver the right content at the right time. 

Analysing your data 

The plan is all coming together; you have a strategy and are using the tactics, next it’s important to measure the results. Choose the most valuable data to be analysed, such as:

• Number of visits to the landing page
• Email sign-ups
• Engagement rate on social media
• Bounce rate
• Time spent on page
• Where visitors go afterwards
• Download of key content. 

Tools such as Google Analytics are essential to viewing the type of traffic being driven to your content and site. It will show you how they ended up there, how long they spent and what their actions are. This should show how your PR-led SEO tactics have worked, as there will be an improvement in more secure and trusted links.

Analytics can also help with showing you the content that is the most engaging with your audience. This is important as it will give you insights into what to pitch to journalists and know it will be relevant to the audience you want to read it. These tactics are especially important for startup companies to see what areas to focus on and to increase content around, whilst boosting their reputation.

Boosting your online reputation

PR-led SEO helps to create great stories and then boost that content to the right viewers. Journalists and editors will want to showcase this, as they want increased readership too. Having your story linked to an authoritative site is so valuable, it creates a great reputation and reliability. This will also make it harder for competitors to replicate your work.

Make sure your startup stands out online and level up with the right strategy for you.