TOP THREE REASONS TO COMBINE PR AND SEO
Holly Willoughby is great. But Holly and Dec presenting I’m a Celeb is simply not the same as the original iconic duo, is it? Some things are just better together. Public relations and search engine optimisation (SEO) also need to be treated as a standard pairing.
Below are the top three reasons to align and incorporate SEO activity with your PR campaign. It doesn’t much matter if your PR agency runs your SEO work or cooperates with an incumbent SEO consultancy, but the two really need to be working together.
Reason one: Intent
John Batelle, a respected American SEO consultant called Google “a database of intentions”. This is because every bit of information the search engine indexes and every search ever performed is driven by one thing — intent.
Your website exists for a reason. Why? Your potential customers have problems to solve. What? The media needs to find information. How?
Understanding these motivations and leveraging them to elevate an SEO campaign to success is something your PR agency is ideally positioned to do. Planning activity around the intent of your target audience results in optimisation targeting the right people.
Reason two: Quality backlinks
One of the things any SEO agency will agree on is the need to generate backlinks to your website. However, simply approaching websites at random to request a link or listing in a directory is not going to get you results you need.
Firstly, directory links do not contribute anything to your ranking. Secondly, even if you gain a link on a high domain authority site, if the people seeing your link are not the right audience, any traffic is useless.
In contrast, links generated by placing content on relevant media websites, will provide quality backlinks and quality traffic.
Reason three: The human factor
Not only do you need to remember that quality backlinks are generated by people, not robots, you also need to be aware of Google’s human factor.
The search engine employs people to sanity check its database and the way search results appear. To help them, there are set guidelines to follow during the checking process, which include the need to check if a company is discussed on reputable sites.
This is anything from national media websites to blogs by other companies and portals run by trade organisations. Attaining this requires a lot of PR legwork – by an actual human. And the best person to do this is the person tasked with managing your reputation.
Ant and Dec, fish and chips, gin and tonic. The list of iconic pairings keeps growing, and it includes SEO and PR.
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