If you invest in PR or SEO for your agency or organization, it’s important to understand how the two work together, how they overlap and how they differ.
Here are four reasons the two efforts should come together:
1. External link-building is SEO 101.
Search engine optimization improves your website’s ranking on search engines. Think of SEO as a video game. Points determine your rank. An effective way to increase your ranking is to host links back to your site.
The value of a link is based on the linked site’s popularity, importance and trustworthiness. A blog that ranks the best hotdogs in a 10-mile radius from your city center is worth a few points. A link from Forbes gets many more points.
PR gets others to say good things about your company, brand or product. The wonderful things people say about you usually include a link to your website. If not, someone should ask that they do.
PR pros use many tactics to get clients coverage: guest blogging, contributed content, expert opinions and insight on breaking news, pitching story ideas, hosting media events and more. This qualifies them to judge what your brand can offer reporters, who wants to hear it and how to contact the gatekeeper who publishes your content and what makes for a good story.
Anytime an SEO expert requests a link from a blogger, he or she does PR. Anytime a PR pro publishes an article online, they improve their client’s SEO.
2. Content is still king.
In SEO, more links used to mean a better ranking. SEO practitioners spammed their client’s links everywhere. Improved search engines began to punish these practices.
Take Google: It changes its search algorithm 500-600 times a year. Most changes are minor, but every few years Google makes a change that deeply affects rankings, such as deciding that mobile-friendly sites should rank higher when searched from a mobile device.
Its most famous algorithm update, Google Penguin, led to the shotgun wedding of PR and SEO. Google Penguin was Google’s first push-back on practices it saw as dishonest or “spammy.” Google punished automatically generated content-link schemes, cloaking, sneaky redirects, doorway pages, malicious behavior, hidden text and hidden links.
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PR connects with reputable sources to host your links, but SEO experts can do this too. PR can make the most of your SEO by creating engaging content. As search engines zero in on quality vs. quantity, it’s important to hire storytellers who engage readers.
3. Keywords should be in your key messages.
Before you share ideas, invite people to the best website possible. Any SEO freelancer or agency will tell you optimizing your site is the first step to success.
This involves meta-tagging, alt-tagging, optimizing on-page copy, keyword research and keyword mapping. Make your site easy for search engines to recognize and rank—and make it visually appealing, too.
This overlaps one of the first steps in a PR campaign: creating key messages. A PR campaign looks like this:
If you rewrite your website copy to be SEO-friendly, use that to be sure it is PR-friendly. One could argue that more PR-friendly copy will be more SEO-friendly. Ideally, work with a SEO expert who identifies key words to boost business and a PR pro who can slide them into your messages naturally.
4. Implied links are becoming more important.
In PR, implied links are brand mentions. After reading a brand mention, the reader searches for that brand. Brand mentions are nearly impossible to track—they’re certainly not as trackable as a hyperlink—but Google is making headway. In 2014, Google applied for a patent detailing how it values implied links.
If your organizations ends up in USA Today, it is extremely valuable for SEO. However, outside of how many unique monthly visitors USA Today has, it is nearly impossible to track that mention’s value.
Fourteen million people visit USA Today every month. How many saw your article? How many looked you up after reading it? These roadblocks prevent people from seeing the value of PR. As tracking becomes more sophisticated, expect more overlap between PR firms and SEO agencies and digital-marketing firms.
Looking at that 14 million, you may think “all PR is good PR” and that any mention in USA Today is hugely valuable. But does that mention cause readers to look you up? This is where great content counts.
A great messaging strategy results in USA Today using your keywords and key phrases when talking about you. Great content piques readers’ interest. Should the publication’s readers do a quick search, USA Today never needs to host a link for you to get SEO value from implied links.
If your agency wants to invest in PR and SEO separately for a client, those teams should talk to each other. Ideally, they should work under one unified strategy. As external link-building becomes more competitive, agency PR pros must maintain relations with media gatekeepers who point readers to your client’s page. Good content ensures quality SEO metrics.
As tracking becomes more sophisticated, the ROI and SEO value of traditional PR will stand out. By ensuring your SEO and PR strategy work together, you’re efforts will go further.
Bruce Kennedy is a senior account executive for Motion PR. A version of this article originally appeared on the firm’s blog.
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