Why SEO and PR Strategies Should be Combined

When you think about how the world of PR works and what PR professionals do on a daily basis, it looks something like this:

• Create content for client
• Post content for client
• Reach out to journalists, influencers, and publishers
• Ask to have story covered
• Wash, rinse, repeat

What other profession does this look like? If you’d said search engine optimization, or SEO, you’d be right:

• Create content for client
• Post content for client
• Reach out to publishers, influencers, and other websites
• Ask to have content linked
• Wash, rinse, repeat

It should be no surprise that the two professions, public relations and SEO, share a lot of common ground on process. It should equally be no surprise that they share similar outcomes: earned media. In the case of PR, our earned media outcome is a media placement of a client’s story in as many relevant publications as possible. In the case of SEO, our earned media outcome is a link or several back to the target website, which boosts the site’s search rankings.

In fact, for the more forward thinking PR firms, SEO and PR are synonymous. If a brand blends its PR and SEO together, then when PR teams are soliciting stories on behalf of the brand, they can also work to include links back to the brand’s website in the articles. Likewise, if the SEO teams are working in parallel with the PR teams, then the SEO research into keywords, top domains and sites, and personalities can inform the PR work, helping to understand where to pitch for overall maximum marketing impact.

Here’s a question to test your integration of PR and SEO: when was the last time that your SEO team or agency gave your PR team or agency a list of keywords and phrases to work into media placements?

Here’s a question to test your integration of SEO and PR: when was the last time that your PR team sent a coverage report to the SEO team so they could validate the links they obtained?

If the answer to either question is neither, then you have some integration challenges ahead if you want to reap the maximum benefit for your marketing.