In today’s marketing landscape, companies can treat SEO and PR as separate endeavours. They might view PR’s role as building positive brand awareness through the media and SEO’s role as optimising their website to boost search engine visibility. These are fair definitions. But rather than seeing the two as separate entities requiring different agency expertise, they are, in many ways, inextricably linked.
The modern world of PR is highly digital. It encompasses securing online coverage, writing blogs, overseeing social media, conducting website reviews and driving lead generation, amongst many other things. These all feed into SEO and all important search engine rankings.
But what matters most for SEO? And how does PR help?
People-first content
Despite several Davids taking a pop at Goliath Google, Google still holds the monopoly on search engines. It’s the prime target for SEO. And so it’s safe to say that its SEO Starter Guide has some apt advice to heed on the matter.
The guide is clear on what it considers the most important influence on “your website’s presence”: content. Specifically, it outlines that creating content readers will find “compelling and useful” will likely have the greatest impact on said presence than “any of the other suggestions in this guide”.
Naturally, this will vary from sector to sector and person to person. But key attributes it picks out include content being “unique”, “up-to-date”, “helpful”, “reliable” and, crucially, “people-first”, rather than adopting a “search engine-first” approach for rankings or using tactics such as “keyword stuffing”. Words should naturally appear in the content.
The SEO landscape has also evolved. Most sites meet the minimum technical requirements needed to appear in search results, especially if they’re on website builders like Squarespace or WordPress. So, rather than worrying as much about technicalities like subdomains versus subdirectories, the most important metric is prioritising the user experience.
And in a world where AI is increasingly influencing digital marketing activities, integrating SEO with traditional PR represents a way to maintain this people-first approach.
PR is SEO amplified
PR agencies thrive on creating relevant and newsworthy content – it is what underscores their value. As outlined, this is a primary driver of SEO. But as well as website content, SEO is boosted by online news coverage, social media traction and getting people positively aware of your brand.
Coverage and backlinks in respected online publications, for instance, give a brand more authority and presence on search engines. Moreover, insightful thought leadership pieces – where business leaders provide their two cents on the most pressing topics in the sector – not only enhance brand reputability and awareness but encourage users to ‘search’ online for the company. These articles can then be repurposed for use on a company’s website, further boosting online presence.
In-person events are a great opportunity to form networks and encourage people to your site to find out more about your brand, services and product. In-depth reports and white papers, drafted by the agency, can also be sent out to the industry and promoted via social media/events, bolstering website traffic. As an agency, we also regularly carry out website reviews, helping to improve factors like wireframe structure and website copy to enhance the user experience.
In short, there are many methods and activities included within PR services that can support SEO.
A ‘more for less’ approach
All this is not to say you can’t onboard an agency for each area. If you have the resources, it can be a good strategy for accessing specialism in both remits and using the agencies to support and amplify each other’s work. Technicalities like crawling and indexing, for example, are still important methods for SEO if the site hasn’t integrated them properly.
Yet at a time when achieving ‘more for less’ has become an essential for marketing departments at startup and scaleup tech companies – something our survey last year attested to – then using a PR agency that also drives SEO can offer a smart and cost-effective approach.
For sure, we would say this. But in such climates, when it comes to SEO and PR, it begs the question: why not just do both with one agency?
If you wish to learn more about how we can support your PR and SEO plans, feel free to reach out here.
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