Virtually all businesses and organizations in the digital age need an online presence in order to thrive. If you work in PR, part of your job may involve managing the online presence of your employer or clients.
One way you can accomplish this more effectively is to learn about SEO. An effective SEO strategy can improve the strength of an overall PR strategy. To better understand why and how, consider the following points:
Earning attention
A proper SEO strategy consists of numerous elements. Just as it’s important to incorporate the right keyword into a website’s content, it’s also important to ensure a website is mobile-friendly in an age when mobile browsing appears to be more popular than desktop browsing.
Generally, your goal when developing and implementing an SEO strategy is to organically earn the attention of online users. Luckily, if you manage to do so, you’ll make the right impression. This can naturally have a positive impact on an organization’s relationship with the public.
Managing brand identity and stories
As a PR professional, depending on the specific nature of your job, you may not necessarily be directly involved in regularly generating content for your employer’s website and social media pages. However, you can (and should) coordinate with those who are responsible for generating content.
The members of these teams already know that prioritizing SEO when publishing content is essential. However, if they aren’t communicating with PR consistently, the content they publish may tell a story that conflicts with the one you want to tell about your brand. By working more closely with SEO and content teams, you can ensure the content you release aligns with your goals.
Pitching to media sources
One of the main points you should remember after reading this is simple, but essential: PR can help content teams more effectively achieve their goals, and content teams can help PR achieve its goals.
For example, an SEO-focused content manager may not necessarily have the bandwidth or experience needed to distribute their content to a wide range of media sources.
As a PR pro, reaching out to media sources in a way that gets a business positive coverage is likely among your specialties. You can optimize the value of SEO-centric content by sharing it with multiple media sources.
This will theoretically help generate backlinks, which is a major component of any strong SEO plan. Backlinks are valuable because they indicate to a search engine algorithm that a piece of content is high-quality, resulting in the content being more heavily promoted in relevant search results pages.
You should also remember that SEO is a complex topic. There’s quite a lot to learn about it. If PR is your main specialty, you shouldn’t expect to master SEO right away. However, with persistence, you can leverage your familiarity with SEO to improve your PR work.
