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3 Helpful Tips to Get Make Your PR+ SEO Relationship Work

Public relations (PR) activities are, or should be, an important part of your marketing efforts. Whether you handle these responsibilities yourself or farm them out to a trusted vendor or practitioner, make sure your PR activities are working hand in hand with your SEO efforts.  For those outside of these very specific areas, many may not realize that SEO and PR have many opportunities to work together to help increase visibility, uncover opportunities and potentially generate new business. Their relationship is important, so make it work for you and your firm!

Although the algorithms are constantly evolving to provide users with the best search results, the latest changes within Google consistently put focus on unique content found on quality sites. Above and beyond simply overseeing a news release distribution, good PR can really amp up your marketing efforts. There are tons of ways that PR and SEO work together, but to start, here are three key things to consider:

Enhance That Press Release
SEO improves and boosts a press release. By using popular keywords within your release, it, along with any stories or additional earned media placements it generates, will continue to bring search engine traffic and direct click-throughs, and can lead to higher rankings. PRNewswire has some great tips on how to properly optimize your release, check them out here.

It’s not just the press release though. You have to get there first. SEO is improved by PR activities including finding and crafting a strong angle or pitch, presenting it in a compelling way or telling a good story using the right language directed towards the proper audience, seeking out powerful and impactful editorial opportunities, generating quality coverage, and building strong relationships with bloggers, writers, editors, reporters and producers. In other words, having a good PR practitioner overseeing the right activities can acquire links that will help strengthen your search results.

The Domino Effect
A domino effect is the cumulative effect produced when one event sets off a chain of similar ones. So what does this mean to you? Well, information comes from all types of places, and often bloggers, writers or reporters may use or expand upon other journalist’s work for reference. Because of this common practice, when your story or pitch gets covered in one media outlet, you may see similar stories and links appear. This can often build credibility as well as trust amongst your clients, prospects and other consumer groups, and they may be more likely to utilize you as their accounting or financial services provider.

I’ve also found that this “domino effect” can increase trust of other reporters you may be trying to pitch. If you’ve worked with and have been covered or sourced in reputable and recognizable media outlets, other reporters, writers and editors may be more willing to take a look at your content,  listen to your pitch and run with it.

Build Media Contacts Thoughtfully and Carefully
It works both ways because contacts are essential both to PR practitioners and the media. But one mistake that PR folks can often make is sending out too much weak content or information that is not targeted or pitched well. Just simply blasting out press releases with no strategy is no good. You need to create and nurture the relationships you form with your media contacts and really understand the content or information that they will benefit from, and then figure out a compelling way to present it to them. Once you build a good relationship, you’ll begin to see you are no longer being as proactive with your PR efforts, but instead being reactive, because the media will be coming to you.

PR can often be one of the best ways to generate backlinks on related industry websites, but you have to think beyond just news release distribution services and build your own strong network of good contacts.

If you don’t recognize that SEO and PR have a good thing going, you are missing out on good opportunities for long term success. To learn more about how experienced PR practitioners and SEO experts can work together to help your firm reach its sales and revenue goals, contact FlashPoint Marketing to see how we can help.