Digital marketing strategies do not operate independently of one another. A comprehensive digital marketing strategy utilizes everything at your disposal to maximize your scope and reach. While considering something like PR, you also need to think about SEO when crafting your content and your message.
PR and SEO function together and complement each other. While PR is all about getting a message out, boosting your visibility, and solidifying your company’s public image, SEO ensures that the message rises to the top in a web search. Both PR and SEO are equally important for a successful marketing strategy.
Certainly, PR and SEO are two different processes, but digital marketing is really one process with multiple parts. Both PR and SEO are two of the crucial pieces of digital marketing. To craft the right message, you also need to make sure that message is seen when it comes to an online search.
How do PR and SEO work? How do PR and SEO work together? And why is it important for you to have a digital marketing strategy that includes effective PR and SEO? This guide will explain why it is important to have both PR and SEO.
What are Public Relations?
Public relations consist of strategic communication processes that build relationships between organizations and different types of publics. Public relations involves engagement with various public groups toward a better understanding of what an organization values and what that organization actually does.
The basic elements of public relations are influencing, engaging, and building relationships with groups like stakeholders, the general public, and governmental bodies. The processes of public relations include:
Anticipating, analyzing, and interpreting public opinion, attitudes, and issues that may be of concern for the organization.
Counseling and management of policy toward specific issues, including things like direct action and communications.
Protecting the reputation of the organization.
Research and evaluations of ongoing issues and ideas that impact an organization’s relationship with different publics.
Planning and implementing strategies that influence or change public policy.
Setting objectives to engage customers.
Since all of these objectives demand different types of research, analysis, and action, public relations consist of multiple forms of action.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO improves the visibility of your website and your online content by using keywords that are known to attract the attention of search engines. SEO best practices ensure that you rank high in search engine results pages (SERPs). Since search engines are looking for specific terms when combing the web, SEO makes sure your content gets hit by the search engines.
Search engines use complex digital programs that comb the internet for key terms that match the terms users are searching with a search engine. Google, Yahoo, Bing, and others all operate with specific online programs that are designed to lock onto specific terms. SEO is the process by which you can learn the keywords that attract these online programs and increase your visibility in a web search.
How PR & SEO Work Together
As we noted above, PR and SEO work together to maximize your digital marketing strategies. By utilizing proper SEO in crafting your message, your PR can be much more effective in broadening your reach with this message. Some of the ways PR and SEO work together include:
Brand awareness
The fact is consumers tend to go with products and services they know something about. When it comes to making a choice, customers will gravitate toward products and services that offer something familiar, and when PR works with good SEO, this familiarity is in their minds when they go online.
The more exposure you get, the higher your sales. SEO ensures that when customers search for a product or service, yours is one of the first things they see in search results. Once your product or service has attained this level of visibility, the content crafted by PR has a much better shot and reaches potential customers.
PR gets your brand into the media, including social media. With effective PR you can place powerful and meaningful content in places that will garner attention. With effective SEO, your brand will rise to the top of any online search. Things like ranking high on the Google SERP (search engine response page) mean your company is among the first that customers see when they are searching for a product or service.
Yet, it is crucial that your online content is of the highest quality, and this is where public relations work with SEO. Public relations craft the content so that it corresponds to the expectations generated by SEO.
Brand reputation management
Part of the work of public relations is to craft compelling content that influences people’s perceptions of your company and your product. With the help of proper SEO research, you can make sure that this content ranks high in search engine results. This strategy is referred to as reputation management.
Reputation management is not simply the process of creating content that builds a specific type of reputation. That is certainly an important part of the process. But the influential content does not reach anyone unless it is boosted with outstanding SEO principles.
Part of what builds your reputation is the frequency with which your business appears on a search engine results page. The more often people see your business in their search results, the more likely they are going to associate your business with the product or service they are looking for. What is more, high and frequent SERP rankings tend to regenerate themselves in the search engines. This means your company will become more visible and people will see your company as the most reputable for the things they are searching for.
Social sharing
Both SEO and public relations work together to increase the likelihood that the right target audience sees your content. The next step is to encourage this target audience to share your content. Sharing online is one of the best ways to disseminate your message beyond your initial target audience.
Public relations works to produce messages and ideas that online users want to share with others. People simply enjoy sharing things they find appealing with friends who like similar things. When the PR message is on point, people will share it. This is where SEO plays a crucial role in online sharing.
SEO makes sure the content is visible in online searches. With shareable content, people see your message, and they are apt to share it beyond your first goal of getting the message out.
Social proof
Social proof is a phenomenon in which people come to follow the actions of others in their buying habits. It is when people begin to see that a certain product or service has gained popularity and they decide to buy into that product or service because they view the actions of others as proof of the value or validity of that product or service.
You gain social proof when your brand reputation is solid and reliable, and this is what public relations can provide. You gain the proof of the online community by gathering visibility with the help of SEO. The two processes work together to solidify your brand reputation in the online communities that search for things your company provides.
SEO can also help boost off-page SEO processes like mentions, backlinks, and shares to help Google understand that your brand is a trusted authority
Brand consistency
It is essential that your brand message remains consistent across every channel. From conventional news media to social media, it is important to maintain consistency to avoid confusing people about your brand. This is where PR and SEO work hand-in-hand to ensure consistency
While the message is crafted by public relations professionals, what they use to craft this content will involve SEO keywords that signal your content to search engines. If the content does not remain consistent across all the various channels, you will fall through in an online search, and this will eventually lower your visibility in any online search. Consistency is sustained through effective public relations and SEO.
Trust and authority
Trust and authority are gained by the feedback cycles generated with public relations and SEO. Public relations craft a meaningful, consistent, and reliable message. SEO ensures that message is seen. As these two processes feed each other through the media reach and search engine results, they build and generate the idea that your product or service is one they can trust, and your product is one that is worthwhile.
In essence, these are two processes that generate something more than the sum of their parts. Reliable and meaningful content from public relations creates an air of authenticity around your brand. This authenticity gains traction when SEO places it at the top of online searches. The more people see the content, the more they have faith in the content.
Lead generation
Public relations are frequently used to generate leads in today’s digital marketing. Public relations can set in motion ways for online users to interact with your content. This creates lead generation as users become more involved in your content.
This ties into SEO as SEO practices signal users that your content is the most authentic and trustworthy. These processes compound on each other as search engines begin to recognize the frequency with which your content gets active use and further bring your content up in search engine ratings. All of this works toward lead generation.
We all understand that public relations are essential as part of a good digital marketing plan. We also know that to gain any traction in online business, we need solid SEO strategies as part of our digital marketing plan. What can get overlooked is the ways public relations and SEO work together to get the best results.
Public relations is all about developing and managing your business reputation online and elsewhere. It is crucial to success for a business to carefully craft a public image and reputation. This means crafting outstanding content that is effectively distributed across all channels. From traditional media to the online communities in social media, your image and your reputation need to stand out in the most positive ways.
SEO is all about making sure your online content ranks high in online searches. When customers search for a product or service, they will most likely go with the companies and brands that come up first on the search engine results page. To rank high in the SERPs, you need outstanding SEO.
When public relations can craft the content that creates the most reliable reputation for your company and this gets combined with the best results of SEO, you will begin to see conversions and real success. The combination of outstanding public relations and the best SEO means high conversions.
As you can see from this guide, there is a lot to effective public relations. To get the most out of public relations, you can leave things to professionals who are knowledgeable and will invest themselves in the success of your company. HeyDay Marketing Services provides public relations services that will help your business grow. HeyDay Marketing can address all the various types of public relations in ways that serve your business needs.
HeyDay Marketing Services can also provide you with the best SEO research and management for your business. Our professionals know the best and most current practices in SEO, and we can weave these practices into the public relations strategies that work best for your brand. From building an online presence to making sure your business secures the authenticity of a leader in your field, HeyDay Marketing Services knows how to provide you with the digital marketing strategies that work.
HeyDay Marketing Services offers several packages for you to find the public relations campaign that works for your company. We understand that one size does not fit all. For sound public relations strategies that work, allow HeyDay Marketing Services to take over the public relations for your business.
