5 minutes read
Public Relations is the process of communicating with your intended publics with the goal of enhancing your public image and establishing a mutually beneficial relationship between your organisation and your target audience. There is no denying that PR – and the way you do it – is crucial to any organisation, especially with the vast presence and influence of social media platforms today.
Most people, however, have not considered that their PR efforts should complement their SEO strategy. Though they used to work separately, when done right, PR and SEO can augment each other and significantly boost the digital marketing efforts of your organisation.
PR and SEO share a similar anatomy: to capture the attention of your audience
Though their core structures are different, both PR and SEO serve the same purpose of making your target audience take notice of your business and brand. An effective SEO strategy can help pull in your target audience to your business, and by supplementing this with the creation of engaging content, you can shape the way your audience perceives your company.
Note: The objective is to implement a cohesive strategy that fully utilises the collaborative strengths of PR and SEO.
You may be asking yourself now, “So, how do I start and do this?” Take this scenario as an example. When you put out press releases and non-paid stories as part of your PR campaign, you get to earn media coverage for those efforts – this creates a valuable opportunity for you to enhance your rankings. Use SEO to pinpoint the keywords in your campaign that need optimisation, and determine the most suitable URL links to incorporate these. This approach aims to obtain more incoming links by generating organic (unpaid) interest in your website. SEO experts can help ensure that links redirecting your audience to external websites are affixed with a “nofollow” HTML code to prevent your website from incurring search engine penalties.
Leveraging your PR efforts to generate more links coming to your website can positively boost your reputation. Though this may not always convert to sales, journalists and news agencies may learn about your story, allowing your website to see increased clicks and create more links, thus intensifying your digital presence.
It is crucial, however, to make sure your PR and SEO efforts do not clash against each other. One way to avoid this is to implement good and effective communication between these two different departments – avoid duplicating and spreading the same information. Instead, make them collaborate to produce high-quality content and materials that can give you maximum exposure.Facebook