What most people don’t understand about SEO strategies is that they function best when combined with other marketing methods. So, you need to integrate them with your PR tactics for best results.
The relationship between SEO and PR is symbiotic, meaning that they both need to work together to achieve a greater purpose. Good quality SEO is essential for strong PR results, and at the same time, PR is a critical part of any SEO strategy.
What do the terms PR and SEO stand for?
PR is short for Public Relations. It involves the process of building and protecting your business’ reputation. PR is a way of influencing the public opinion and behavior in favor of your organization.
SEO, on the other hand, stands for Search Engine Optimization. It involves strategies to ensure your web content ranks high on search engine result pages (SERPs). SEO practices help to boost website traffic and enhance your online reputation.
Advantages of strong PR to your brand
1. PR Improves Brand Sentiment
Every business has one or two things they offer to the public. But how do you tell people you’re offering something incredible, timely, and relevant?
PR helps to tell your story and distinguish you from your competitors. It provides the public with content that helps to promote your brand. Without a strong PR, people might never know about your brand.
2. It Helps to Promote Brand Values
Trust is one of the important elements that determines whether a brand will be successful or not. The lack of which can lead to reduction in sales.
To build trust, you need to connect with the authority in your industry. Get them to talk about your brand. PR can help build your brand value through networking strategies and influencer connections.
3. It Enhances Brand’s Online Presence
We are in the digital age where almost everyone makes use of the internet. PR helps brands reach out to their audience through online platforms. You can easily tell your brand story through social media, press releases, and promotional sites.
Also, whenever your brand’s image is under threat, PR can help repair the damage through online platforms.
4. PR Helps Generate More Leads, Sales and Revenue
PR enables brands to build relationships with prospects. It helps to get your target audience into the buying stage quicker. PR is your ally when it comes to generating more leads, sales, and increasing revenue.
Importance of SEO to your brand
1. Increases Brand’s Visibility
One of the objectives of implementing SEO strategies is to increase online visibility. You want your business to be on the first page whenever a prospect searches for related topics on the internet.
SEO improves your online presence and provides the opportunity for potential customers to interact with your brand. Apart from attracting new customers, it gives your brand an authoritative voice in your industry.
2. Improves Users Experience
SEO isn’t just about optimizing for search engines. It also helps to improve users’ experience by creating better, faster, and user-friendly websites. Visitors tend to spend more time on an organized and user-friendly website.
SEO reduces bounce rate and enables visitors to engage more with your content. This will ultimately lead to more conversion and increased traffic. While you keep your visitors happy, search engines are happy as well.
3. It Boost Brand’s Credibility
When your website ranks high on search engines, it proves that you have quality content and your brand is trustworthy. As a result, it boosts your brand’s credibility and makes people think of you as an expert in the industry.
In addition, it makes people trust your brand. And they’ll consider your product or service better than the competition.
The common things between PR and SEO are online presence and ‘reputation management’. Now imagine the impact of combining the two together. They’ll become a handy weapon in your marketing and communication arsenal.
Here’s how SEO and PR can work together to build your brand’s online presence and reputation.
1. PR and SEO Can Help You Avoid or Solve Reputation Crisis
Sometimes, competitors spread negative rumors about your brand or a dissatisfied customer may give bad feedback. These can lead to a reputation crisis. They can tarnish the image you’ve tried to build over the years in minutes.
Reputation crisis is never good for any brand. It can hit where you least expect it. That’s why, as a brand, you need to have a crisis management plan. Combining PR and SEO can help you avoid or minimize the damage of a reputation crisis.
When SEO and PR work together you can identify possible areas of criticism easily. And you can create high quality content to counter such criticism using keywords related to those issues raised.
2. SEO + PR = Excellent Publicity
When it comes to excellent publicity, PR is great but SEO is its lifeblood. You can’t increase your brand’s awareness without working on your online presence.
SEO gives you the publicity you need to promote your brand. It generates organic traffic to your website by ranking high in search engine result pages. Making it easier to fulfill the objectives of your PR.
3. To Get Credible Backlinks
Getting external links (backlinks) to your page is part of effective SEO strategy. But how do you get these links? It is through reaching out to established and well-known websites. This is where PR comes into the picture.
You need strong PR to get backlinks from authoritative websites in your industry. You need genuine relationships to convince them that your brand is worth talking about. Credible backlinks will impact your page with high search rankings.
4. To Generate High-reward On Investment
Due to increased competition, content marketing has become less effective and expensive. The cost to convert a single customer has increased over the years (ProfitWell 2018).
You can overcome this challenge by combining PR and SEO. They both work together to generate new audiences and improve conversion rate. The interesting thing about it is that they produce high-reward with little investment.
Combining SEO tactics with your marketing and communications (PR) approach can improve your brand’s online presence and reputation significantly. The two can be a powerful tool when combined together.
Written by: Makkai Mátyás
SEO specialist and online marketing expert. Founder of SEOlympic.
