Want to learn how to create an effective SEO PR strategy? That’s a great idea.
A few years ago, SEO and PR were perceived to be two separate strategies for promoting your business online. Today, search engine optimization and public relations are two of the most powerful strategies for improving your business’s online visibility and reach.
Here is the proof: According to a recent Search Engine Watch survey of 184 SEO and PR professionals, 64 percent of the respondents say that SEO and PR are equally important and support each other:
Image via Search Engine Watch
SEO helps to optimize your website and online content to improve your Google rankings to attract more visitors. PR focuses on building brand awareness and boosting your business’ public perception and reputation through pitching and creating stories for influential digital outlets.
Combining SEO and PR can help to ensure your marketing messages generate more attention and improve brand awareness, visibility, and even conversions.
In this article, we’ll teach you SEO PR tactics for launching effective online marketing campaigns.
Let’s get started.
1. They work together on content marketing efforts
Launching a practical SEO PR strategy requires you to align your SEO and PR content strategies.
In that case, you need to focus on producing quality content collaboratively to increase rankings and boost your brand’s image. By harnessing the capabilities of an AI writing tool, businesses can streamline their content creation process, ensuring high-quality output while optimizing for search engine rankings.
According to Semrush’s latest state of content marketing report, 53 percent of marketers say improving the quality of their content and making it valuable has helped them boost their rankings.
Image via Semrush
Here, you need to get your SEO and PR teams to work together on your content marketing strategies.
Here are the steps to develop a combined SEO PR strategy that works:
Step 1: Brainstorm body keywords relevant to your product or service. These are the descriptive terms that people use to search for products online.
Step 2: Use a keyword research tool like Semrush to discover all relevant keywords, their monthly search volume, difficulty score, and other metrics. Read this Semrush review post by Attrock to understand how to do keyword research efficiently with this tool..
2. Leverage guest blogging to boost SEO
Albeit being an old method, guest blogging is still a powerful tactic for your SEO PR strategy.
According to a recent Twitter poll conducted by Dr. Marie Haynes, founder and CEO of Marie Haynes Consulting, 43.7 percent of marketers use it for SEO (at least occasionally):
Image via Twitter
Essentially, guest blogging enables you to generate leads from digital PR campaigns to build your brand profile and be exposed to a large audience. This ultimately helps to build brand awareness.
Here is how to earn quality backlinks for your SEO PR strategy:
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Concentrate on acquiring high-authority links from digital PR campaigns
Here, your SEO and PR teams need to collaborate in creating content that can attract attention and become highly newsworthy.
Your team should focus on gaining links from reputable news sources as well as other high-authority sites.
Here is a good guest post example that Semrush’s Marcus Tober recently published on Adweek that helps:
Image via Adweek
Sharing your expertise on relevant websites can help you establish your brand profile, increase brand awareness, and drive traffic to your site.
It also helps to boost your brand’s authority and improves rankings on search engine results pages.
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Request links
Your PR team can reach out to website owners who mention your product or brand’s name without linking and ask them to consider including a link to your site.
To find websites or blogs that mention your brand or product without linking to your site, you can use Social Mention or Hootsuite. These two are designed for that purpose.
Alternatively, you can set up Google Alerts.
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Leverage domain authority to select your PR targets
Domain Authority, often abbreviated as DA is the premiere SEO metric used to determine how successful a website is when it comes to ranking in search engines.
A website is scored from 1-100.
In this case, a website with an authority score between 40 and 50 is considered average, 50 and 60 is a good rate whereas 60 and above indicates an excellent domain authority.
Here, you can leverage SEO tools to identify relevant websites with a good authority score.
For instance, you can use the Free Domain Authority Checker by Moz to check the DA of a website:
Image via Moz
3. Generate backlinks with media coverage
Generating backlinks with media coverage is also a great SEO PR strategy to leverage. Here is why.
Journalists are always looking out for breaking news—whether it’s a big scandal, company woes, etc.
But since journalists want to report the news from an original source, you can offer to provide an expert opinion or view as long as you’re a master of your industry.
The good news is that when journalists use you as a source in their news articles, they link back to your site.
Here is a good example of winning media coverage with backlinks where Miguel Angel Dobrich, a journalist, educator, and digital entrepreneur gets backlinks to his two sites by sharing his expert opinion:
Image via Reuters Institute
Here are handy tips to generate backlinks through media coverage:
- Set up media monitoring using tools like Google Alerts, Hootsuite, or Mention to stay updated about what’s happening in your industry
- Find contacts of journalists who report on your industry
- Reach out to the journalists to provide expert opinion or comment whenever you get an alert of any breaking news within your industry
Pro tip: To improve your backlink structure, you need to ensure your links are added on pages that are indexed by Google. Leverage a reliable index checker tool to check whether your backlinks are indexed
You may also consider signing up for platforms where journalists are looking for expert opinions. Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is the leader in the PR industry:
Image via HARO
The platform is easy to use and free. All you need to do is to sign up either as a journalist or source. Once you create your account, you will be sent three emails per day with a list of news stories that journalists are looking sources for.
Be sure to respond to requests where you can sufficiently demonstrate your expertise.
Pro tip: When done correctly, an SEO PR strategy can help to improve customer experience, boost your website’s organic rankings and boost your credibility and authority within your industry.
Conclusion
Creating a successful SEO PR strategy doesn’t have to be complicated. All you need to do is to get your SEO and PR teams to collaborate on content marketing efforts, leverage guest blogging to boost SEO, and generate backlinks with media coverage.
