The marketing world is changing quickly. And all the time, as most business owners are painfully aware. Get the hang of one marketing concept – especially digital marketing, and another one pops up.
It is no wonder that things have gone through such a dramatic metamorphosis with the emergence of digital communication and the social media explosion that has dominated global conversations over the last 20 years.
Two marketing segments are working hand in hand with these changes like never before. With common goals and visions, the worlds of an SEO agency and a PR agency are now colluding and more frequently closely working together on strategic partnerships and for businesses of all kinds compounding these two disciplines has produced – and is producing – some astounding success stories.
If you have never given too much thought to the idea of combining the power of making use of both a great SEO agency and a reputable pr agency – or one that has teams that can do both like Pearl Lemon – then it’s time to change that, as the benefits it offers to your overall marketing strategy can be real game-changers.
How a PR Agency and an SEO Agency Can Work Together
Backlinks
Whatever else changes in SEO – and it’s a lot, often – backlinks are still the backbone of any good SEO campaign. High-quality backlinks from authoritative sources can – and do – help businesses achieve higher than they might ever have imagined possible placement in the SERPs for their target keywords.
However, getting these kinds of backlinks isn’t easy. In fact, it’s very hard. Getting links isn’t, but getting excellent links is, and the fact is that one high-quality backlink has the potential to make ten times the positive SERPs impact than several lower quality backlinks.
Fortunately, for savvy businesses and SEOs, getting these type of authoritative backlinks is a speciality of a good pr agency. They have the contacts, connections and know-how to place businesses in all kinds of media placements that will, in addition to increasing the brand’ profile in general garner really valuable backlinks.
This means that when PR professionals and SEO pros work together, you can take advantage of these high-quality links to drive your SERPS positions up.
Hot Topics and Keywords
A good SEO is great at identifying trending keywords and key topics that are of interest to various target audiences, both on an evergreen basis and in terms of ‘what’s hot right now.’ By feeding this intel to a business PR agency, the PR pros can then get to work on feeding those high-quality outlets stories that utilize those keywords effectively.
Your search rankings are further improved by concentrating on creating trending and popular content. This helps to significantly improve the click-through rate as well. And all of this is achieved by just sharing a bit of data to allow your PR team to build more powerful campaigns.
SEO Analysis of Public Relations Pieces
Your SEO team can boost the work a PR team does in other ways too. Your SEO team is able to improve the quality of PR agency campaigns by regularly measuring their search rankings and performing in-depth search engine analysis to identify possible SEO opportunities that have yet to be leveraged.
This type of ‘peer review’ enables your PR team to work to develop more effective campaigns that are better at reaching your target audience and keeping them engaged once they do.
Your SEO team can examine things like keyword efficiency, click-through rates and much more. They do it all the time anyway. All of this information is then able to be utilized by your PR team to create more effective campaigns in the future.
Social Media Promotion
SEO pros are not always the best people to ask about the finer details of social media marketing. Social signals may or may not be a minor ranking factor in terms of SEO, but it’s not their true area of expertise.
Public relations professionals, on the other hand, are better at social media than almost anyone else. With the exception perhaps of heavy hitter Instagrammers, but the chances are good that if you are working with a good public relations agency, they know how to reach, and work with, those people anyway.
So while your business PR agency is handling the social media side of things, which is a must for effective brand building, they can also feedback to the SEO team what topics are trending there, so that the SEO folks can then start planning content – properly keyword-optimized content of course – for your web properties – especially your blog – to capitalize on that interest.
The Importance of Professional Connections and Relationships
A public relations professional knows the importance of networking. To better distribute their content, they work to establish solid relationships with bloggers, journalists, podcasters, social media influencers and other media. You can also hire a social media agency for this.
It does take a certain specific personality to create enough of these contacts and to nurture them well enough for them to be truly beneficial. And this quality is a soft skill that the best PR agencies demand in all their employees (to your benefit.)
Combining Different Viewpoints to Collaborate Effectively
SEO and PR professionals tend to have a very different view of media outlets and media placements. The types of information concentrate on have varies based on those standpoints and experiences.
For example, the general tone used by an outlet, how favorably they regard certain things, ideologies, products etc. and an appreciation of the reporting styles of employees at the news outlet will certainly be best understood by a PR professional.
An SEO specialist, however, will be more concerned with the data side of things. The site reputation and search rankings for media websites, their unique visitor count, and all that other related traffic information that SEOs are so involved in analyzing on a daily basis.
Although these two viewpoints are very different, they are both equally important. A better SEO campaign – and a better PR campaign – can be developed by working together and sharing this knowledge between the two different teams. For the client – that’s you – it helps to ensure with greater certainty that your message not only reaches your target audience but keeps them engaged once you do.
Evolved Press Releases
Press releases are one of the oldest PR strategies in the book. But even they have changed and evolved in the digital age, and continue to do so. To cut through the noise and the mass of information sent to the media to be effective, today’s press releases need to be multimedia offerings that truly engage.
A great public relations agency are the right folks to create those releases, especially as their writers are often journalists themselves and a good PR team includes staff who understand how to use video, images and even audio to the best effect.
There is another piece to the press release puzzle, but your SEO team can solve that. They can determine what keywords and key phrases to use, especially as most journalists quote widely from a PR. Press releases have also become far more accessible to the public to read, and therefore to search engines, so making use of those appropriate elements of copy will provide another SERPS boost.
Last Word
The world of marketing is continuing to evolve. As such, the lines between the once distinctly separate and very different worlds of SEO and business public relations are becoming increasingly blurred.
In an ideal world, you would be able to hire a company to work with that could do both. The good news is that increasingly you can, as everything we have just covered is not just something we understand.
Pearl Lemon is one of those companies. Our SEO team and our PR team are very different people with different priorities and goals in many ways, but they work together to ensure that everything the PR team does works for SEO, and vice versa.
The result is greater brand visibility, a big boost to a brand’s reputation, and a SERPs boost that creates increased traffic and a higher conversion rate than either speciality could achieve alone.
Ready to work with a company that functions as an SEO agency and a public relations company? Get in touch here, so we can discuss how our ‘hybrid’ team can help you.
