By: Arianna Georgi, Consultant, J. Walcher Communications
When determining your digital marketing strategy budget, putting together the pieces can be overwhelming. But there is a huge benefit to getting your efforts to work together, specifically PR and SEO. When both of those work together, brand visibility is limitless.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be intimidating for newbies, but the basic idea is that you want your site to rank number one in Google Search results. All you need to do is identify keywords for each webpage, create relevant content and obtain “authority” for your site by getting links from other sites that Google considers reliable.
This is where the public relations element comes in. When you get relevant links – like Instagram traffic through influencers – the site’s “search clout” grows. A few things to consider as a public relations agency that also provides SEO:
Brand Awareness
An SEO (what SEO experts call themselves), needs a starting point, the brand name of their client. Unless there is a PR effort to establish the brand, it might be extremely hard to rank in Google Search results for even just the company name. In other words, before the SEO comes in, they need PR to at least get the brand name out there.
Paying Attention to “Off-site” Traffic, (i.e. Influencer Campaigns), and Proving Your Worth to Clients
You launched a campaign with an influencer who contacted your PR agency about a client. That is wonderful, but unless you look at the sites’ traffic, it is hard to prove you did much to “move the needle.” To Google, these links back to the client help establish a “creed,” and make it easier for you to rank in results.
Another Off-site Traffic Idea: Link Building
Part of Google’s algorithm is seeing which sites, with “high authority” (think newspapers, Wikipedia, well-established databases, etc.), send traffic to other sites. When your team secures coverage for a client on one of these well-established sites, (with a link), you are giving it more “clout” with Google. Then, you can use Google Analytics to show your value to clients by looking at how much traffic you brought to their website. Your SEO can help show your client how that grew their rankings.
New Content Ideas
A good SEO will be able to supply you with constant keyword opportunities and innovative ideas for your company and your clients. Because they/we check the ranking constantly and uncover new opportunities, you should be able to depend on an SEO professional to give insight on trends to jump on, from a PR angle. For instance, most SEOs look at trending topics (via Google), or insights (via an SEO tool). They can alert you when something starts to spark conversation so you can be the first to comment on it.
Don’t Ignore the Importance of PR or SEO
We all understand clients may have limited budgets, but ideally, a good SEO professional can help you prove your worth over and over. Recent studies have shown that the COVID-19 pandemic lessened the general ad spending for companies, especially when it comes to pay-per-click marketing (PPC), affiliate marketing, and with insignificant effect on the bottom line for some of these MAIN big-budget elements.
Although companies cut spending on ads and performance marketing, they still benefited from AWARENESS, and that’s PR’s job. As famous SEO Rand Fishkin said:
“Attribution is worth something, even by itself. Knowing the keywords that sent those search visitors? Valuable. Knowing which websites people browsed before they bought from you? Valuable. Knowing more about your audience’s online behavior? Valuable.”
When PR and SEO work together, knowing the above elements becomes achievable and valuable.
