Google receives over 89 billion visits each month, indicating the importance of search engines and making sure that your brand is visible online. Ensuring PR, SEO and Paid Search campaigns are fully aligned allows businesses to get in front of potential customers at all touchpoints in the user journey.
The majority of companies are very good at talking the talk but when it comes to their overall brand image, but many have very disjointed tactics.
In today’s competitive digital landscape, brands need to ensure their online presence tells a consistent story across all platforms, whether that be in news publications, on social media, or in their website content.
So, how can brands ensure an integrated approach that combines PR, SEO & other digital channels?
Aligning PR with quality SEO
When it comes to building credibility and boosting the domain authority of a website, the type of content brands put out there, and where it gets published, has a huge impact.
Backlinks are becoming more important to brands so, when putting together PR content such as opinion pieces or feature articles, agencies will always try and include any relevant backlinks in the piece.
By securing relevant backlinks from other websites (not just to your company’s homepage but to informative landing pages) businesses can build the domain authority of their own sites and position themselves as authorities in their market. Having useful & educational content on your website showcases subject matter expertise and is a great indication to search engines on what your site is about, and what to rank it for.
While some media publications don’t offer backlinks as a rule, some do. It’s important those backlinks provide relevant information, such as additional research or data, to the piece. Linking to your company’s website homepage is not enough.
What’s more, by securing quality backlinks, and strategically placing brand mentions, companies can improve their online footprint via an increase in keyword rankings and online visibility. Higher rankings lead to increased brand awareness, established thought leadership and potentially more sales.
SEO insights
When PR & SEO work together, SEO and keyword insights can be used by PR teams to better understand their audience and their behaviour online.
When it comes to creating content, the keywords included are vital. PR professionals can adjust campaign focus and incorporate relevant keywords into their content to resonate with the desired audience. By publishing content on high-domain authority (DA) websites and securing brand mentions and backlinks, PR professionals contribute to improving rankings for targeted keywords.
What’s more, it is key to ensure any SEO and content strategies are up to date and following Google’s best practices. Following recent algorithm updates, Google is giving more weight to those brands that are providing helpful context to their readers. Having a strategic content strategy and using keyword research to find out what searchers are looking for is vital for this. Answering key questions will not only help marketing and PR teams to create inspiring content, it will also help to improve online authority and position a business and its leaders as significant voices in the industry.
Combining all of the above with a solid technical SEO strategy is key. Ensuring you have a clean, fast and easy to use site, will mean users can find what they need onsite and search engine crawlers get the correct signals to help your site rank highly for relevant search terms.
Consistent messaging
A well-executed PR campaign contributes to both SEO and brand authority however this only works if it aligns with other elements of content and marketing activities that a brand is running.
Combining the power of PR and SEO has already been discussed, but how a company, and its employees, come across on social media, over email, and at events, also need to align. Before engaging with a company, journalists will look to a company’s website and social media pages to assess credibility– if content is mismatched or messaging is confused, that could damage a company’s chance at achieving earned media coverage.
Another thing to remember is that content needs to be platform appropriate for it to be effective.
Mimicking compelling storytelling across all platforms is also vital. This means your traditional media communications, social media, and website messaging and content must all align with one another.
Paid Search
Traditionally, Paid Search has been seen as the agile add on – the place to add marketing budget to pay to capture users who are important to a business when they turn to search. Paid Search is still this, but it also so much more when used in an integrated manner.
Like SEO and PR, the messaging in the ad copy should be aligned. When releasing content pertinent to your brand or current topics that affect your industry, Paid Search is agile enough to establish a company’ position on the search engine results page. CRM data can be utilised to signal to the search engines which users searching will bring the highest value, to ensure efficient use of budget. Research keywords, copy and landing pages can be quickly tested for performance through paid search. Paid Search can also bring visuals on who else is competing on similar keywords.
Ultimately, Paid Search can be there to support SEO and PR for critical time-based efforts as well as evergreen activity.
To conclude, when PR, SEO and Paid Search work together, the impact is greater than the sum of their individual parts. By aligning strategies, sharing insights, and collaborating on content, brands can achieve long-term success in the competitive digital landscape.
An integrated approach like the one discussed here, benefits brand visibility, credibility, and overall online performance.
If you’re looking to align your PR and marketing efforts more closely, reach out to our PR and digital marketing experts today.