You’ve done everything right with your search engine optimization (SEO) and digital public relations (PR) efforts. You have a great website, optimized content, social media presence and even an email marketing campaign.
But something is still missing – you’re not seeing the increased online visibility or sales you hoped for.
What could be going wrong?
The answer may lie in the relationship between digital PR and SEO.
While it’s true that both strategies are essential for success, you’re missing out on great synergy if you implement them independently from one another.
By combining both disciplines, you can create a powerful strategy that amplifies your brand’s reach to drive better leads and improve sales.
If this sounds like a handful, that’s exactly what this guide is for, in which we’ll explore topics like:
• Understanding Digital PR and SEO
• PR Strategies and SEO Performance: Why Use Them Together?
• Tips To Maximize Your Impact and Online Visibility With an SEO PR Strategy
Understanding Digital PR and SEO
Digital public relations (PR) refers to the online effort to build relationships with media outlets, influencers and other organizations. It’s about creating content that resonates with your target audience and is worth sharing across different platforms.
Some activities in a digital PR campaign include the following:
• Writing press releases
• Creating shareable content such as infographics
• Engaging in online conversations on social media and forums
• Developing relationships with industry influencers
Unlike traditional PR strategies, digital PR focuses on reaching online communities instead of conventional media.
On the other hand, SEO, or search engine optimization, is more technical and involves optimizing your website content for higher search engine rankings. This involves things like:
• Choosing targeted keywords
• Creating backlinks from other websites
• Using SEO-friendly structures (such as meta tags) for pages and posts
How Are They Connected?
Put simply, they are both digital marketing strategies that get you better leads, improve customer acquisition costs and ultimately help you improve your brand visibility and sales.
But when it comes to their relationship, digital PR and SEO are like two sides of the same coin – they’re complementary.
“Getting a good amount of organic traffic is possible only with a solid link building strategy,” said Ron Evan Del Rosario, Thrive’s Demand Generation Link Building Manager.
“To get these links and rank your keywords, digital PR can help reach various influencers, media houses and publication companies through PR outreach campaigns.”
To explain further:
• Both strategies improve brand awareness. Digital PR helps you build relationships with influential people and organizations in your niche, while SEO helps you reach a larger audience through organic search.
• Content promotion. SEO ensures that your content gets found on the top search engine rankings, while digital PR helps share it across multiple channels.
• Link building. Links from authoritative websites are critical for SEO success. With digital PR, you can build relationships with these websites and get them to link to your content.
A mobile app development company recognized the importance of link-building for their SEO and leveraged digital PR campaigns to increase their average domain authority (DA). This generated 653 referring domains, over 5,000 backlinks and 182 keywords in the top three search engine results pages (SERPs):
Case study: Mobile App Development Company
They’ve also generated 21.7 million readerships and over 700,000 estimated views from their PR strategies and link-building campaigns.
As you can see, your SEO performance is deeply impacted by how well you’re doing with digital PR. The two work together to create a powerful and effective brand awareness strategy that gets you better results.
PR Strategies and SEO Performance: Why Use Them Together?
At this point, you might still be thinking – why use digital PR and SEO together when you can get by with just one?
Brand awareness strategy isn’t just having good SEO practices or digital PR alone. As we said, your SEO benefits from what you do with the other side of the coin.
1. Gather Social Proof and Establish Authoritativeness
For starters, good PR strategies strategically place your search-engine-optimized content in front of the right people.
If you conduct a PR campaign correctly, you’ll get more backlinks, mentions and shares. All of these are necessary to improve brand awareness and search engine rankings.
Similarly, a good SEO content strategy helps establish your content authority. This means having well-optimized content that provides valuable insights to readers, also getting you more shares and backlinks.
These links add up and make your website look more authoritative in the eyes of search engine algorithms.
2. Leverage the Power of Search and Social Media
If an SEO content strategy is for search engines, then PR strategies are generally for social media.
Integrating them creates a robust brand awareness strategy that expands your reach beyond organic search and improves your chances of getting more social media engagements.
Here’s how it works:
1. You create SEO-friendly content and put it out there with a digital PR strategy. This would include sharing it on social media, guest blogging and more.
2. When people find your content through organic searches or social media, they share it further.
3. Word-of-mouth spreads, generating more backlink opportunities and helping you rank higher in the SERPs.
Remember that your PR strategy must have shareable and expert content so your SEO benefits from it.
3. It’s Organic, Free and Ethical
Let’s get one thing clear: this isn’t some spammy lead generation strategy where you’ll pay for links just so you can rank higher.
Instead, this is still a long-term game that leverages white hat practices that SEO benefits from. You can use platforms like Help A Reporter Out (HARO) to find links, Google Keywords Planner to choose the right keywords and HubSpot for lead generation.
“Google is now able to identify websites that manipulate keyword rankings more easily,” said Del Rosario.
“External relationships and links from major publications shield your websites from getting penalized, especially when Google updates its algorithm.”
While both improve customer acquisition, the success of your SEO and PR strategies requires patience and honesty.
Tips To Maximize Your Impact and Visibility With an SEO PR Strategy
So, what makes a good SEO content strategy? Here’s a checklist of best practices to improve brand awareness.
1. Develop White Papers, Case Studies and Data-Driven Research
A lead generation PR campaign isn’t just about visibility. And when you reach out to experts for backlinks, you want to bring value to the table. That’s why you must have well-researched content that offers more.
You can use data-driven guides, case studies of your previous work and white papers to show how your product or service differs from the competition. This helps build credibility and earned media for your brand.
Make sure to have the following information when creating this type of content:
• The goal of the research
• Detailed data and sources
• A clear hypothesis or conclusion
• Relevant visuals, such as infographics
Authoritative publications and individuals love to share well-researched content. So, this could be your ticket to earning valuable backlinks and mentions for improved SEO performance.
2. Leverage Industry and News for Thought Leadership
Scoring citations and backlinks through HARO and other platforms is one thing. But if you want to stand out, your content must be timely and on-point with industry knowledge.
That’s why you should always stay up-to-date with news in your niche and seek opportunities to share your insights as a thought leader.
Here’s a blog post that leveraged a controversial leak from Google. Inside, you’ll not only get information about the leak itself but also insights from experts within the company to guide readers on what to expect and how they should move forward:
Screenshot: Search King Admits Defeat to Open Source AI
Then, leverage your thought leadership in your outreach emails.
Del Rosario shares his winning formula for a HARO outreach email:
1. Briefly explain why you’re reaching out and why you are the right person to contribute to the article.
2. Provide concrete examples of how your story or expertise could be relevant to the article.
3. Share additional resources that add value to your message and help reinforce your credibility as an expert in your field, such as:
a. Links to past work
b. Press releases
c. Studies
d. Surveys
4. Thank them for their time, and provide your contact information to help them reach you for additional questions. To look more professional, add your signature, company and role at the end of your email.
“Remember that the journalist needs to understand what you’re talking about, so make sure not to get too technical or industry-specific,” Del Rosario said.
“Journalists need answers based on personal experience. Otherwise, they can just search for answers online.”
3. Be Creative
Sure, your campaigns are all about improving your SEO performance. But while experts and publications love data, you don’t have to limit yourself to endless statistics and charts.
Del Rosario advises that “high-quality, impactful pieces are more important than churning out content for the sake of doing so.”
Spice up your SEO PR strategy with creativity, such as:
• Video content
• Infographics
• Webinars
• Interactive content
Here are some infographics on a franchise marketing guide that establishes authority while breaking up the text of long-form content:
Screenshots: Digital Marketing For Franchises
These creative solutions are more likely to get you noticed and mentioned. Plus, they help diversify your outreach strategy, making it less predictable and more engaging.
Get Better Leads With Thrive Internet Marketing Agency
To improve sales through search, you must take advantage of the synergy between digital PR and SEO. Increased visibility with trust wins you more leads and higher sales.
Keep these tips in mind when implementing your SEO PR strategy. It’s a powerful and cost-effective tool, but only when done right.
Thrive is a digital marketing company that prides itself on sustainable and results-driven digital marketing solutions. We help you identify and focus on your target audience, improve SEO performance and leverage the power of PR to maximize visibility.
Schedule a consultation today to learn how your business can grow even further!
