Think PR when you think SEO

Boost your website visibility – weave SEO into your PR

 

When planning your new website or looking at ways to drive more organic search-traffic to your website, you’re probably already thinking about SEO. For years, we have been building websites that are fully optimised at the time they go live and advise our customers that ongoing attention to SEO is a must for maintaining their site’s visibility, (rankings) reach and effect. Every business that we deal with wants more people to be aware of their brand and often invest time or money (or both) in PR as well.

 

Many of our customers are already working hard to make sure their site is found by people looking for what they sell; search engine optimisation doesn’t have to end with their website. PR activity and content marketing can also benefit from some careful thought, and by taking note of these simple tips, organisations can work smarter to maximise rankings, reach and effect.

 

Here are 5 essential tips for bringing a touch of SEO into your general PR activity:

 

•              Build website links across all your online media coverage – if you’re spending time and money producing blogs, posts, tweets and press articles, you should make sure that you include relevant links back to your site. It may be obvious to you, but it’s amazing how many businesses fail to make their site more visible and accessible to an even larger audience.

 

•              Build keywords and tags into your PR – you’ve woven them in your web pages, so make sure that your PR materials have them too. If you’re adding press items as new pages onto your site (and you should, as part of the ongoing SEO efforts I mentioned earlier), they will help more of the people looking for what you sell, to find you. We work with a couple of web copywriters that can produce branded PR materials that work in line with your site optimisation to make this easier for our customers.

 

•              Target press releases like you target your web content – PR is not just about exposing your content to the largest audience possible; it has to be the right audience, in the right place and at the right time. Incorporating SEO into your PR can help you target and reach the most valuable online audience. By the way, you should make sure you publish something that’s newsworthy and not just bland content stuffed with key-words – You won’t fool anybody and Google recognises could penalise your site.

 

•              Use social media to boost your SEO and your PR – this is the most effective platform for producing high quality links and shares and social sharing has now become the number one driver for SEO ranking. Social media has not only brought us a great new medium for discovering targeted content, it is also changing how information sources (by this I mean search engines), are delivering the content to us. Of course, this means that you will not only need to produce content that pleases search engines but content that users will engage with and share. Social media provides you with a bunch of great tools to analyse the reach and effect that your content is having.  Assessing the value of your SEO efforts helps you fine tune your marketing messages for even better results.

 

•              Pictures paint a thousand words – I know that’s a cliché but Image-led social media sites like Instagram and Pinterest offer a great opportunity for optimisation. After all, the word optimise means to get the most from, and tagging your PR images with keywords and targeted brand terms will extend your reach and effect even more. Don’t be shy, say cheese!!

 

Whether you engage with a PR agency, an SEO agency or you’re taking care of it yourself, think SEO when you think PR and you will continue to reach out to the right online influencers and customers.

 

  • Do you struggle to manage your own PR and SEO efforts internally?
  • Is your business getting the most from your target audience and online influencers?
  • Are you looking for a cost effective way to get more visitor traffic to drive more sales?