When people search for products/services relevant to your niche, you want to be among the top results so as to attract more clicks. After all, clicks are a key differentiator between a failing business and a thriving one.
And guess what? You can drive clicks (and a lot more) by integrating digital public relations and search engine optimization for your business.
And while optimizing your SEO and digital PR strategy separately can still help your business grow, combining them increases your visibility on search engines. It also becomes easier for people to find your brand on places other than Google Search.
But how does integrating digital PR and SEO help improve marketing results? Let’s find out.
Before we get into how digital PR and SEO can help your brand improve marketing ROI, let’s examine how each contributes to marketing.
Digital PR
The public relations team helps with strategic brand communications by increasing brand visibility and managing your reputation.
They conduct media outreach, send press releases, and distribute branded news for brand promotion. In addition, they manage ad campaigns and pitch stories to publications to ensure maximum exposure.
SEO
The SEO team helps your brand maximize its presence on Google Search by publishing search engine optimized content with keywords, authority, and a great UX.
They use keyword research, content optimization, backlinking, and other activities to improve your website’s search ranking.
Digital PR and SEO combined
When you combine both digital PR and SEO, you build a powerhouse that creates valuable content at the right time for the right audiences and on platforms they frequent.
You create content that covers issues, stories, and topics your audience cares about and engages with meaningfully. Eventually, that drives marketing returns in the form of traffic, conversions, and revenue.
But how exactly does that happen?
Find out below:
1. Builds brand awareness
As said before, effective SEO leads to higher search rankings, which makes your brand more discoverable and authoritative. Searchers are more likely to click on results from brands topping the SERPs.
PR campaigns complement your SEO efforts since they are geared towards building awareness by indirect channels like press releases, citations, and ads.
In general, people are more receptive towards brands they see frequently (in a positive light) in news and public events. Even Google bots take this as a sign of authority and rank you higher. This way, you can master branded searches, as more people trust your brand, search for it actively, and feel confident about engaging with it.
Now, back to SEO.
Employing on-page SEO tactics like optimizing your titles, meta descriptions, and content helps you grab the attention of search bots who index your pages better, helping you win more traffic from the SERPs.
What’s more, SEO is mostly about user experience nowadays. Content needs to be well-optimized and deliver exemplary user experience. Moreover, if it’s fresh and updated, it tends to rank high and delight readers at the same time. When you’re able to achieve that, your rankings improve automatically and you build user trust.
Best of all? When people trust your brand, they become more likely to check out your products and buy from you even if you are not the cheapest.
Image via Edelman
2. Helps build relationships
Integrating digital PR and SEO can help build stronger relationships with other businesses, bloggers, influencers, and niche experts.
It can help you build mutually beneficial initiatives that help your business grow through online collaborations, co-marketing activities, mentions, etc.
But integrating digital PR and SEO also does more than that. It helps you earn the trust of search engines.
How so? As more people mention you as a valuable source, search engines start perceiving you as a trustworthy brand. Your rankings rise and you get increased organic traffic to your site.
Furthermore, having many referring domains can help drive traffic from Google.
Image via Ahrefs
This leads more people to discover your business organically, which means they start looking for more avenues to get in touch with your brand.
And if they get value from your site, they may share their positive experience with others, attracting even more traffic and authority for you, in the process.
What’s more, the integration of digital PR and SEO helps companies boost their brand awareness but in some sectors such as Insurance, the integration may not work well.
Customers may not be able to understand their products and might choose to speak to your representatives. In these circumstances, you need to have business call centers. These call centers can help you build good customer relationships.
3. Enables lead generation
If you are able to get a byline, expert commentary, or guest posting opportunity in reputable media publications through digital PR, it’s a solid step towards thought leadership and lead generation.
How? You establish authority and credibility, which helps you attract qualified traffic to your website. If there’s a link from the publisher pointing to your site, it adds to your referral traffic.
Even without a link, mentions can drive up rankings because Google considers them implied links. These also include mentions from reviews, feature articles, and earned media.
The same applies to a well-attended panel discussion or PR event. If you have a firm grasp of the topic and demonstrate your expertise, you can get qualified leads through those who attend in person and those watching online.
Now that you’ve managed to drive engaged traffic by digital PR and SEO, you can convert them into leads and customers by using gated content, personalized email, and retargeting ads.
4. Improves your content quality
Aligning digital PR and SEO can help you create content that people love to read and share.
Effective SEO includes keyword research, audience analysis, and content gap analysis. All these activities culminate into creating optimized content that meets user needs.
Now let’s talk about how your PR team supports and facilitates content upliftment.
You create great content but you still need to get in front of the right audience. That’s where your PR team steps in.
PR’s efforts are focused on getting attention to this great content, sharing it with the right audience, and encouraging the audience to share it further.
Best of all, if your PR team manages to get you coverage on top-performing niche websites or events, your content spreads across different audience groups naturally!
Sometimes, you can get exclusive access to the publisher’s marketing content (like media coverage, videos, blog posts, and social posts) that can inspire your content strategy.
Ready to use digital PR and SEO to accelerate your marketing?
Combining digital PR and SEO unifies your teams while creating a cohesive environment that drives business growth.
SEO provides direction in terms of audience research, keyword research, competitive analysis, etc. PR leverages its relationship-building techniques to build your authority and backlinks, thus increasing your visibility and rankings.
Ready to leverage the numerous benefits of aligning digital PR and SEO? Or, maybe you need help getting the two departments to work together. Comment below, and I can help you make it happen.