SEO is a process of improving a website to increase visibility during search engine rankings, raising brand awareness. Public relations is all about brand awareness. Increased brand awareness leads to increased sales as customers become more familiar and aware of your product or service. For long, marketers and public relations experts have been missing out on a fantastic killer combo that can take their businesses to new heights – SEO and digital public relations. If it is the first time hearing about this SEO and PR combo, read on. This article outlines 7 reasons why it is necessary to have SEO in public relations.
- Increase Brand Recognition
This is the first and most crucial reason public relations professionals need SEO. Public relations is about brand awareness. Google has ranking signals that they use to identify and ranks websites. A website needs to satisfy these signals to achieve higher Google rankings. The rewards of doing so are increased visibility, leading to more heightened brand awareness.
Search engine algorithms are continuously becoming smarter and better. Therefore, companies and public relations professionals need to devise smart and effective ways to level up to the changes. A website with higher google rankings is highly visible, and clients are likely to choose their products or services in the present and future to the familiarity.
- SEO Builds Credibility & Trustworthiness (E-A-T Benefits)
The more online mentions a website has, the more credible and trustworthy it seems. Google’s search algorithm uses online mentions and links to rank websites. E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. This is a concept and factor that Google introduced in 2014 to evaluate a webpage’s overall quality.
Websites of higher ranking and quality are therefore presented to search users. In doing so, google ensures only the best and most relevant content reaches the user. As a public relations expert, you can improve the company’s website E-A-T to make it more reputable, thus extending its reach and boosting its brand visibility online.
- Build Relations Through Guest Blogging Outreach
This is self-explanatory. An in-depth and well-informed post can get you into new relationships. Businesses, influencers, public relations professionals and bloggers will want to associate with you and your posts. As a result of the new relationships, you will get into market activities and synergies through collaborations with companies helping you grow.
The collaborations can also help grow both of your companies by developing a mutually beneficial co-marketing relationship where you use each other for online mentions and backlinks. This is an indirect way of doing public relations. Click here to get the interactive content that gets your customers talking and journalists linking.
- Getting Earned Media Coverage
A combination of SEO and public relations gets you referrals to die for. You can amass valuable traffic from targeted media outlets through digital public relations. The traffic is from targeted media; outlets selected because they are part of the target audience’s lives.
In addition to connecting with the target audience, public relations also involve connecting with people who can help you get media placements and backlinks. This includes mentions of your business by website plying the same niche as you. However, it is not an automatic assurance that websites will include links to your website just because your content is incredible. You need to ask for backlinks.
- Content Marketing is a Form of Public Relations
There is a strong link between public relations and content marketing. Public relations is managing the public image of a person, brand or company. Just like content marketing, public relations is a communication process. Incorporating public relations efforts in content marketing strategies enhances public relations campaigns. Therefore, publishing content on websites and blogs, which is what content marketing entails, can help a company perform its public relations activities.
- More Organic Traffic Allows You to Allocate Budget in Other Initiatives
The cost of acquiring new customers has been increasing over time. Therefore, as a company, you need to focus on SEO strategy because it is less costly than other initiatives and has long-lasting results. The money saved by investing in the less expensive SEO strategy can be allocated to other initiatives that can help the company grow further.
- Growing Your Domain Rating and Authority through Backlinks
By link building, you can grow your domain Rating resulting in higher Google rankings. Web pages that include backlinks improve in Google rankings and outperform contents that don’t include backlinks. Backlinks are the most important ranking factor after relevance and overall page content, according to a survey by Sparktoro.
