By Tom Addison, Senior Digital Marketing Executive
For a long time, digital PR and SEO operated separately, often at odds with each other. Fast forward to now, and integration between the two is vital. While some argue that a good digital PR strategy can have a bigger impact upon SEO than PPC, email marketing and other digital approaches, alignment of PR and SEO is the way forward.
Integrating PR and SEO doesn’t need to be a huge overhaul to your strategy and planning; simple collaboration and communication can drastically transform your results and enable you to see the bigger picture.
Here are three reasons you should consider digital PR when it comes to developing your SEO strategy:
Backlinking
Backlinks are where a 3rd party website links to yours. This is something that most clients want in their coverage because it’s more likely to drive referral traffic to their website. And as we all know, referral traffic is a very valuable source of visitors. This traffic typically spends the longest on the website and has a higher conversion rate than the other sources of traffic. It’s always worthwhile to take a deeper look into it on Google Analytics to see which referral link is working so you can focus your efforts on getting more backlinks that are similar.
Backlinking can also help you boost your domain authority, which can then help you rank higher. There are eight broad areas to Google’s ranking algorithm and one of them is having authoritative backlinks to your website. Moz has developed a scoring system for domain authority, which gives you a good idea of how authoritative Google thinks your website is. For example, if you get a backlink in The Guardian, which has a domain authority score of 95 then Google will consider you more of a reliable and authoritative source than someone with a backlink in a lower-scoring website. That’s not to say that one backlink in The Guardian is better than lots in a trade publication – there is a fine balance between quality and quantity.
Content creation
A large part of building out your SEO is creating a consistent stream of optimised content to help improve your organic traffic and rank on Google. Content marketing is hard work, it can take up a lot of your time or budget if you’re outsourcing it. So, you want to make sure that you’re getting your money’s worth. PR teams can work with SEO teams to help determine which content could be worth amplifying by pitching it to the media. It’s a win-win if you’re able to create one piece of content that can help drive traffic and get you coverage.
This mainly just comes down to communication between teams. If your digital PR and SEO team are integrated or have frequent meetings to make sure that their goals are aligned and they’re sharing ideas, it can eliminate duplication and improve efficiency.
Reputation management
When people are deciding to buy something they now have all the information they need at their fingertips – especially when it comes to B2B. They can quickly do a search that will tell them whether people think you’re doing a good job or not. Whether your product or service delivers on its promises, and whether your brand is trustworthy. This third party endorsement is incredibly valuable to businesses because the prospective buyer will trust what other people have to say about you much more than what you have to say about yourself.
Every company has had at least one bad review – deserved or not. So, what can digital PR and SEO do to help combat this? I would like to say though that if all your reviews are negative then you might want to look at your business practices, not PR and SEO. But to get control of your online reputation from that one pesky review that haunts you, can be done with some successful PR activity. It could be through a successful integrated campaign that has got you national coverage or in a highly regarded trade publication. The search engine results on page 1 for your brand may look a lot more appealing to a prospect – or even potential staff – something we discuss in our Whiteoaks Prodcast episode on building the employer brand.
If done right, PR and SEO can have a huge impact on your inbound lead generation. Even if it’s just increasing the communication between the teams it’s worth thinking next time you’re creating content or pitching an article how can this benefit each other.
If you want to talk more about aligning your B2B PR and SEO then please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
