Traditionally used to raise brand awareness and boost trust in new audiences, digital PR has become a valuable tool for SEO purposes.
But it hasn’t always been like this.
As marketing became more data-driven and the link between metrics and sales grew stronger, PR was in danger of becoming lost and redundant as it was increasingly difficult to link PR investment to direct outcomes.
Instead, thanks to improved analytics and wide education amongst PR professionals, PR has firmly cemented its place within the communications pyramid alongside marketing and SEO.
And it is a pyramid. Because although marketing can put your business in front of targeted prospects, it can fall under its own weight unless it has tools like PR and SEO to reach new audiences.
Imagine that you’re looking to launch a product. You’ve done your research, built out pages and content for the website, and you are ready to get going.
You put the pages live and start to track the page rankings, traffic and leads that are racing in. But it’s not working as fast or as well as you had planned. Why?
It can take time for pages to first be indexed by search engines, and even longer for them to build up enough visibility, interest and clicks for Google to place them higher up in search results pages.
If only there was a way to produce an instant, winning campaign to get the ball rolling while webpages catch up...
By targeting high Domain Authority media websites, gaining press coverage and earning a hyperlink back to your website, you can actively track the amount of visitors who read that news story and come directly to your site as a result.
You can then start to measure the effect of the PR campaign over time on your own website’s Domain Authority, inbound links created from online coverage, and track certain pieces of coverage to keyword search terms that your business now ranks for.
This is the benefit of Digital PR. Unlike with traditional coverage where stories would be placed in a newspaper and be put in the bin the very next day, the benefit of digital and SEO PR is that coverage remains high on search pages indefinitely.
The impact of the SEO PR campaign is better measured than traditional methods of PR - presenting marketing, sales and the rest of the business with tangible benefits versus investments made.
By effectively utilising PR support in your SEO campaigns, you can create a consistent, measurable flow of prospects and leads for your marketing and sales team, while tracking exactly where they came from and how.
There are plenty of advantages of utilising a strategic SEO PR campaign.
Over time, not only will you see increased traffic, leads and sales made through the website, but you’ll also be putting your brand name in front of brand new audiences and potential customers.
Through a targeted backlinking strategy, you can also start to track the referral traffic coming through from the PR campaign, as well as an increase in your own website’s Domain Authority.
But it’s not just a one-way street, as SEO also has long-term benefits on PR.
By having a fully SEO-optimised website based around key search terms for your business, journalists will be able to find you, not just the other way around - increasing the chances of gaining organic press coverage.
SEO and PR have a lot more in common than people think. It’s time we used both in tandem to gain an online competitive advantage.
Read more on how to integrate SEO into your PR campaign here