Is your SEO company using digital public relations in your overall strategy? If not, you’re missing out on a valuable SEO tool for you and your clients.
Public relations isn’t just pitching and traditional media relations anymore and that mindset is outdated. The truth is, the internet has changed just about every industry an that includes public relations.
80 percent of the U.S. is online nearly every day, and in 1995 only one percent of the world had access to the internet. Things have changed in the world, and in public relations, so it’s time your SEO agency do the same.
Why Do I Need Digital Public Relations?
Back in the twentieth century, public relations and marketing had very little, if any, crossover. Public relations professionals focused almost solely on media relations and earned media, while marketers had different goals.
This has all changed since the rise of the internet, online media and social media. Now it’s crucial that marketing and communications efforts be fully integrated. If you’re an SEO agency, this means using public relations as a way to boost a client’s website and drive more traffic. After all, the goal of public relations is to generate positive attention around a brand, so why shouldn’t this be used to gain website traffic?
Here are three benefits of including digital public relations strategies in your SEO business:
1. Press Releases
Digital press releases are a gold mine of backlinks that will send people right to your website. Have your client’s PR professionals work with an SEO team to link to appropriate pages throughout the press release. This contributes to your network of links on the web, boosts SEO and sends more people directly to the client’s website, even if the press release is posted on an external site.
2. Pitch Key Words
Pitching isn’t just reserved for traditional media anymore and it still has a valuable place in a digital PR strategy.
Again, this only works if your SEO, marketing and PR teams are working together. Have this new team craft media pitches together. The PR professional will know how to get the reporters attention, and the SEO team can help insert keywords into the pitch that you want the reporter to use in the article. These keywords will ideally end up in your article later on and help drive more traffic.
3. Dive Into Influencers
Bloggers and influencers now have a major impact on public relations, even more so than some of the most famous news outlets.
Use your PR professional’s pitching skills to reach all kinds of new media on the internet, including bloggers, social media influencers and more. When a blogger mentions your site online, it’s helping to create the valuable web of links to your site that can give your client’s SEO a boost. Again, some bloggers generate more traffic than the nations biggest news sites, so pitching to them help you build brand recognition much faster.
4. Use Key Personnel
Using key personnel in a company as experts is a great PR strategy, and it’s one that’s easy to combine with an SEO strategy. There are tons of reputable outlines online (such as Forbes) that accept contributor posts from experts in nearly every field.
Use these opportunities to have C-level executives write (or ghostwrite for them) helpful pieces that can be pitched and shared with top media. These articles are a great opportunity to include backlinks and keywords that will help SEO strategy, while making your company and staff look like experts.
Hopefully by now you’ve realized the benefits of digital public relations. While there are tons of benefits, business people know it’s not always easy to shake up the way things are done at businesses and agencies.
Here’s How to Integrate
Integrating your PR, marketing and SEO strategies doesn’t have to be a long and painful process. Here are three steps to take to integrate digital public relations into your SEO and marketing team:
1. Blur the Department Lines
If your client has extreme department lines, encourage them to try and blend their marketing and communications team into one. This is easier said than done, but removing specific “marketing” and “communications” titles can help employees understand that they need to work together.
2. Switch up Seating
This one might seem obvious, but it’s hard for marketing and PR teams to work together if they’re not sitting close by. Switch up seating to help encourage more collaboration and communication. These are both key when you’re trying to integrate departments.
It’ll be difficult to integrate different digital strategies if the employees feel they can’t bring up ideas or issues to other departments.
3. Encourage Team Bonding
When you’re switching things up on employees, morale can sometimes drop. It’s crucial to keep employees happy by encouraging team bonding.
Host events outside of work to help employees get to know one another outside of the work setting. These settings are more casual and less pressured, so they can develop good communication skills that will transfer to the office.
4. Do Cross-Disciplinary Training
PR, Marketing, and SEO are similar in the sense that they’re all industries that are constantly training. Because of that, the professionals in each field might not be up-to-date on the latest trends in each, and may not fully understand how they can work together.
Encourage your clients to host occasional training events or lunch-and-learns educate everyone on how the industries can work together to boost the bottom line. As an agency, you can even do this for them by hosting webinars or other virtual educational tools.
Want More Information?
Digital PR and SEO both bring in great benefits for companies, but they work better together. As we mentioned earlier, there are a lot of great PR strategies like press releases and pitching that can bring businesses an even bigger ROI when SEO and marketing pros have a voice.
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