As digital marketing evolves, the efforts and goals of different departments are beginning to align. While businesses often keep their SEO and public relations initiatives separate, both efforts can be extremely complementary when combined. Learn about the importance of developing an integrated marketing strategy below.

What is SEO?

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the act of increasing the quantity and quality of unpaid traffic to your website or a web page from search engines.

What is PR?

Public relations is defined as the practice of managing and sharing information on behalf of an individual or organization in order to shape public perception.

How Do They Work Together?

While traditional and digital public relations are similar in that both are a means of sharing information and influencing public opinion, they differ in the ways in which they are presented. Traditional PR typically includes utilizing media such as radio, print, and television, while digital PR efforts seek to establish and enhance a trustworthy online brand reputation, which can also benefit your SEO efforts. Both efforts seek to build and enhance your online authority.

Additionally, digital PR can enhance your SEO strategy by offering opportunities to increase the amount and quality of mentions and links back to your website. These mentions and backlinks ultimately enhance your brand’s reputation and enable you to increase awareness of your brand, company, services, or other key messages.

Digital PR also benefits SEO by obtaining high-quality links that increase organic search rankings.

Four Ways to Integrate SEO into Your Digital PR Strategy

1. Ask for Links Back To Your Website: You can use special websites or conduct Internet searches to identify unlinked brand mentions. Once identified, reach out to the authors or publishers of the site to ask them to link back to your website, which will help boost your domain authority.
2. Identify High-Quality Websites: Another way to increase your SEO ranking is to conduct research to identify high-quality sites (we recommend looking for sites with a Domain Rating of 20 or higher) and reach out to these sites and ask them to link back to your specific webpages that have quality and relevant information for their audience. Oftentimes writers are open to linking to other sites that showcase information that would be of interest to their audience.
3. Implement Keywords: Utilize keyword research to learn what your audience is searching for and what words or phrases they’re using in these searches and incorporate them into your digital PR efforts and online content such as press releases and blogs. Once the content is posted online, these pieces have a higher likelihood of being shown to people searching for these keywords and phrases.
4. Build Strategic Relationships: Another way to enhance your digital PR strategy to complement your SEO efforts is to build mutually beneficial relationships with writers and key publications. Use social networking platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter to your advantage to build and maintain relationships with people writing about topics that resonate with your audience as this could present an opportunity for them to include members of your team as a source in future pieces of content and include links back to your website, thus boosting your domain authority.

Start Integrating SEO into Your Digital PR Strategy

Your PR and SEO strategies can greatly benefit from combining efforts to have the greatest impact for your firm. The team at 9Sail can help you reach your SEO and public relations goals. Contact 9Sail today to get started.