PR specialists understand how important it is for a company, brand or persona to be present when target audiences have questions. SEO is highly similar as it helps valuable content to be discovered. The problem is that PR enthusiasts often dismiss SEO and they see it more in the realm of marketing. In reality, every single person involved in public relations can use SEO data in order to improve their campaigns.

There is a fight that should not happen between SEO and PR at the moment. SEO is becoming more similar to PR and now gives access to really valuable information that the PR specialist should use.

If you work in PR, here are some things that you can always use from SEO.

Drafting Messages Using The Appropriate Keywords

When you create content for the web you naturally use keywords. SEO is all about identifying the best possible keywords to use. Because of this the PR specialist can take a page out of search engine optimization and use those best keywords in their messages.

Obviously, finding the right keywords is not an easy task. The goal is to locate the words and expressions that the target customer looks for when trying to find your content. In most cases natural, organic ranking is not what you rank really high for.

Appropriate keywords come from these sources:

• Expressions customers use in daily conversation
• Keywords that competitors use
• Phrases related to industry topics

Keywords chosen when drafting PR messages and creating related content should be based on empathy and understanding the customer. Never focus on what search engine visibility you might have.

Covering All Technical Bases

Those that do SEO work are often focused on the technical side of things and miss out on the human side of things. The PR specialist tends to do the exact opposite. A mixture of the two is always the best possible approach for increased efficiency and better results.

Before an online PR campaign is launched, you want to cover all technical bases. If possible, hire an SEO specialist to do that. If not, think about the following as you perform a technical audit:

• You need to have META descriptions, title tags and URLs delivered in a format that makes it easily for Google to crawl.
• You need to have appropriate keywords in appropriate places, like headline, URL, ALT attributes or META descriptions.
• Page crawl diagnostics – this basically means you need to use a tool that will check to see if your pages are easy to crawl.
• Duplicate content presence – content that you create should always be unique and the site structure or platform used should never cause the appearance of duplicate content.

SEO is technical while PR is more human-centric. However, when you do PR work you cannot deny the technical part of things since the search engines have to connect audiences to the website and understand its content.

Identifying Who Is Linking To You

All marketers heard of things like backlinks or pagerank with the simple idea being: if you get more inbound links from high quality sources, your site is more reputable. Some time ago this was basically a loophole for many so marketers simply paid for links instead of promoting quality of a really high value. Eventually, Google figured out that this was going on and they made changes to the algorithm in order to identify the bought links and reduce their value.

Leaving aside the small SEO history, the PR specialist gains a lot of important knowledge by identifying who naturally links to the produced content. Strengths are understood and more valuable, effective content can be created in the future. At the same time, you might identify some partnership opportunities as backlinks are identified. People already decided that your content is valuable so they may be open for collaboration.

You can also identify who links to your competition. This gives you even more partnership options that can be considered as you develop your PR strategy. Just be sure you do not look at these backlinks as the SEO specialists do. You are looking for more than just a link, a possibility to increase brand awareness and exposure.

Some Tactics You Can Try

The PR leader has to be dictating the SEO strategy in a normal scenario. Firm rankings can be impacted through many different strategies. Some that you do want to consider are the following:

• Recommend links back when getting PR Mention – In many situations you get PR mentions from journalists. This can be taken one step further by simply asking if linking to relevant content is considered. Share data about the content and why it is helpful. This makes the journalist more comfortable to share.
• Pitching Resources – In many cases you come across various link or resource roundups that simply did not include you. Do not wonder about what can be done better in the future. Reach out and contact the authors. Talk about your resource and ask for the link. There is a pretty good possibility that the blogger simply did not see what you created in the past so this is why the link was not included.
• Publish Internal Stats – During research phase it is possible to gather a lot of compelling data. This can be published through an internal study on the site. Writers and journalists always want to cite metrics and stats. Building visibility becomes easier and backlinks are gained at the same time.
• Create Visual Content – The digital world is obviously hungry for as much visual content as possible. The problem is that creating such a resource is time consuming and quite expensive. This means that when the business creates content like infographics and offers publishing permission there is a high possibility that backlinks can be naturally gained.

Final Thoughts

Good PR automatically means that your communication strategy is taking advantage of all available resources while all internal departments work together for the betterment of the brand. Both the SEO specialist and the PR specialist need to focus on doing all that is possible to help the target audience. Empathy has always been a big part of PR and now it is a big part of modern SEO. These two departments in a company (SEO and PR) should always work together for the best possible results.