Public relations is, in large part, aimed at increasing the exposure of a business to its most valuable target audience, in a positive way. One way to do that in today’s digital world is by creating content that others share, and building links to valuable, authoritative sites that also cater to your target audience. These goals are shared by the SEO world, because they serve our primary goal as well: attracting valuable traffic to a website.
SEO can complement the public relations strategy, and vice versa. As search becomes more sophisticated, and more able to accurately deliver quality content and browsing experiences to a user, SEO and PR goals become more and more intertwined; and so do the overall strategies.
SEO expertise can provide several advantages to a public relations strategy, like:
- technical expertise: SEO is, in part, about leveraging the technical factors that Google uses to rank pages, like page speed and metadata;
- keyword research: including the right keywords in your public relations content can increase its online visibility, and thus its effect on your target audience;
Public relations complements SEO in that it is aimed at creating content that engages the target audience, and will be shared among those audience members, industry websites and blogs, and news outlets.
As time goes on, PR and SEO will become more and more complementary, so an understanding of what each profession is aimed at, and how they accomplish their goals, will become more advantageous to your business’s overall online presence.