Four Ways SEO and PR Can Work Together

The digital landscape is always evolving and has become more integrated. This means that marketing and communication channels are working together much more closely. How well this works can vary from business to business, but your channels should be working together. An easy collaboration is between PR and SEO, as good content and outreach is a big part of successful SEO. How can these different teams helps each other to reach your business goals?

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1. Education. It’s easy to get stuck in the bubble of your specialty, and when you start to work alongside people from teams, it’s easy to forget that they don’t know your area as well as you do. PR professionals won’t be as familiar with the impact that online earned media can have on SEO and keyword rankings, so you before you start making requests, take some time to teach them how and why. SEO professionals aren’t taught PR. Help each other understand what you can get out of working together. If you’re struggling to work together, outsource to a team that knows both areas well, like elitelawyermanagement.com, who specializes in PR and publicity for the legal industry.
2. Optimizing links in earned coverage. Your SEO team can help your PR team to optimize the links they’ve got in all the media coverage they’ve earned. This could be company press releases or non-paid stories. SEO can help PR to choose links with the right keywords that need a boost in the rankings and can make sure PR is directing your audience to the right links. SEO should also speak with PR to make sure that any links benign used from paid sponsorship are being used correctly to any penalties from search engines.
3. Managing media outreach. Influencer outreach is a big part of any marketing strategy, and you might have more than one team handling your outreach. This can make things tricky, as you don’t want multiple people from your company reaching out to on influencer. This makes things confusing for the influencer if they’re getting different requests from different people at the same company. Eliminate that overlap by setting clear guidelines for what different types of outreach the different teams will own. Your PR team might own the building relationships with mass media outlets, and your content marketing team might work with bloggers and subject matter experts. Share lists and possible contacts between teams before making any contact, to make sure that someone isn’t already talking to them. This means you can all wasting time pitching a source that someone else in the company has already tried and found unresponsive.
4. Aligning messages and stories. If you have more than one team managing outreach, you’re bound to have multiple stories coming out at the same time. Get all your teams to align on broader messaging and time to make sure that you put out content on the same team and aren’t mixing your messages or promoting two different things at once. Keep a content calendar that lines up with business priority and seasonality.