To increase your visibility online and attract more customers to your brand, it’s essential that you have a strategy to combine your digital PR and SEO.
Digital has made it easier than ever to grow your brand in the public eye, creating the capacity to attract thousands of your target audience to your business every single week. Creating a trustworthy and credible brand image online is paramount to the future success of your business and to keep your online reputation clean and positive. An SEO and digital PR agency, like Percepto, can help you manage these two strategies.
What are digital PR and SEO?
Digital PR is an online communications methodology which reaches out to publications, websites, platforms and outlets to raise brand awareness, engage with stakeholders and reinforce messaging. This could include activity such as blogs, guest posts, thought leadership pieces, social media, podcasts and so on.
SEO focuses on ensuring your website is ranked as highly as possible through the use of key words associated with your brand, that your target customer is searching for on search engines.
Therefore, the combination of digital PR and SEO is about having your brand name featured positively wherever possible online, so that Google recognizes your popularity while increasing the cost of search engine optimization, trusts you and starts ranking your business more highly. This increases your visibility when your target audience uses Google to search for your services specifically, thus directing more traffic to your website.
What is the main SEO benefit of digital PR?
Digital PR should be a key part of your SEO strategy, and vice versa, because it helps build links that trace back to your website. The more links you have tracking back to your website, the more credible and trustworthy Google believes you to be.
How will SEO impact your digital PR when done well?
When you create a winning combination using digital PR and SEO, you’re able to build brand awareness, increase your visibility and ultimately generate more inbound leads to your business. Here are five digital PR methods that can be used in conjunction with your SEO strategy straightaway.
- Press releases: Press releases are the bread and butter of public relations, the concise and perfectly formed story which is sent to journalists to be placed, uploaded and rewritten into coverage. Having your brand name or story featured in publications increases visibility and awareness. It creates word of mouth, spreads the company’s message and nurtures the narrative you are building around your brand. Ultimately this all leads to an increase in brand name search on web browsers and in turn, footfall to your website.
- Blogs: If hosted on your website and enriched with words that support an SEO strategy, blogs can generate more traffic. SEO research can be performed to discover the most search for keywords, which are weaved across blog posts. Promoting blogs on your social media pages will also further increase views. This combination method of mixing digital PR and SEO techniques is a surefire way to improve trust of the site and improve Google’s ranking, while ensuring your site is visible when those specific keywords are searched for.
- Website pages: By optimizing your website content in terms of SEO, you’re increasing the likelihood of your site being found. The more targeted your keywords are for your website SEO strategy, the more likely the pages and the website overall will be ranked highly on the first pages of Google. The higher the site ranks for the search term, the more real estate you hold on Google’s first pages. The higher your position, the more exposure and higher potential for future clients.
- Thought leadership pieces in the media: Not only does this strategy increase your visibility to potential customers by getting your name and work in front of hundreds if not thousands of people, some media publications allow you to link your website at the bottom of the article, meaning you can divert readers straight to your website. Your thought leadership pieces remain online forever meaning whenever people find and read your article, they’re also exposed to your business website, increasing the chance of clicking through.
- Social media. Arguably the most popular form of information sharing in the modern world, social media is a great tool for increasing brand awareness. Using website links in posts will send more traffic to your site, therefore increasing your trust factor to Google. The more visits your website has, the more Google sees it as a trusted source.
For many communications practitioners there seems to be an internal struggle, battling to be proven as the ‘best marketing methodology today’. “Traditional PR is pointless”, some may say. “Display advertising is dead ”, others will holler. There has been a push and pull between disciplines since the day dot – when actually the real way to create an overarching strategy plan for marketing and communications is to have a comprehensive, mixed methodology, through the line, 360-degree approach.
Communications professionals like those at Percepto understand how these techniques build and preserve the correct narrative, while building authority, trust, and brand loyalty and leading to client retention and potential increase in sales.
Is SEO more important than digital PR? The answer of course, is that including a solid combination plan for digital PR and SEO into your marcomms strategy is essential. Increasing online visibility further attracts and engages those all important stakeholders and potential future customers. Because when it comes down to the fundamental basics of any business, it’s all about those relationships we have built and how we continue to maintain them.