There are some new rules to SEO and PR. In his effective work “The New Rules of Marketing & PR”, David Meerman Scott highlighted how marketing and PR have evolved to be more effective when used together. This article goes further: SEO and PR have evolved too. This matters because search engines like Google and Yahoo! are picking up more and more press releases which are optimized effectively. Not only are these press releases being found by journalists, they’re also being found by bloggers and buyers.
Say you run a used book store. You recently bought a huge collection of books, and you built a brand new site to start selling these books. How would you start? You can go traditional: you can use search engine marketing, PPC advertising, even start a blog. These are good. But beyond optimizing your site, you should also consider writing optimized press releases. There are thousands of bloggers who blog about art topics like films and books. If one blogger decides to search for used books, your press release can give him all the necessary information he needs to help his readers who in turn will be buying from you. See how that works? You used SEO for a press release. If you had just written the press release and posted it, you might have gotten some traffic to your used book site. However, by ranking highly on search engines, you did more than get relevant traffic from customers: you also gave your message the opportunity to go viral, to spread across hundreds if not thousands of blogs and sites and forums with similar themes. That’s the power of partnering SEO and PR.
1. Your Message Goes Viral
SEO extends the reach of PR and communications. It allows you to reach not only buyers, but those who communicate with your buyers. By focusing on relevant keywords, by offering useful and unique information, you’re showing value to many bloggers, journalists, and buyers.
2. Journalists and Bloggers with Buzz
Buzz created by journalists and bloggers is bigger than you might think. With a modest marketing budget, you can turn that a business around or into a huge success. Online, journalists and bloggers are constantly on the hunt for items which may help their readers. By partnering SEO and PR, you created more name power for your company, more traffic to your site, more sales opportunities, and a highly effective marketing system with longevity.
3. The Setup
If you can do this once, who says you can’t use this setup of SEO and PR again? You just put yourself on the map with the right form of SEO and PR. True, it may not work the first time. This kind of success does not happen overnight. However, it can be very effective, even on a lesser scale. Many are still focused on solely SEO when they should factor in the power of partnering SEO with PR.
4. Build Rankings
By getting relevant incoming links from respected sites and blogs, your search engine rankings go up. Simply having press releases point to your site is good, but if 10 top blogs and some newspapers pick up the release, that increases your search engine ranking greatly.
5. Increase Interest
A journalist or blogger you never solicited may contact you for more information on your product. This may create a more relevant article or blog post about your business and product in general. Also, once your brand name gets out there, you can create more trust. Just like Coca-Cola and Amazon and other top brands spread through building brands on trusted products, you can too.
6. Protect Your Brand
Finally, we all know sometimes bloggers and journalists say something and it’s almost thought of as fact. Unfortunately, many read criticism and consider it true. By building optimized press releases, you can give your audience relevant, positive, and brand building messages about why you stand behind your product or service.
It’s important to note how Google and other search engines build rankings in order to understand public relations more. The top five ways search engines rank your site are based on: anchor text from external links, external link popularity, diversity of link sources, keyword use in the title tag, and how trustworthy the domain is considered by other respectable domains. If your rankings are low, that does not mean your site is bad. It may just mean you lack enough relevant external links, among other points. Combining search engine optimization and public relations can boost these rankings naturally.
