PROFESIONAL Study SEO As Well To Public Relation

SEO and Public Relations Can Relate

If your company has a public relations (PR) department, you’re in luck. If not, think about this: If you got a phone call tomorrow from a radio station wanting to do a story on your company, who would they speak with? That’s your PR department. PR folks are very well suited to work with you on your SEO campaign. They’re careful about words, they’re excellent communicators, and they probably know how to take the time to track their results. They are the “keepers” of the brand, creating and monitoring the face that your organization puts forth to the public. Look to PR for help with keyword brainstorming, optimizing press releases, link building, and keeping your search engine listings and other links in line with your branding.

A typical PR department is primarily concerned with getting your company mentioned in the media and making sure that the publicity is accurate and ideally positive. Many newspaper and magazine articles, not to mention blog postings, are triggered by press releases or other forms of contact from a PR department. And it’s fair to say that search engines deserve a place among these media sources: just like magazines, newspapers and the like, search engines provide a free, ostensibly unbiased third-party source of publicity for your organization.

Even more important from a PR point of view, search engines have become a key research tool for those very journalists, bloggers, and thought leaders PR is chatting up in the first place. You might meet some resistance from a PR department that thinks of SEO as strictly a form of advertising. In truth, SEO often does walk a fine line. A PPC or Pay Per Click campaign is most clearly within the advertising classification, but other SEO tasks, such as including target keywords in press releases or gaining incoming links from business contacts, fall more directly into the PR bucket. Once you explain to your PR folks that you will be seeking their assistance only with organic SEO activity, they should be more open to the possibilities.

As the department that protects the company brand, PR will likely have a great deal of interest in the brand maintenance tasks that fall under the SEO umbrella: monitoring search engine listings and other online mentions for currency and accuracy. You may need to educate the PR team about how to find outdated information online, but once they know where (and how) to look, don’t be surprised if they develop a passion
for rooting out the “uglies.”

What if your website is not trying to sell anything or gather leads, or run advertising for revenue? What if the only goal of your website is brand awareness? This is when you need your PR department most of all. The folks in PR are already skilled in handling those difficult-to-measure soft targets offline through clipping services and surveys. They may even be doing some tracking of online mentions. Now you need to tie their tracking efforts together with the SEO campaign to make sure that SEO gets credit where credit is due. We’ll talk more about online brand-awareness tracking options in Part III, “Your SEO Plan.” Luckily, PR people are generally very comfortable with documentation. You shouldn’t have too hard a time convincing them to document their SEO successes.