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Power From Synergy – PR and SEO

Businesses of any kind need a good reputation and at the very least need to be able to avoid or properly handle anything which may damage that reputation. This highlights the basic need for Public Relations, but PR as it’s often known is actually a much more proactive tool than that. Marketers have long known about the dynamics, relationships, behaviours and roles of groups and of people within those groups, and how some particular groups and individuals are particularly powerful and influential when it comes to spreading messages and influencing opinion.

Opinion leaders, style leaders, journalists, bloggers, industry experts and people with celebrity status are just some of the potentially valuable contacts and targets for building good relationships where Public Relations are concerned. Since the business world and these influencers moved onto the Internet, old PR principles have been applied in new and interesting ways.

The web’s size, diversity, and importance to the survival and prosperity of most companies has meant an almost blinkered focus on just getting to the top of the search engines for certain key phrases. The power influenced by e.g. Google and the need to understand how high search engine rankings can be achieved has led to the need for and proliferation of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) companies and experts. Bearing in mind the importance of good Public Relations, and now of Search Engine Optimisation to most businesses, what is the cross over and are there any synergies to be derived from the two, and what is their relevance to any ‘average’ business?

The Cross Over

The benefits of ranking highly in Google’s search engine results are undeniable. Google’s need to protect its own and its customers’ interests by protecting the quality and integrity of its search engine results now means that webmasters and website owners need to find ways to get particularly high quality incoming links to their web pages. Since the best possible Search Engine Optimisation involves doing this, and since Public Relations can create the content and the interest from the right sources to attract and get these links, herein lies that cross over.

Examples of Synergy

Unlike fleeting and transient news stories in the mass media, good quality links generated using PR can be the gifts that keep on giving in terms of rankings and website visitors. In 2009 an estimated 126 million blogs existed on the web (source: BlogPulse) and made up what’s become known as the ‘blogoshere’. There is a huge diversity in the type and nature of these blogs, but a common theme would be a focus on a specific subject or area of interest. As well as blogs there are vast numbers of specific interest news websites and forums. Part of PR is finding and nurturing potential useful relationships, and researching, finding and contacting the right influential bloggers and relevant webmasters for a specific subject.

A time honoured way of circulating newsworthy information in a PR friendly and usable format is the press release. By publishing your company’s newsworthy item on a page on your website, or for example by creating pages with attention grabbing and interesting videos or the results of your own research, a press release about your newsworthy items could then be sent to a several carefully selected and influential webmasters and bloggers who could in turn publish information about these pages and the link to your website.

This could lead to several beneficial things happening. Quite apart from your website’s search engine ranking and PageRank™ potentially benefitting from a high quality link from those carefully selected websites and blogs, you could also reap the benefits of greater numbers of more qualified visitors to your website. This in itself could bring enquiries and could attract high quality links from visitors to these third party blogs and web pages. You may even be fortunate enough to benefit from a rapid and / or viral spread of communication about your newsworthy items among interested, important and influential people.

The synergy between the communication about your newsworthy items using PR and Search Engine Optimisation could also come from carrying out effective Search Engine Optimisation on the newsworthy pages you produce. This would mean carrying out keyword research on the subject of your information, and making sure that your newsworthy pages included these and other useful keywords and key phrases e.g. in the document title, and in the body text of the page. In this way you could begin to leverage the maximum promotional benefits from the synergy.

Unlike other media e.g. papers and magazines, a well optimized, value adding piece of content on a well optimised web page / blog is likely to last a lot longer and could bring large numbers of visitors and high quality incoming links over many years.

The Relevance to Your Business

Regularly utilizing the leverage and synergy offered by PR and Search Engine Optimisation can therefore bring your business:

• More qualified and relevant visitors.
• More high quality incoming links and the resulting higher PageRank™, higher search engine rankings, the possibility of more pages within the website being indexed, and more frequent search engine visits.
• Increased profile, credibility and the resulting improvements to and maintenance of a good professional reputation.

Through investing in PR combined with SEO, all of these things could not only be achieved at much less cost but could provide longer lasting overall benefits than some paid for advertising e.g. pay per click, thus potentially reducing your costs and increasing your turnover simultaneously.