Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is at the heart of many marketing strategies. It is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website from search engines.
Public Relations (PR) is also an important feature for reaching potential customers for B2B tech and telecoms brands. What is often missed however, is the integration of these two approaches.
The current marketing climate means SEO and PR should go hand in hand for the best results.
Why Should PR and SEO Work Together?
Combining SEO and PR can help you to achieve your business goals quickly because both approaches share similar purposes such as brand awareness, social sharing, reputation management and trust and authority building.
A study into the ‘mere exposure effect’ by Zajonc (1968) showed that repeatedly displayed stimuli were viewed more positively than an unknown stimulus. This reflects into marketing and is one of the reasons building brand awareness, consistency and trust is so important.
For example, when given the choice between Coca-Cola and an unknown brand of fizzy drink, the majority will choose Coca-Cola because it’s familiar and has built authority within the drinks market.
Seamlessly integrating SEO and PR together in your marketing strategy will help to build your brands position in the B2B tech and telecoms industry and drive more traffic to your channels across all different types of digital platforms.
The Effects
The insights drawn through SEO can benefit the entire PR strategy by stepping in and providing guidance as to which relationships and campaigns are worth pursuing. Data backed evidence can strengthen basic PR initiatives. Keyword research, competitive analysis, backlink research, and quality-scoring SEO tools like Hubspot SEO Marketing Software can all deliver the necessary data for PR to produce an efficient and effective strategy. When a marketing team can utilise these insights and place its keyword research into its PR efforts, that’s when they’ll be successful.
At the same time, PR connections can be used to amplify the value of SEO. Link building is more relationship driven today than ever before so having a bank of high authority connections is important. By leveraging these connections and relationship building skills the marketing team can use SEO to build quality backlinks to elevate your brands awareness.
How do we integrate and collaborate to generate better results?
Using PR and SEO to maximise Return on Investment (ROI) in your marketing efforts can be achieved by streamlining your initiatives and messages. The marketing team should work together to identify opportunities, brainstorm ideas and build a strong strategy.
For example, a press release can generate valuable backlinks if done correctly. Conducting keyword research using a keyword planning tool and then using keywords in any press release you distribute will increase the likelihood of reader’s searching for those terms finding you. At the same time keywords make you sound more credible and help you to position your brand as an industry leader.
Overall, developing a marketing strategy that promotes SEO and PR working as one unit is far more valuable than using them as standalone tactics. If done successfully, you can use this method to boost your brands Search Engine Result Page (SERP) position and generate new leads.
If you aren’t thinking about using SEO to amplify your PR you should, and we can help.