Unless you have been living under a rock, SEO is an acronym that you will be familiar with. However, what you may not be as au fait with is how PR can work hand in hand with SEO tactics to supercharge your search engine optimisation.
For the uninitiated, the efficacy of your organic search strategy should be built around three types of SEO: on page SEO (essentially your website content); technical SEO (the structure and foundations of your website, rather than the content itself); and off-page SEO (what you do outside of your website to improve SEO). Specifically, where PR can help is by supporting your off-page SEO. While Google does not disclose the exact algorithm it uses to rank websites, it is thought that off-page SEO can impact the ranking by as much as 50%, so can play a powerful part in your website visibility in searches.
Creating an impactful PR campaign that generates editorial in reputable digital news outlets, will boost a website’s SEO dramatically. That is because you will have built credibility by proxy. We know that Google’s algorithm rewards trustworthy and authoritative sites, so by getting established news outlets, such as bbc.co.uk, theguardian.com or Yahoo, writing about you and signposting readers to your website, their credibility effectively rubs off on you. It is not enough to just write about a company though, it is imperative that these media outlets also include a backlink for them to impact SEO – and there is a distinction between a backlink and a link, so a good SEO/PR campaign should focus on those websites which will input backlinks in their news articles.
The advantage of improving SEO via a PR campaign, is that a PR campaign can help more broadly than just helping your Google ranking, delivering a more compelling return on investment. It can generate coverage in print and broadcast media, which won’t help SEO but will have significant reach, will raise awareness, and will drive people to purchase. It also works with more immediacy in driving traffic to your website: one client reported that a single article in the dailymail.co.uk triggered more visits to their website on a single day, than any other SEO campaign they had run.
Getting a PR story featured on nationally and internationally regarded websites is an art form though, and one which requires knowing what makes a story newsworthy; experience of what collateral to give journalists to whet their appetite, without ruining their reason to link back to your website; and the right database of journalists to reach out to. If you would like to talk to Storm about how we can support your off-page SEO, then please email hello@stormcom.co.uk.
