How Does PR Affect SEO?
We all know PR is good for getting the word out there about your business. But now that most media placements are published online, PR is also an important tool for SEO.
The magic of it is that the more the media talks about your business, the more your business will appear on search engine results.
I don’t think I talk about this enough, but it’s one of the biggest reasons a lot of companies want PR in the first place.
So, let’s talk about the relationship between PR and SEO.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. The goal of SEO is to have your website rank on the first page of results when someone Googles a relevant keyword.
(Or Bing, or whatever search engine is used.)
Imagine you are a baker in Austin, Texas. (That’s where I live.) If I search for “Austin Bakery” you would hope I find your business, right? That’s what SEO is for: landing your website on search results.
There are all kinds of strategies to make this happen, and all of them have to do with letting Google know what your website is about.
How does SEO work?
SEO works by making sure Google understands what your website is about. To do this, we need to know how Google understands the Internet.
Google organizes all the content on the web based on a lot of different factors, but there are two that matter the most.
Keywords
Links
Keywords make obvious sense. If your website is titled, “Austin Bakery” Google will probably understand that’s what you’re about. (But you don’t always have to be so on the nose, I promise!)
Links, or more technically backlinks, tell Google that you have credible information. It’s kind of like every time another website links to yours, they’re vouching for you and telling Google to trust the content on that site.
Backlinks also build associations with the sites that link to yours. For example:
If that other website is a review site for your local community, it tells Google you might be a local bakery.
If that other website is a publication about baking, it tells Google you might be about baking.
If that other website is a mom blog, it tells Google you might be a service for moms.
Why is PR crucial for SEO?
Traditional PR is all about getting earned media placements. It’s an old school strategy to get publications to write about you. And in the 21st century, that’s almost always going to be published online and include a (valuable!) link.
So if you are working on SEO, PR is the way to get all those backlinks.
Getting the right keywords on your website is challenging, but totally within your control. Whereas, getting backlinks is much more difficult because it is not entirely up to you.
Someone else that works on the other website has to be the one to publish and link back to your website. It doesn’t work if the link is published on social media or any of the other channels you operate yourself. So, part of the effort is finding the right publications, the right people to talk to, and convincing them to publish about your website.
And that’s PR.
If you have a PR strategy, you’re automatically working on your SEO strategy too. And if you are working on an SEO strategy, you need a PR strategy to really see results.