Public relations (PR) is associated with many aspects of marketing. It can boost brand awareness and develop your company’s image. It can also help you reach your target audience and generate leads.
However, one area of marketing that often isn’t connected to PR is SEO (search engine optimization). This isn’t just talking about including backlinks in press releases, either. In fact, Google has made it pretty clear that links on press releases are usually nofollow (i.e. they don’t help your SEO.)
Even so, there are several other areas where your PR that can have a profound impact on your company’s organic search engine traffic. Here are a few of the top areas where they can help.
PR Propagates Keywords
When you’re running a PR campaign, it often involves things like press releases and interviews. As you engage in these activities, you have to choose the words that you’ll use to represent your brand. For instance, a health food brand might want to connect itself with terms like “healthy snacks” or “nutritional health.”
Over time, this verbal consistency begins to connect your brand with certain keywords in the minds of consumers. As press releases and interviews are shared, they reinforce the mantra that your brand and your keywords are one and the same.
This doesn’t just help consumers with brand association. It also ensures that your brand is connected with those words in search results, as well. Every time your brand shows up online in context with your focused keywords, it will not only boost your brand awareness. It will quietly improve your SEO, too.
PR Lands Backlinks
Now, you might be thinking, “didn’t they already say PR isn’t good for generating backlinks?” And it’s true that links in press releases don’t directly impact your SEO.
However, there’s an indirect way that you can get backlinks from your PR efforts. This doesn’t involve placing links in your press releases as a deliberate link-building strategy. Instead, it comes from the repercussions of a good press release.
In other words, if you write a press release that is worth its salt, it will generate its own backlinks. As you create bona fide, high-quality releases about real newsworthy stories, they should be able to earn media placement. As these are picked up by news outlets, organic traffic is driven to your site (which is already a plus for your SEO). On top of that, though, if your site is well-made, many of these organic visitors have the potential to share your content of their own volition. And that content should count as a quality backlink that will directly impact your SEO.
PR Provides Reusable Content
Links and keywords are subtle SEO benefits that can come with your PR efforts. But there’s another aspect of your PR/SEO relationship that is right there in plain sight: it creates reusable content.
If you have a piece of information that you want to share with the world, you can whip up a press release to spread the news. Once published, you can do several things with that piece of content:
- You can share the press release link on your social media profiles;
- You can reuse the information to create a separate blog post for your website;
- You can share the blog post or original release with your email chain.
All of these activities can help boost your SEO through activities like traffic, linking, and keywords. To be clear, this isn’t a recommendation to copy your press releases and republish them verbatim. Google does not look kindly on duplicate content.
However, you can certainly recycle the information into other content. You can also share existing links across your social media, email, and other marketing channels. All of this activity can reduce your content creation time while simultaneously helping to boost your SEO in the process.
From propagating keywords to organic traffic and backlinks to reusable content, there are plenty of ways your PR efforts can boost your SEO. The important thing is that you create an online strategy to help you do so and find a solid partner to help you carry out your plans to perfection.
