How digital PR aids SEO (and vice versa)

Though digital PR and SEO are two separate and highly important disciplines, the lines between the two are becoming increasingly blurred. Whilst a business may seek either SEO services to boost their search engine rankings, or PR services to increase brand awareness, there’s a significant overlap in how these two aims are achieved.

The work of SEO and PR teams can overlap entirely unintentionally. In an SEO’s quest for backlinks, it may be logical to use a range of PR approaches to target various publications - whether that’s by sending press releases to journalists, guest blogging, or newsjacking - which involves jumping onto breaking news stories for PR opportunities. Many popular digital PR tactics work hand-in-hand with SEO, to achieve the following successes.

Increase Domain Authority (DA)

Domain Authority is used to measure how authoritative and trustworthy a website is. Landing a story in a reputable publication that’s relevant to a client’s audience is a win for brand awareness and public image in PR.

But imagine that the digital publication has a high Domain Authority to boot. Securing a backlink to a client’s website within this article will boost the client site’s own domain authority and search engine rankings.

Securing a backlink from a high-DA website is similar to earning an endorsement from an industry expert. Trust in your brand increases, both in the eyes of your intended audience and for Google’s website crawlers. And so, your search engine rankings go up. In turn, more people discover your brand, and brand awareness continues to rise.

Earn keyword visibility

Using SEO best practises, by incorporating keywords into content and optimising for the best possible user experience, will help maximise the impact of digital PR coverage. It simply helps you to squeeze more benefits out of the same tactics you are already employing.

In this instance, PR and SEO are like pie and chips. The two things work brilliantly separately, but together, they’re a whole meal. PR brings brand consistency and awareness that can sometimes fall by the wayside in SEO. It can be all too easy to focus purely on keywords in SEO content and let branding become secondary. Considering keyword optimisation and branding at once will ensure your content both ranks and entices your audience.

Ultimately, digital PR and SEO both aim to boost a brand’s online reach and sales. Combining the two makes for a watertight digital marketing campaign, as each discipline’s strength compliments the other.

This is why digital PR has become so vital within marketing strategies. The ability to boost online visibility in so many ways through digital media coverage is something that print PR simply can’t compete with.

Proving quantifiable results

SEO analytics can inform a PR strategy, by tracking a target audience’s current behaviour, and linking your PR campaign’s actions to real results. Being able to track the success of your campaigns is crucial to being able to prove your success to potential clients, and show your current clients that your work has been worth their time and money.

Whilst a feature in a national publication is a huge achievement, quantifying its impact as merely boosting brand awareness is no longer enough. Being able to show that your PR wins have improved search visibility, domain authority and website traffic, ultimately resulting in leads, demonstrates a much stronger ROI.

Magic happens when SEO and PR teams work together - or when individuals recognise and develop the skill set to combine the two themselves.

Written by Annabel Mulliner, writer at marketing agency Little Seed Group