PR and SEO can and should have an incredibly symbiotic relationship. When they combine forces, each can turbocharge the other’s effectiveness. Still, in most organizations, they still work in totally different silos. Read on for best practices that will help your company bring these two important disciplines together.
First Up: A Culture of Collaboration
Good content and strategic outreach are crucial components of an effective SEO strategy. This is exactly what PR people also do well. So how do you bring these two teams together?
In short, it is all about building a culture of collaboration and encouraging these teams to work together. By making it clear that both groups are valuable – and you value the results they can bring when they work together – you can alleviate some of the territorial feelings that different groups might harbor.
Part of building this culture of collaboration will require leadership to spend the time and effort to educate each group on what the other does; elaborate on what is uniquely valuable about each group; and highlight the areas where they can work together to make each other’s jobs easier.
When SEO professionals can see the impact of earned media placements on their success, and PR teams can see how the content being created for SEO programs can give them more fodder for their outreach, you give them great incentive to work together!
Related Post: Press Coverage, Backlinks and Media Strategy
Aligning the Message and Coordinating Timing
A natural outgrowth of this collaboration is encouraging folks to coordinate their efforts on messaging. To effectively drive business, both groups should be developing content and placing stories that focus on the same messaging and result. If you’re looking to drive traffic to one offering on your website, or uncover new leads in a particular industry, shouldn’t both teams be working with one another to ensure their activities are serving the same goal?
Similarly, your PR and SEO teams should be coordinating on timing. Marketers who have experience launching new brands and new products are very used to managing content across disciplines. On launch day, press outreach, web content, and social channels should all be sharing the same information and referring everyone back to the same content on the company’s site.
The same principle should apply every day – not just on launch day. Your SEO and PR teams should align to ensure you are not mixing messages or promoting two different initiatives at the same time. Both groups keep a content calendar – so why not make sure they’re keeping one global calendar that works for all?
Strategic Link Optimization in PR Placements
Your SEO team should be helping your PR team to optimize the links in press releases, media placements, and more. By checking in with their colleagues on the SEO side, the PR team can ensure they’re including links with keywords that need a ranking boost. They can also help ensure that they are only linking to indexed pages.
This is an important part of coordinating messaging. Both teams can and should be working together to drive ranking for key initiatives.
Similarly, SEO should also consult with PR to make sure any links from paid sponsorships are nofollowed to avoid any search engine penalty.
Maximizing Content Across Platforms
A ton of care, thought, and strategy goes into creating content. And many companies have two dynamic groups – PR and SEO – working hard to create quality content for different, but related audiences. By encouraging them to share and repurpose what they’ve created, you can make all that great content work harder. And they’ll appreciate having a stable of great tools to use in their efforts.
Your PR team can use things like infographics, blog posts, and third-party reviews that have been developed by the SEO team. By adding these tools to their media outreach, they can drive additional coverage, creating more links for the search team and an easy placement win for the PR program. Similarly, media placements, press releases and other materials can be useful for your search team as they develop content and connect with third parties.
Sharing KPIs
Combining efforts and encouraging collaboration should absolutely extend to measuring results. By working together, both groups are able to influence and show progress against a broader range of KPIs. Who doesn’t like reporting on how their activities impact multiple parts of the business?
By working together against business goals, both PR and SEO get support in showing the value of their work – and get more resources to help them be effective. Examples of effective combined goals could include:
· Keyword rank changes on pages that PR helped secure links to
· Growth in links or shares for a piece of content with PR’s amplification efforts
· How often content is repurposed and used in both search and media efforts
Related Post: Communications KPIs: How Do You Measure PR?