Many SEO experts have, at some point or another, received great results by building high volumes of low quality or low relevance links. It’s still possible to achieve high rankings this way, but with Google clamping down on such practices, it’s preferable to explore other, safer alternatives. One such alternative is through the use of Digital PR.
Most companies have a department that specialises in PR and crafts high quality editorial content. The challenge is that these departments often aren’t as focused on Digital as they could be, and don’t take full advantage of the great value the Internet could add to their campaigns and to SEO.
So, how can you go about changing this? There are a number of things an SEO agency can do to leverage the good work done by PR professionals. I’ve listed the most important steps below.
Explain How SEO Can Aid PR
It’s important to explain how SEO can aid PR (and vice versa) in the form of an elevator pitch to the PR department that maybe isn’t embracing all the opportunities available yet. The objective is to obtain links from authoritative sources working with the PR department. Remember, they are under no obligation to share their contacts with you, so make sure you explain the benefits that they, you and the brand stand to gain. It’s important to work together with the understanding that all teams will benefit.
Leverage Offline Contacts
Offline publications such as newspapers, magazines and bulletins usually have some kind of online presence. This is something PR departments should aim to take advantage of; there is always the chance a link back to a brand site can be secured from a respected source. If a PR department perhaps hasn’t considered this, you could suggest that they discuss the possibility of building links with the publications that do have sites.
Leverage Online Contacts
Now similar to the above, PR departments sometimes don’t receive any links in return for the quality articles they publish online. Many PR departments publish articles to a number of authoritative sites without asking “is it possible to have a link?” The old adage applies: if you don’t ask you don’t get. You’ll probably be surprised to see how easy it is secure a fresh link from an authoritative source.
Request a Schedule of Events
PR departments normally have a provisional schedule that helps guide PR activity for major brand launches, promotions and events over the next 6 to 12 months.
Once you have this schedule, it’s best to identify key dates and events that you would like to target and to start thinking of a linking strategy that will accompany this PR activity. Start building a strategy with the PR team. There will be different areas to explore once you start to collaborate, but the important thing is that you are aligning your strategy with theirs. You are sharing the workload and working towards a common goal
In Conclusion
These are just a few examples of how you can use the clients’ PR presence to bolster links. Just by implementing these techniques, you could improve the chances of ranking a client’s website. This is just the tip of the iceberg as there are many more ways you can leverage PR to improve your search engine ranking. Your SEO team can focus their efforts elsewhere whilst the PR team help obtain highly effective authoritative quality links from authorised sources.
Have you had a positive experience by marrying your PR and SEO efforts? We’d love to hear from you.
