While many of the long-standing SEOs are defensive about the change that SEO faces, specialists are slowly but surely starting to accept that brands and businesses need to adapt to shift their SEO strategy from link building to content marketing unless they want to be left behind and consequently discarded in the huge world of digital. Traditional approaches such as buying masses of low quality, spammy backlinks and click bait headlines worked incredibly well in the past but the Google Penguin update has meant this approach no longer works for a sustained period of time. Onsite SEO strategies involving robots.txt, optimised H1 and sitemap.xls still have their place when it comes to optimising a site but just can’t pull their weight on their own, meaning SEO specialists need to revamp their offsite strategies or risk falling flat.

PR is one of those disciplines which are difficult to define and it owns too many preconceived notions, with many traditional journos and SEO strategists condemning its practise. Particularly in the SEO world it is often seen as outdated. However, these preconceptions can actually get in the way of what is a perfect addition to any SEO strategy. PR campaigns are a great way of raising awareness of a business and achieving social shares, increased brand awareness and more importantly in SEO, those all-important high quality back links.

By adapting your digital strategy to incorporate both disciplines, you can benefit from both SEO and PR in what is a rewarding campaign with valuable results. This is why successful SEO companies have increasingly shifted towards having an umbrella of departments, one of with is operating as a PR team.

If PR and SEO had a baby, it would be content marketing.

Content Marketing is King

We hate to use the cheesy and overused phrase, ‘Content is King’, but frankly, it is king. Content marketing is less about irrelevant link building and more about quality pieces of content that are shareable and interesting. Content marketing is the hub of great content; by ensuring content marketing is at the heart of your strategy, you will achieve great backlinks, brand exposure and quality coverage.

For the SEO and digital marketers out there still getting to grips with the integration between both disciplines, here are a few tips on how to gradually incorporate PR into your SEO strategy:

• Start by thinking of the audience that the piece is going to reach; optimizing your content for SEO shouldn’t be discarded but it should come second. It needs to be good quality and shareable. Google’s continuous change to its algorithms means that your content needs to be of high quality to keep your readers interested.
• Build that relationship with journos and bloggers. A fundamental rule in the world of PR, but using this in your SEO strategy is an easy way to build links because many are happy to include them on their site.
• Use those SEO keywords in your press releases with search engines still in mind. The PR team should be briefed by the SEO team to understand the keywords associated. Consequently, this content will be picked up and, have links back to your site and increase the status of your own site.
• Create a blog for your business - not only does this get a lot of weight from search engines it also builds a relationship with your customers and audience, promotes your own business and shows potential clients you know your stuff.