In today’s marketing landscape, brands can no longer achieve ROI by stuffing keywords or mass-producing press releases. It’s a nuanced and digital world out there when it comes to marketing, and brands need to be smart, genuine, and consistent with the content they produce and perhaps crucially, they need to know how to leverage it to get results. Combining the strengths of PR and SEO can have a huge impact, creating more ongoing organic traffic that has real value for the company.

Public relations teams like ours at Ranieri Agency, are strategic communicators that manage brand reputation and increase brand visibility by producing media content (traditional and digital) and building relationships in the industry. We secure media coverage, pitch and write stories, send out press releases, manage creative PR campaigns, and promote events & news.

SEO maximises a brand’s online presence by ensuring digital content is search-engine optimized to drive traffic to the website and ultimately generate leads and drive conversions. SEO teams focus on keyword research, SERP rankings management, optimissing new and old content to drive traffic, and website analysis.

However, SEO and PR are not mutually exclusive. In fact, marrying the two to feed off each other’s strengths is essential to building trust, which is pretty much the number one factor in determining whether a potential customer will convert after interacting with your content.

Think of it this way — SEO teams could craft website content with all of the SEO bells and whistles with the sole intent of getting a high ranking on Google. While it’s not that simple nowadays, let’s just say it happens.

When a customer arrives on your website and sees content without any of the meaningful aspects added by PR — thought leadership, guest input, carefully considered marketing messaging — they’ll quickly realize they’re looking at a bunch of keywords and move on.

Let’s reverse that and consider a thoughtfully crafted feature story created by a PR team that includes a compelling brand message, but it’s not optimised and lives on the third Google search results page. No matter how great the story is, odds are your target audience won’t ever see it (when’s the last time you clicked past page one on Google?) and even if they do, they’ll be skeptical because it was so low ranking.

Companies doing SEO and PR the best are doing it together, leaning on PR specialists like Ranieri Agency to create opportunities for meaningful content creation, and ensuring it’s SEO optimised and visible to the right audience.

How to measure SEO PR

Even though all mentions provide some value for both PR and SEO, a number of factors aside from domain authority and relevance impact how much SEO benefit will be provided.

One example would be no-follow links. Many SEO experts would tell you to not even bother with no-follow links, because there is no direct SEO value provided. These links won’t boost your keyword rankings, or improve your own domain authority score even if you manage to secure a link from The Times.

Mentions = Good – A positive mention of your brand without a link to your page. A reader might gain a positive impression about your brand, but it won’t happen often that a person will search for your site directly.

Backlink (No-follow) = Good – Someone says something positive about your band, provides a link, but it is a no-follow link. There is no direct SEO value from that link, but if people find your website useful, and link to it in the future, it will provide indirect value.

Backlink (Follow) = Better – If there is a positive mention of your company and there is a link to your website, it makes it easier and therefore more likely a person will land on your website. ‘Follow’ links also provide a direct SEO benefit.

Relevant anchor text = The Best – The best-case scenario happens when a positive mention includes a link using relevant anchor text for a term you want to rank for.

How good or amazing your links are for your PR and SEO efforts depend on both their structure and the domain authority of a referring website. Make sure to include both in your future decision-making and amplify your overall marketing results by combining strengths of both PR and SEO strategies.

If you’re interested in a deeper dive, get in touch to discussing how we achieve ROI for our clients from SEO and PR integration.