We bet most of you are well aware of marketing trends for 2024. This year will be all about brands connecting with audiences in newly redefined ways: AI has become a game changer; the dominance of video marketing and short-form content; shifting to nano-influencers; unique content for customers. However, compiling PR and digital marketing remains timeless and forceful.
In 2024 it’s all about having a bird’s-eye view of every customer interaction across all of your business channels. As customers reach out to companies through different channels, this holistic approach adapts to their wants and provides them with high-quality customer service. A survey conducted by Gartner stated that 82% of CMOs reprioritized investments in digital channels in 2023, showing that recent shifts in the PR and content marketing landscape underline the importance of adaptation to new trends.
So, how to boost your brand visibility or enhance the campaign results? – Merge PR tools and digital marketing techniques for your campaign.
Benefits that a business can get from this integration are: improving SEO and ranking, increasing website traffic, enhancing brand trust, and generating leads.
In fact, SEO and PR have many natural overlaps.
In this blog post, we will consider several ways in which SEO and PR become a winning combination.
Build backlinks through PR
The majority of today’s PR work revolves around digital PR. Pieces of news and other media outlets focus greatly on their online content.
A central ingredient of successful SEO is backlinks, and here is where digital PR can help significantly.
By placing articles in high authority outlets, such as renowned online news media, you can collect high-quality PR backlinks.
How? – When your press release gets mentioned as a source, news outlets will likely link back to the related article or blog. A well-positioned piece of content can thus generate hundreds of high-quality backlinks at once. Another powerful thing is to be quoted as an industry expert in an article.
To succeed in this area, you should:
- First of all, learn the basics of SEO and backlinks. Here is a clear and simple explanation of this topic, and beyond that with an example from the real estate market.
- Pay attention to the quality of your link profile. Natural links are like votes of confidence from other websites, indicating that your content is valuable and trustworthy. They enhance credibility, improve organic traffic, prevent penalties against your website and ensure long-term sustainability.
- Do your best to analyse competitors’ backlinks. Such investigation will help to forecast the ability of your content to rank for its target phrases, to notice potentially harmful or spammy links to your website, and to see preferable links for your target audience.
There are some good tools for competitor backlink analysis.
What we recommend to avoid:
Often SEO specialists invent manipulative techniques to cheat on search engines and get a higher ranking for the website than it deserves. Such methods are called black hat SEO or cloaking. We warn you from applying them since they are not secure and your account can get penalised or even banned by Google.
Improve CTR via brand awareness
Did you know that more than 50% of searches don’t result in any clicks? This can be problematic for SEO experts, as even pages that are highly optimized and appear at the top of search results may not receive any traffic.
How to deal with it and improve the click-through rate? – Investing in higher brand awareness.
Brand awareness significantly improves CTR in search results. And it makes sense. We are prone to trust familiar sources. For example, if you have heard about some new product in the news, you are more likely to recognize the brand name when it shows up in search results. Thus, your chances of clicking the link and visiting the website increase significantly.
By improving your keywords’ CTR you will drive your cost efficiency, improve your ad-rank and be able to evaluate your campaign accurately.
Increase credibility for better SEO conversion rates
User experience is a crucial ranking factor for search engines. The worst indication for any website is a user that immediately returns to the search engine results page (SERP), as that shows that the website or website content did not match the intent of the search.
One way to decrease the bounce rate of any web page and increase the time on a page is by adding different trust elements to the website. A web page that looks trustworthy is more likely to invite users to stay longer, even if the content might be marginally worse than on other pages.
PR can help SEO by building that trust. A website that has been featured in Forbes or the Times or any other well-known media in your field is more likely to build trust.
What can be done straightforwardly to optimize the conversion rate? – Go try some of these conversion rate tools.
Leverage themed output by PR and SEO integration
Picking topics for publications is where your team can get creative. Look for themes or ideas that have the potential to resonate with your target audience and cover them from different viewpoints in both owned and earned media, to embody your position as an influential expert.
The SEO output will likely be articles, insights, guides, or just old blog content on your own website, and you can also explore opportunities for writing guest articles for customer or supplier websites.
The PR content creation is likely to take a different form depending on the media, such as thought leadership pieces, news commentary, and online media. Your themed content can also be shared on social media and through email.
Integrating your PR and SEO efforts will boost the chances that your target audience will find you as an opinion maker on your chosen theme. And each piece of content you generate should be optimised for search. The key principle – you should routinely follow the same SEO best practices no matter what. Thousands of words are worth nothing without real-life proof.
Here are case studies about successfully integrating SEO into PR strategy to validate theory with practice.
Wrapping up the topic
PR and SEO are natural best friends. While PR can help SEO by creating brand awareness, backlinks, and social proof, SEO can benefit PR with several analytical insights that can inform PR strategy.
PR and SEO are symbiotic marketing forces by nature and work together holistically to achieve a common goal – to make your business flourish.
