For many businesses, especially early-stage startups, it can be difficult to know where to spend your time and money. While there is no easy answer, one of the most effective ways to grow your brand is through an integrated marketing strategy that combines SEO (search engine optimisation) with PR (public relations). Here are a few tips on how you can successfully grow your business using SEO and PR.
In order to have a successful marketing strategy, it is important for companies to integrate SEO and PR (public relations) tactics together. SEO focuses on optimising a company’s website to rank higher on search engines and attract more website traffic. PR, on the other hand, is concerned with building and maintaining a positive image for the company by managing its relationships with customers, the media, and other stakeholders.
When used together, these tactics can complement each other to create a comprehensive marketing strategy. Without PR, a company may struggle to reach a wider customer base and increase engagement with those customers. Additionally, without a comprehensive PR strategy, a company may not be able to leverage its SEO efforts to attract new prospects and establish a positive public presence.
On the other hand, SEO without PR can limit customer relationships since there is no way to distribute important company news and updates efficiently. PR can help by using Press Releases and other channels for reaching out to the audience and keeping them updated about the company. By integrating SEO and PR, businesses can reach the right target audience, build reputation and trust, driving customer loyalty and higher returns on investment (ROI).
In terms of SEO, it is important to have a strong technical foundation, conduct keyword research, create optimized content, track analytics and goals, develop a conversion strategy, and use paid strategies such as link building. Thought leadership is another important aspect of this integrated strategy, which involves showcasing the business’s expertise and innovation through onsite content, social content, bylines, books, speaking opportunities, podcasts and videos. These can help establish the company as a thought leader in its industry. Finally, PR efforts include creating press assets, leveraging media mentions, creating press releases, and launching new products or services.
1. Why should you care about SEO and PR?
You’re probably familiar with SEO, search engine optimization, and PR, public relations. SEO is about making sure that your website or blog shows up in the search engines and it’s a vital tool for improving traffic to your site. For most of us, these skills are often difficult to learn, but if you invest a bit of time and effort, you can afford to get better at these marketing skills. A lot of your audience probably already uses search engines for looking for information about products and services on the web. It’s pretty much impossible to get people to read the whole story of your business if they only get a portion of it through a search engine. As a small business, it doesn’t make sense to be the only company in their minds. A large percentage of Google’s 300 million monthly searches are social media queries, and news stories occupy another third of all internet searches, reports Cision.com. If you fail to provide an SEO optimised website to the web, people won’t find you as your offering as easily. By using increased keywords on your site, you increase the likelihood that Google will notify your site that your page is of interest and help bring traffic to your website. Obviously, this effort should be ongoing all the time but Google provides you with a useful tool to track keyword performance. You should also take the time to market your business on an increasing number of social media platforms and reply to comments from your customers and followers on Twitter. Studies have shown that businesses that answer questions and engage with their audience are more likely to be featured and get a greater number of website visitors. Social media is vital to increasing brand awareness, according to research from Edelman. It can also help you tap into a wider audience when email is often not reachable. SEO is the process of making your content more appealing to Google, which in turn makes it more appealing to your audience. PR is about making your content more appealing to the media, which in turn makes it more appealing to your audience. Both SEO and PR are important but they’re only successful when they work together. When a press release gets published, you’re sending signals to the search engines and to the world that you have something authoritative to say about a particular topic. When authoritative websites (like Forbes, Inc or Mashable) publish your press release, they’re driving signals back to your brand and best of all, a backlink. Promoting your content means putting out great content. Promoting your content means you’re proud of what you’ve created and you want to share it with people. Promoting your content means you want to give people a taste of what you’re capable of and that you want to build your reputation.
2. How does SEO work to help your business?
Search Engine Optimisation is the process of optimising your website to rank higher in search engines like Google. It’s important because Google is the number one search engine in the world and most people use Google to find businesses online. With a powerful engine like Google at your disposal, you can advertise on Google and directly get to the top 10 results for your keyword. Search engine optimisation (SEO) involves creating targeted website content, integrating them into the Google algorithm, and then adding SEO-enhanced copy and images. This allows you to rank higher in Google search results and increase your organic traffic. SEO is all about strategy and it helps startups, brands, and small businesses to truly reach their audience. Creating content on your website that targets traffic to your landing page is a critical part of SEO. This content will provide your potential customers with helpful information and will influence the traffic towards your landing page. Content can include blog posts or articles, white papers, eBooks, videos, job listings, profiles, case studies, or anything else you feel is relevant to your business. Many people think that having a huge social media presence is necessary for brands to grow. While it is important to have a presence on social media in general — especially when it comes to your niche and industry — using it as part of your SEO strategy is advantageous. The entrepreneur can use social media to ask questions and pose product opportunities. There are many companies that have harnessed the power of social media for their SEO strategy. For example; Tom’s Guide, Beanstalk, and Lucky Day have all gained significant traction by using social media as part of their SEO strategy. Brands typically spend 70% of their marketing budgets on SEO. However, they only make up 5% of their overall website traffic from search engines. This means that they need to be using all of their resources to drive traffic to their landing page from search engines.
3. What are good ways to market your company using SEO?
When it comes to SEO, it’s important to remember that you’re not just creating content to rank well on search engines. You’re also creating content for the people who will read your content. If you’re not creating content that people want to read, then you won’t have a strong SEO strategy. When producing SEO content, it’s important to remember that you’re not just creating content to rank well on search engines. You’re also creating content for the people who will read your content. If you’re not creating content that people want to read, then you won’t have a strong SEO strategy. (By the way, make sure you have won the thumbs up a column from your audience on your blog!) Moreover, when you consider the role PR plays in a company’s overall brand awareness, confidence, and influence, it becomes even more important to make sure that this is integrated into your SEO strategy. What should SEO and PR professionals know about one another? If you’ve ever considered hiring a PR expert to help grow your business, you’ve probably started with the mentality that expertise in one field trumps expertise in another. This doesn’t mean that PR teams will always be able to do the kind of outreach, surveys, and research that SEO teams do, but incorporating these skills into what the PR team does can pay off in the long run. After all, if the PR team creates the content, but your SEO team helps to optimize that content for search engine rankings, a win-win agenda can occur. A privileged position in a PR team can also translate into more resources for producing SEO content. If you have someone on your team who knows how to set up a survey, someone who can write a compelling blog post, or someone who has the time and ability to sit down with a CEO and have a beer (or two) about the state of their business—then they are in a great position to produce content that the SEO team will then be able to promote on their site.
4. Why is PR so important for your business?
If you want your business to be successful, you need to be willing to put yourself out there and be seen. One of the ways to be seen is by doing public relations. PR is important because it helps you get known and it boosts your credibility and authority. It’s also a great way to get free marketing for your business. To be effective, you will need to determine what is important to you, what your company is good at, and what resources are necessary for you to succeed. For example, do you want to focus your PR efforts on keywords, social media, writing, or video marketing?
5. How to Use SEO for PR
Before you start working on creating a PR strategy, it would be wise to understand what your company’s primary goals are. Getting to know the unique challenges of what you do is key. Identify how you can add value to consumers and what keywords are important to you in your industry. Keep in mind that hiring a full-time employee may include the pay for a PR strategy, and this is a decision that you will need to make based on your business goals. Before beginning any marketing efforts for your PR strategy, mapping out the resources necessary is a must. Creating a to-do list with a list of tasks to coordinate will ease the process. You can create tasks in an online calendar or even an Excel spreadsheet. Before implementing the necessary tools to coordinate the PR efforts, it is important to determine who should work on the PR strategy. Do you need a generalist (i.e. a person who can help with every task) or a more granular (i.e. a person who can focus on a particular task)?
One thing you may want to consider before launching any PR campaign is the amount of time you will need to dedicate to the effort. If you need to create the content, promote the campaign, write the press releases, and generate the social media content, you may need to clock in up to 10 hours per day. Once your campaign is ready reach out to the media and to newswires, some newswires encourage you to put backlinks in. This is where Google picks up the backlinks in the published articles.
6. How can you market your business through PR?
You can use PR to generate leads and build your business. PR is a great way to get your business in front of customers that you can reach through press releases. Press releases are one of the best ways to be in front of customers, even if you don’t have a big budget for advertising. It can be tricky to market your brand if you don’t have a website to sell your products and services. A website is an essential part of your marketing strategy. If you only have a blog and nothing else, you are missing the biggest opportunity to gain customers and build your brand. When you have a website and a presence on social media, you can add PR to your strategy. You can use press releases and social media to share stories, tips, and news about your business. When customers find out about a product, service, or event you are promoting, they’ll be more likely to decide to give your business a go. It is always a good idea to have a social media plan in place before you launch. Otherwise, you may find that there aren’t enough leads coming in. There are two major things to remember when you decide to use PR. The first is that you need to do something you’re great at to create great content. Try to make it as exciting as possible for customers to share your content. There is a lot of value in skipping the work and being a typewriter salesman. The second thing to remember is that your content needs a purpose. It needs to be something customers can relate to. Why would they want to read your story? The interview subject matters because when customers learn about your business, even if they are an insignificant percentage of the thousands of people who visit your website, they have a legitimate interest in buying what you sell. Your audience wants to know why you are in the position you are in. Creating great content doesn’t always reveal a brilliant marketing strategy.
