Are your SEO and PR strategies working seamlessly together? If not, it’s time to bridge the gap! These two areas share many inherent connections that can amplify your results when aligned. Search engines like Google use advanced algorithms to determine the rankings of websites that appear for a given search query.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of enhancing a website’s visibility and ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs) to attract organic traffic. By optimizing content to be relevant, authoritative, and accessible, SEO ensures that both users and search engines can easily find and engage with a site. As a business, being near the top of the search results is an unmatched way to gain brand exposure and build trust among your target audiences. It is critical for building a strong online presence and ensuring your content reaches the right audience, making it an important part of any marketing mix.
SEO encompasses several key components. On-page SEO focuses on optimizing individual web pages by improving elements like keyword usage, meta tags, headers, content quality, URL structure, and internal linking. Off-page SEO involves activities outside the website to build authority, such as link building, social media promotion, and influencer outreach. This is where digital PR comes in.
What is Digital PR?
Digital PR is a way of harnessing the versatility and popularity of digital media to gain exposure for your brand while simultaneously building trust and credibility. Digital PR takes a diverse and continually growing array of formats and leverages audio, visual, and written content to effectively showcase your brand to a wider, more engaged audience. Additionally, it serves as a powerful tool to position key spokespeople as respected thought leaders and experts within their industry. Consisting of earned media rather than paid placements, Digital PR helps to establish legitimacy and generate trust among your target audience.
How Does PR-Driven Link-Building Help SEO?
Link building is a key strategy in SEO because search engines view backlinks—i.e., links from other websites that lead back to your site—as proof of your content’s value and trustworthiness. The more high-quality backlinks a website earns, the higher it will rank in search results. However, it’s important to note that SEO is not a mere numbers game: Google and other search engines put weight on the quality of the linking sites in addition to the overall quantity. Backlinks from reputable, authoritative websites carry more weight and can dramatically boost your site’s credibility.
In many cases, SEO marketers mainly focus on securing the greatest number of backlinks as quickly as possible. This strategy prioritizes quantity and efficiency above all, and often pays little attention to the quality of the websites and platforms which feature the content. It can therefore lead to content being featured on websites that compromise your brand’s credibility, and many major search engines such as Google are actively cracking down on so-called “link farms,” which are websites that exist solely to sell link placement opportunities. In other cases, the backlinks may be consistently in the mid-range, not having enough authority to truly move the needle.
PR can drastically improve SEO strategy, and subsequently the results, as PR-driven link building leverages established public relations strategies to secure high-quality placements on relevant, industry-specific platforms. This approach focuses on placements that enhance both search engine rankings and brand credibility. PR-driven efforts emphasize quality over quantity, understanding that a single placement in a respected news source can significantly impact a brand’s SEO performance. Search engines prioritize trusted and credible sources in their rankings, making high-authority placements far more valuable than a large volume of low-quality links. This strategic focus not only boosts online visibility but also reinforces your brand's reputation as an expert and thought leader in your field.
What Does A High Quality Link Look Like?
With so much content out there, it is not always easy to determine which sites will provide the kind of exposure and credibility that would create the most value for your brand. PR and marketing professionals use metrics such as Domain Authority (DA) to gain a holistic understanding of a website’s overall influence and credibility. Measured on a scale from 1 to 100, DA provides a useful benchmark for assessing a website’s overall strength and competitiveness in search results. Receiving links from high DA sites will in turn boost the DA of your own site, allowing you to rank higher in the search engines.
It is also important to understand the 2 types of links that exist: dofollow and nofollow links. Both types play a crucial role in SEO and link-building strategies. Dofollow links are standard hyperlinks that search engines can follow from the linking website to the linked one, passing authority (often referred to as "link juice") from the one to the other. These links are valuable for improving a site’s domain authority, keyword rankings, and overall search engine performance. For example, a link from a high-authority blog to your site is considered a dofollow link and can significantly enhance your SEO.
By contrast, nofollow links include a specific attribute that instructs search engines not to pass authority or ranking signals to the linked site. While they don’t directly boost rankings, nofollow links can still drive referral traffic, improve brand visibility, and contribute to a diverse backlink profile, which is important for maintaining a natural link-building strategy.
Both types of links are important in a balanced SEO approach. Dofollow links are often the primary target for building authority, while nofollow links can help drive traffic and protect against penalties for unnatural link-building practices. In 2020, Google announced that it would treat nofollow links as "hints" rather than strict directives, meaning they may still be considered for crawling and ranking under certain circumstances. Together, these two kinds of links contribute to a comprehensive SEO strategy by enhancing visibility, traffic, and credibility in search engine rankings.
How To Secure Links
To begin building links, try to find ways to share your insights and expertise with a relevant audience. This can take the form of writing bylined articles, contributing quotations to journalists in search of expertise, or seeking opportunities to be interviewed by digital publications.
Here are some tips to help you get started:
Identify Relevant Publications: Search for industry-specific blogs, trade publications, or news outlets that accept guest posts. Try to target sites that have a strong domain authority and are relevant to your expertise or target market.
Understand Their Guidelines: Every website will have different guidelines surrounding the length, content, and submission process for guest posts. Familiarize yourself with these guidelines to ensure that your content is properly formatted, and consider reading a few other articles from the site to get a sense of the house style.
Develop Expertise: Write about topics on which you have extensive knowledge or a unique angle. Provide your audience with actionable advice and speak directly to their interests and concerns.
Pitch Ideas: Create a concise, compelling pitch that clearly outlines your proposed topic, its value to the publication’s readers, and your credentials as an expert. Personalize the email to demonstrate your familiarity with the site.
Write High-Quality Content: Once accepted, create a thoroughly researched and engaging article that aligns with the publication’s voice and focus. Discuss the topic in a way that enriches the audience’s understanding and provides them with value rather than directly promoting your business.
Include a Strong Byline: Provide a brief but informative author bio that highlights your credentials, expertise, and a link to your website or professional profile. Depending on the nature and audience of the publication, you may want to highlight different credentials for different sites.
Build Relationships: Be polite and professional in your communications and respect the outlet’s deadlines. A positive relationship with a publication’s editors can help build the foundation for further opportunities.
Consistent effort and valuable contributions can help position you as a credible thought leader in your field while expanding your reach through trusted platforms.
An Engine of Growth
Search engine optimization is critical for brands that not only want to boost exposure, but to help define the conversation within their industry. Attaining a high ranking in the search engines allows you to drive more traffic to your website while also sharing your unique expertise and thought leadership. Exposure and trust do not always go hand-in-hand, but an SEO strategy driven by PR allows the two to become intertwined. Strategic and high-quality placements allow your brand to become more than just a name: they help a broader audience become acquainted with your expertise and mission. For this reason, a robust and diverse SEO strategy is a fundamental building block of any brand’s online presence.
As new trends such as voice search optimization, improvements in user experience through Google’s Core Web Vitals, and the rise of AI-driven algorithms like Google’s RankBrain change how we engage with search engines, companies will need to adapt their SEO strategies to stay relevant. While written content remains the backbone of SEO, the growing importance of video and visual search is creating a need for more multimedia content. SEO is a dynamic and ongoing process, and brands will need to continually stay on the cutting edge of changing algorithms and user behaviors to remain competitive.
To learn more about how Mackasey Howard can help you leverage digital PR to improve SEO, Contact Us.
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