Integrating Public Relations and Online Marketing

As a small business owner, you may already know that your company should be using both digital marketing and PR tactics. But if you want to make the most from your investments, PR and marketing shouldn’t operate as entirely separate entities. By integrating PR and SEO, you can maximize your online real estate to get more, higher quality leads and sales—not just from the web, but in general.

Why PR and SEO Integration Is Important

In the early days of SEO, marketers practicing shady SEO methods constantly landed on the first pages of search results. More links, regardless of how ethical, and reviews, even if they weren’t real, were keys to ranking success. That’s no longer the case—far from it. Google and other search engines are now taking trustworthiness seriously when it comes to your rankings—and shady SEO tactics won’t make the cut. People and the user experience now come first.

What does that mean in terms of your PR and SEO strategies? Your approach to marketing and PR shouldn’t be the same today as it was five years ago—treating the two campaigns separately could result in missed opportunities and wasted money. With approximately 97 percent of buyers searching for local businesses online, it’s important that your PR campaign reaches your digital audience and that your local SEO efforts have the social signals to establish trust. That means:

• Having positive reviews on your site, Google+, and in as many venues as possible
• Interacting with customers and generating user engagement on social media
• Sharing relevant, timely information about your business via blogs, news stories, PR articles, and social media
• Providing quality content linking to credible sources

How to Integrate PR and SEO Strategies

Setting one overall goal relating to your business objectives is a critical first step to successful PR and SEO integration. Once you’ve established your goal, you can go about planning PR and digital marketing strategies that can help you effectively reach that goal. In our experience, the best strategies comprise the following steps:

• Establish your target audience and your voice – combining the data you have on users who visit your site with keyword research, surveys, and CRM databases can help you create the big picture when it comes to who is really using your services. In turn, this can help you figure out what message you want to send them and how you can effectively send it.
• Determine what mediums you will use – consider the most relevant sources for research and marketing. The final list should contain high authority websites and social media platforms your clients are using, as well as relevant digital and non-digital publications they may be reading.
• Create high quality content, and share it – having relevant, informative content on both digital and non-digital platforms is critical to getting more sales. This can include landing pages and blogs on your website, social media posts, e-mail newsletters, brochures, and press releases, as well as digital, print, and TV advertisements.
• Track > Test > Tweak > Repeat – we’ve said it before and we’ll say it again—your integrated PR and SEO strategy is useless without the data to show it’s actually working. Collect analytics data, along with the hits and readership of your articles, to see if you’re hitting the goal. If you’re not, use your campaign results to adjust it.

Get More Leads with PR and SEO Integration

Researching, implementing, tracking, and testing your PR and SEO strategies can take time and consist of many details. Don’t take the chance on a DIY campaign if you have little time or experience.

Contact the pros at Blue Corona, and we’ll make sure the job gets done right!