Jon Robinson (00:02):
Hi, everyone. Today, we’re going to talk about how SEO and PR, public relations efforts, work in tandem. SEO and PR are both marketing strategies that help your brand gain brand recognition, helps you eventually generate more leads, more top-line revenue for your business. Traditionally, those are kind of siloed marketing efforts, but nowadays, coverage is really just coverage, digital coverage, traditional coverage. That type of coverage needs to work in unison in order to really benefit your brand at the highest level. So we’re going to talk about specific ways that SEO and PR efforts help each other out and how one plus one could potentially equal three for your business.
Jon Robinson (00:52):
So we’re going to start with SEO. The top two factors for SEO are content and links. PR can actually give you both. We’re going to start on the content side. PR efforts provide unique and proprietary content for your brand. So your PR team can generate and pitch various news pitches or concepts that your brand is coming up with to media outlets to get you coverage. Something as simple as a press release that lives on your website can provide additional keyword opportunities for your brand from an SEO perspective. So think about all the different ways that your PR team is positioning and pitching stories to media outlets. All of that content that you’re trying to get coverage about needs to live on your website and serves SEO purposes.
Jon Robinson (01:46):
The second thing here is links. So backlinks are a huge opportunity for you to help boost your SEO presence. Content tells Google the keywords that you should be ranking for. Links are how you get those keywords to rank. So when your brand is getting mentions in media outlets through your PR efforts, those are potentially the best backlinks that you could get. They serve as an incredible link opportunity. If you’re getting mentioned in a news outlet, even another website mentioning some content that you’ve pitched, you should reach out to those websites, you should reach out to those media outlets, and make sure that they’re actually linking back to the content that’s relevant on your website.
Jon Robinson (02:29):
These links are extremely, extremely valuable. We see a lot of brands, a lot of law firms that are getting mentions in the news, but those mentions aren’t actually linking back to their website. So it’s really important that those PR efforts don’t go underutilized and not serving a significant SEO boost by backlinking back to your website.
Jon Robinson (02:51):
Another thing that I want to mention is what’s known as EAT in the SEO world. It stands for expertise, authority, and trust. So your brand, your law firm, in order to rank highly needs great content, needs a lot of links, but also needs to be positioned as an expert with authority and trustworthiness. And the reason why is because in addition to the algorithmic way that Google crawls your website and determines how it should rank, there are manual search raters that Google hires and contracts to manually review websites that are ranking highly for certain keywords. And those search raters are asked to gauge various things related to the expertise and authority and trust of your website.
Jon Robinson (03:44):
If your brand is being mentioned, your law firm is being mentioned, externally on other websites, in media outlets, if you have good brand recognition, if you’re noting that you’re being mentioned in those other media outlets, that raises your expertise. It raises your authority. Your content then becomes more authoritative to these search engine raters so that they are going to inform Google through their rating process that your content is actually something that can be trusted and is authoritative on the subject matter.
Jon Robinson (04:18):
Specifically in the legal space, as well as in finance and healthcare, the types of topics that you’re going to be writing about on your website require a very high level of EAT, of expertise, authority, and trust, because these are things that affect a person’s money. It affects their life. It affects their health. And Google knows that and has become more aware of the fact that there is a lot of content out on the internet that does not have this expertise or authority and is potentially positioning false information or misleading information. By being a brand that has significant PR efforts and is getting mentioned in other news and media outlets, you are now receiving that external validation for your expertise. So that is another way that PR helps your SEO efforts.
Jon Robinson (05:11):
Traditionally, SEO and other social media is known as owned media and PR is known as earned media. Nowadays, these things just very much work together. It’s really important that you have both and that you have a cohesive effort. Think about things like brand recognition. If you’re Googling something and you have a bunch of different options to choose from in the top three results, if you recognize a brand or a law firm for one of those results because of all their PR efforts, maybe you’ve seen the law firm or brand mentioned in the news, or you’ve read an article somewhere else, or you’ve seen a commercial, some sort of external validation elsewhere, that is going to lead you to more likely click on the result that has that brand recognition.
Jon Robinson (05:59):
PR is the way that you are gaining that external brand recognition. It’s going to improve the click-through rate of your results in the search engine results. So it’s something else that you should think about. SEO and PR, very tightly knit, work very closely together. Your PR efforts help your SEO, your SEO helps your PR. Just something that you need to think about when you’re looking at your marketing mix, making sure that you have a cohesive strategy that is not leaving one of these things without being accounted for. So thanks very much for watching, and we’ll see you again soon.
