How SEO and PR Combination Work Together to Drive Traffic

The digital revolution that swept the world of marketing and sales continues to intensify, emerging with sophisticated solutions to meet changing consumer behavior.

Also, trends have already emerged for some time as the pandemic of 2020 accelerated digital transformation in ways that we could never have imagined.

More importantly, many consumers are bypassing brick-and-mortar stores in favor of e-commerce platforms due to lockdowns and restrictions related to the pandemic, accelerating a process that has been going on for years. This means that PR professionals have changed the way they do business, seeking to embrace new digital technologies and keep up with digital technology trends.

But how are SEO and PR related? Let’s find out…

What is SEO?

SEO stands for “search engine optimization”. In simple terms, it means the process of optimizing your site to make it appear when people search for products or services related to your business on Google, Bing, and other search engines.

The more visible your page is when it comes to search results, the better your chances are to attract attention and attract potential business.

Search engines like Google and Bing make use of bots to crawl pages on the web. They then go from site to site to collect information about the pages, and index them accordingly. Think of an index as a large library where a reader can point to a book (or web page) to help you find exactly what you’re looking for at that moment.

Next, the algorithm examines the pages in the index, considering hundreds of factors or rankings, to determine the order in which pages will appear in search results for a given query.

Why is SEO important for marketing?

SEO is an important part of digital marketing, as people make billions of searches every year, often with the business purpose to find information about products and services. Search is often the source of digital traffic for brands and complements other marketing channels. Higher visibility and higher rankings in search results than your competitors can have a huge impact on your results.

However, search results have evolved over the past few years to provide users with specific answers and information that can keep them on the results page instead of directing them to other websites. Also, note that features such as rich results and knowledge sections in search results can increase visibility and provide users with more information about your business directly in the results.

What is PR?

Public relations (PR) are a set of methods and strategies related to the management of how to disseminate information about a person or company to the public, especially to the media. Its purpose is to spread news or important events of the company, to maintain the image of the company, and to put a positive spin on bad events to reduce their failure.

Public relations can take the form of company press releases, press conferences, press interviews, social media, or other venues. Any person or company that works in the public eye is faced with disseminating information about their actions to the public.

Although public relations are an institution in itself, any attempt to express oneself in some way can be considered a form of public relations. Public relations are different from advertising as public relations tries to present the image of a person or brand in an organic way, such as creating good news from sources and supporting business decisions that will get public support.

Why is Digital PR important for SEO?

While traditional PR (TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines) still exists and continues to influence your brand, it is digital PR that is getting most of your brand’s attention today.

Digital PR works to establish a trustworthy reputation for you online, which, in turn, can also serve your SEO efforts. Both aim to support rights in one way or another.

Digital PR benefits SEO by providing opportunities for backlinks and valuable words across different channels. It communicates your company, your brand, your management, your products, your services, and everything important to your business.

These words, backlinks, and advertising methods help build your reputation and authority. Another way to explain the importance of digital PR for SEO is that the key to improving organic search rankings is high links, and PR can provide that.

To drive the point home when it comes to the importance of digital PR for SEO, here is a simple example of how it can work. Imagine that your content marketing team is creating a website full of important keywords as part of an SEO strategy, intending to get a higher ranking in the SERPs. Visitors to your site may or may not respond, depending on the value of the content.

This is where digital PR can step in to help. When a digital PR campaign gets high attention, leads to reputation, and high links to trustworthy websites, your SEO benefits.

Global SEO Market and PR Industry

The SEO market is growing every day. The digitization of business has led to an increase in online content, thus increasing the demand for SEO services. Also, small, and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are increasingly accessing these services to expand their customer base and remain competitive in the market.

In addition, it is expected that the need to stay ahead of the competition and the increase in return on investment (ROI) will increase the demand for these services.

To illustrate this purpose, it’s worth noting that the global search engine optimization services market is expected to reach $74.76 billion in 2023. It was $62.75 billion in 2022.

Shifting our focus to the world of PR and PR industry trends, this booming market will, much like SEO, grow exponentially. The PR market is expected to be worth $129 billion in 2025, compared to the $88 billion reached in 2020.

How Can PR And SEO Work Together to Drive Traffic

When SEO and PR efforts are combined, they create a process of creating valuable content in the right place, with the right audience, and at the right time.

Your own advertising and marketing efforts (your website, blog, social media – whatever your brand creates on its own) will be both SEO optimized and designed to cover relevant topics, issues, and stories. At the same time, your PR output and earned media (guest blogging on other sites, newsletters, etc.) will drive traffic back to your website where prospects can convert.

Over time, these combined efforts increase your domain potential, giving your brand a strong foundation for continued exposure, better brand recognition, and continued organic traffic.

Conclusion

Of course, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to implement an integrated PR and SEO strategy. What’s important is effective communication and collaboration between the people and organizations that manage your content and market your brand.

A good first step is to consider the division of labor as your business when it comes to SEO and PR. Is there a group that takes care of everything? If so, that may mean teaching the team the importance of a SEO PR strategy and spending time planning how to do it.

If you have different teams dealing with each, it might be a good idea to create clear and open lines of communication between them and specific ways you want them to work together.