You’re at a conference and you’re chatting to someone with a PR background about SEO. You might not agree with everything they’re saying, but instead of arguing your point about why SEO is different, it might be worth listening to what they have to say and thinking about what SEO and PR can actually learn from each other.
To start with, PR is very proactive. This is really great and something that the SEO industry can learn from it. Often with SEO, we don’t get the opportunity to be as proactive because sometimes a client will only come to you for SEO because they’ve seen their competitors are already doing it. Often, with link building, sometimes the best way to do it is to look at what other people are doing, and again that’s reactive because you’re emulating what’s already been done.
Obviously, with PR, it’s very focused on building a relationship with the audience. Sometimes with SEO, this point gets lost a little bit. It’s easy to focus on the search engines rather than the person. I think this point is particularly important at the moment with the updates that are currently and that are bound to happen with Google. If you’ve got the user at the centre of your SEO strategy, I don’t think you can go too far wrong.
So PR has got a really big focus on brand and reputation. Sometimes this does get missed within SEO. It’s being picked up on a bit more now with things like page one domination. But I think it would be really good for SEO to focus on the brand more as a whole and not just get caught up on smaller details.
Accountability is something that obviously both disciplines focus on, but I think maybe SEO focuses particularly on accountability because it’s so easy for us to measure the progress that we make. Maybe PR struggles with that a little bit more because of the mix of online and offline media making it more difficult to measure.
So those are just some top level ideas. Obviously, I’m from an SEO background. So if you’ve got a PR background and have got any ideas on how this can be developed and what PR and SEO really can learn from each other, then please leave a comment below or find us on Koozai.com.
Twitter trends has now become personalised (just like everything else online these days!!). If you don’t want personalised trends shown when you log onto Twitter just select Twitter.com. More info at https://blog.twitter.com/2012/06/tailored-trends-bring-you-closer.html
Well thanks for the twitter personlisation idea.
Thanks for putting together this video Tara. In many ways I feel my role has changed a lot over the last year to take on lots of PR functions including:
– Liasing with the media
– Performing outreach
– Monitoring our brandAlthough these came about due to a role change, at every stage they felt like very natural additions to an SEO role. All of those items have SEO benefits, for example a high profile media link can be worth an incredible amount of value (and sometimes cause overnight ranking changes if you get anchor text).
Feeding everything back to the SEO team I’ve learnt a lot myself and vice versa, so totally agree that both disciplines can help each other.
What do you think?
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