SEO and PR: Friends with Benefits

Are your SEO and PR firms working together? How your publicist can help you rank higher on Google.

With so much competition and lack of conclusive data in the field of search engine optimization, it becomes increasingly difficult to make your site stand out from countless other businesses vying for your position on Google.  The amount of competition for relevant keywords has gotten so immense that it takes a good amount of research to find strong terms that are not so highly competitive that they’re useless.  The easiest way to set yourself apart from the masses is a strong relationship between your PR and SEO.

Simply supplying a list of keywords to blog or press release writers can help them search optimize their content based around your chosen keywords.  Let’s say for example that your company manufactures synthetic lily pads for use in frog ponds and tank habitats. It would seem natural to base website content, blog entries etc. on the products themselves. A brief study of keywords and search density will show that very few people are actually interested in searching for “lily pads”, more than 10 times the traffic flows around the term “frog”. While the competition (39 million sites on Google) makes the all-important first two pages of Google’s search almost unobtainable, at least there are people looking for it. Furthermore, a little research into this term will show that just as many people are searching for scientific information about frogs, ranging from “frog dissection” to “frog life cycle”. So why not put together a case study on how your lily pads are scientifically designed to fit into the frog’s eco-system and lead to a healthy life cycle? It will certainly increase your search traffic while greatly diminishing competition for search rankings.

Public relations initiatives can be integral to building a network of inbound links to your website, which has a major influence on your search engine magnetism.   Let’s go back to our synthetic lily pads. While looking into keywords and digging around with the term “frog”, I noticed that there are more searches about how to draw a frog than there are for the term “frog” by itself.  The keyword phrase “How to draw a cartoon frog” has 921 searches listed in Wordtracker, as compared to 1561 for “frog”, but it has only 75,000 competing pages on Google as compared to 39 million. This means the ratio of searches to competition is 300 times stronger for “how to draw a cartoon frog”. While this might not fit into the technical or scientific parts of your product’s online presence, why not design a PR marketing initiative around this idea? You could be gathering inbound links from every elementary science and art teacher with a website. While not necessarily reaching your specific target audience, this alone will increase your search engine visibility dramatically.

This strong PR/SEO relationship will also allow you to highlight important keyword phrases in your non-web based publicity campaigns, using subconscious repetitive suggestion to lead your target audience to search for your chosen terms. While there is little search activity based around the term “lily pad”, it is a very specific and targeted word for your business. Aside from this it’s not a highly competitive term on the major search engines (especially “how to draw a lily pad”!). So how do we make use of this as a PR and marketing tool? By choosing keywords to highlight in non-web related initiatives we can use the incredible reach of the media and the power of suggestion to drive people to search for lily pads. When people conjure up what they search for, they will have the tendency to phrase things according to what they’ve absorbed through repetition. By carefully choosing keywords and branding, and weaving them into your other initiatives you can actually increase searches for those terms. This will drive traffic straight to your site, without necessarily a conscious decision on the part of your audience.

Combined with traditional SEO, these strategies will help to make all of your content and publicity work most effectively for your search rankings.  This isn’t just effective on your search engine rankings, an in depth knowledge of the consumer’s keyword choice can help you to steer your PR campaigns in the right direction as well. There is no way for any statistical study of marketing or consumer trends to be as up to date or accurate as search statistics. With such a huge mass of data being recorded and reported on a daily basis, having enough information is no longer the problem. Instead, it becomes a matter of figuring out how to interpret it.