Public Relations (PR) is a business practice that plays a pivotal role in defining a business' relationship with its employees, customers, and shareholders.
Good PR strengthens brands and builds the public's trust in it - the primary reason most businesses have PR professionals to take care of public communications such as conferences, press releases, social media engagement, crisis communication, and media and employee communications.
The efficacy of traditional PR can be increased many times over by combining Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and PR efforts - SEO PR.
SEO is an internet marketing technique that improves natural page ranking of web content by harnessing the power of search engines through the strategic placement of relevant keywords within text.
SEO enhances PR efforts by infusing SEO techniques in online PR copy - articles, newsletters, press releases, website content, whitepapers, RSS feeds, blog articles or any other text published on the internet for greater brand visibility.
SEO PR is an art that creates the right mesh of keywords and good copywriting.
An excess of keywords can defeat the purpose of the content, as can its incorrect positioning.
This is where professional SEO services come into the picture.
They are well versed with the working of various search engine's algorithms, popular keywords, and strategies such as cross-linking to improve the natural ranking of the published copy.
They are careful to avoid link and keyword spamming that can get the website banned from search engines.
SEO PR efforts should be supported by other marketing campaigns such as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising or traditional PR to maximize ROI.
The results of SEO PR are more measurable than traditional PR in terms of increased traffic, press release pickup, and search engine rankings.
SEO PR leads to long term results.
A newsworthy press release can be archived by websites that pull relevant news feeds such Google News or industry/product specific websites such as Philatelic News (a blog dedicated to postage meters).
As the press release includes links to the propounding business website, it works all the better for the brand.
SEO PR helps businesses stay on top of new market trends and increase their customer spectrum by reaching out to new audiences.
While SEO PR involves many techniques and strategies, the simplest way a business can get started is to combine existing PR and SEO efforts.