There are several different factors that affect your business’s overall success. As we continue to rapidly move forward into the digital world, it is very important for your business to not only have a digital presence but to operate successfully online. That success includes the trust of your current or potential customers. Along with the trust your website needs to build with search engines like Google.
With any business, you need the help of a good PR strategy. This is to help navigate your brand, especially with the increasing importance of having an online presence. So what is PR exactly? Public Relations or “PR” is the professional maintenance of a favorable/positive public image or relationship of a business or organization. In short, PR is how you present your business to the public. Especially to your current or future clients and customers. Every business will want to maintain a positive reputation with the public.
So how does having good or bad PR affect your business online, and specifically your SEO? As you probably already know, SEO or “search engine optimization” is the process of increasing website traffic through improvements in visibility on a search engine results page. What information about your business is ranking better than others? Is it your good information? Is it bad reviews or good reviews? When you type your business into Google, what are the results that come up first to the top? Let’s go over how your PR efforts can work with your SEO efforts to achieve better search results while maintaining and improving your brand reputation.
The Short Term and Long Term Plan
With any good PR plan, you are going to want to do a sentiment analysis for your brand and reputation management strategy. Ask yourself questions about the public perception of your brand:
- How does the public view your business?
- How do you know they think this?
- Where did they come to think that?
There are several resources available to help you get started. Once you collect the data, you have a great jumping off point to know how the public perceives you. If your overall reputation online is good, then the terms and key phrases people are searching about your brand and business will most likely appear at the top of the search.
Let’s say someone posts something negative about your business. This could be on social media or someone left a bad review on a popular review platform. Your PR short term plan of action would be to immediately address and try to take care of, respond, or handle the situation. However, even if you respond to the review or comment right away, we know that SEO takes time. You need to plan for the long term goal.
Your SEO is your long term strategy. SEO can be used to help you recover from bad PR. Or it could increase your good PR and that sentiment to the public. You need to build both trust with your customers and search engines. Depending on where your PR currently stands for your business, your SEO strategy might change. Gage where you are and where you want to be. In turn, you have the tools to address your campaign the best way possible.
Let’s use this same example of a bad review. When you get a bad review, it may be at the top of the search when someone looks for your business online. You have this negative review that could potentially be hurting your brand. Someone may be searching for your business online and see this review and think twice about doing business with you. On the PR side, you would want to respond to the review to clear up any information, and you will want to start planning and soliciting positive reviews to hopefully push that review down and have better results coming to the top. On the SEO side, you will want to start ranking for terms that are positive and would rank higher, if possible.
How SEO can help your PR strategy
So, how does SEO help? As mentioned, a major part of your PR strategy is your brand and reputation management. As you see the results when you search for your business, or specific phrases associated with your business, it can help you understand your business’s sentiment on search engines and where to begin. By examining these results, they can help you build a stronger SEO strategy for your PR efforts.
Here are some key ways your SEO and PR can work together:
Keyword Research and Implementation
Choosing the best keywords for your campaign is crucial to ranking well. Understand where you are and target keywords of where you want to be. When you choose the right keywords, this will help to put your website and business at the top of the search results.
If your PR team wants your business to be recognized for certain achievements or important information about your business, then you can implement that key phrase into your strategy and build your campaign over time. 5W Public Relations states: “Your SEO team is able to improve the quality of the PR team’s campaigns by regularly measuring their rankings and performing search engine analysis. This type of peer review enables your PR team to work to develop more effective campaigns that are better at reaching your target audience. Your SEO team can examine things like keyword efficiency, click-through rates and much more. All of this information is able to be utilized by your PR team. They can then create more effective campaigns in the future.”
Reputation Management
As your business grows and changes, continue to put out the best messaging for your brand. Whether reviews, feedback, or information are shared publicly about your business by you or a customer, you should respond, share, or engage with the feedback. Choose the best messaging for your business and push out the best links and information. Overtime, you can build a solid reputation online as you rank for positive terms.
Amplify Content/Social Media
With a strong social media strategy in place, you can use your social media to push out messaging for your business as well as amplify your content. With strong, good quality content, you can establish your business as thought leaders in your industry and rank well for that content. Drive traffic with your good content to your site and you will build trust and authority with the search engines.
Guest Blogging/Backlinks
A great way to bring people back to your site is by guest blogging for other businesses in your industry. You not only establishing yourself as a thought leader. You are in turn building a positive reputation within that industry online. Providing backlinks for other businesses who are sharing good content, that also have trust with search engines, will help to drive traffic to your site. This will build both a trustworthy reputation and help improve your rankings over time.
Your PR and SEO efforts can really strengthen each other with a strong, effective strategy. SEO doesn’t change quickly. It takes time to rank and build trust and authority. As you combine the efforts of your PR strategy, with brand management and focus on building good PR for your business, it can help your long term SEO strategy. You will increase your overall traffic and trust when you rank well, drive positive traffic to your website, and review platforms and social channels. You can also maintain positive results overall.
Need help with your SEO strategy? Get started with Boostability today!
