We need to talk about SEO PR or PR SEO, whichever way round you prefer. Why? In order to answer the following question:
“We’ve got a brand new website. What do we do if we want to rank for competitive keywords?”
1) You create great on message content to populate the site with.
2) You earn links from authoritative editorial sites with outstanding PR.
3) You sacrifice a lamb to the great deity GOOGLE.
Two of those three tactics work. Hint: we stopped sacrificing lambs years ago.
Good PR is shareable. It’s interesting. It will naturally acquire its originator links.
It could be a news story in which a company is repeatedly linked to as the source (hint: figure out which newspapers do this and target them).
It could be a stunt, it could be a piece of original research, it could be the provocative opinion of a company founder. In short there are loads of ways PR results in links. And what do we know ladies and gents, boys and girls? Points mean… links mean prizes.
We know this because Google tells us so. When asked what the most important keyword ranking factors are, Andrey Lipattsev, a Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google said:
“I can tell you what they are. It is content. And it’s links pointing to your site.”
Thing is, you don’t need hundreds of links. You need an inbound link profile that’s better than your competitors’. Oh yeah, and nine times out of ten SEO PR will be the way to do this – it’ll open up opportunities your competitors haven’t got anywhere near. And it’ll be super hard for them to secure the same links. Because that’ll mean the following conversation will need to take place.
*Your competitor picks up phone and rings its SEO agency*
“Yeah hi, yeah I’m looking for SEO Mike.
“Hi Mike, how’s it going? Christmas shopping sorted? Yeah, nice.
“Look I noticed our rivals have acquired a load of great PR coverage with some powerful links.
“Would be great if we could get the same.
“What do you mean you’re just an SEO agency? I need a PR agency for those links? But you’re my agency!”
*Phone goes dead*
“Mike? Mike? MMMIIIKKKEEE???”
They will need to hire a PR agency. And then they’ll need to find one that not only handles this kind of link building but also gets the technical side of SEO too – because let’s be honest, these days SEO and PR agencies do a lot of the same stuff and who can afford to retain two agencies essentially doing the same thing?
Let’s pop back up to the top, great content was the other requirement.
“Hi Mike, yeah it’s me again.
“You feeling better now? Good! Good Christmas?
“Good, good.
“Look I was thinking we could get 2017 off to a flying start with some revamped copy for our landing pages, updated conversion friendly meta descriptions and a blog series on a topic we’re keen on dominating in Q1 and Q2.
“Mike? Mike? MMMIIIKKKEEE???”
Yeah that’s right. Mike’s done one and all you’re left with is an agency proficient in best practice SEO circa 2010 and poor content.
So much of modern day SEO requires a digital PR agency as comfortable developing interesting story angles as they are writing great calls to action for your meta descriptions – it’s what SEO PR is all about.
If you’re looking for this type of search marketing service then drop us a line today. And don’t worry about Mike, he’s just bought a new lamb. Only joking!
(Seriously though, kebab anyone?)