SEO in PR – Standing out from the crowd

In PR we’re always looking for new ways to help increase our client’s visibility. You can write the best article and get the most fantastic piece of coverage possible from a release, but in the age of Google if you’re not paying attention to your SEO, then you may not be maximising your online potential.

These days, SEO should be considered part of the standard writing and proofing processes, coming at the start the content creation process, not wrapped in at the end.

Quality content

The first step is to ensure that the quality of content that you’re putting out is good. If your content is interesting, topical and well written, then it stands to reason that more people will want to read it and share it – which in turn can improve your SEO.

Keyword research

It pays to invest time in researching your clients’ keywords – what are the search terms that your client’s prospective customers are using that lead them to their website in the first place? Don’t just base these on your assumptions – actually do the research, you may be surprised with those that come up!  Where possible you should try and integrate these words and phrases into releases – this can make them more likely to appear higher up on Google rankings. Incorporating keywords into releases can leave a subliminal trail of breadcrumbs right to your clients’ websites. This keyword research should be an on-going process - as your clients’ products and services diversify.

Where can you do keyword research? Head over to Google, log in, and go to its AdWords Keyword Popularity Tool.

Link building

Backlinks and other links built into content and blogs in particular also gives a nice boost to SEO. One critical link is the one that drives traffic to your client’s website, but for further Google SEO brownie points, you can incorporate other relevant links.  Link building these days is about quality, rather than quantity, so it’s imperative to start with good content, and links that people will want to click on, which aim to get readers to engage more with the content. When it comes to link building, the more links to high-quality content, the better.

Be Social

Make sure that you are taking advantage of all available channels to broadcast your great results as this is a really powerful way to help your client be visible and find a targeted audience. Share coverage across the likes of Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+ - whatever’s most relevant to your particular audience.

At the end of the day, the pillars of good SEO for PR are having quality, focused content whether that is your own or that which you are linking to. However, the key is to be flexible and sensible - there’s no point arbitrarily forcing a whole load of keywords into an article where they don’t really belong. With small, consistent steps every day, you can help create even more visible results for clients.

(Image: via Wikimedia Commons)