Strongly Six Ways to Make Your Online Public Relations Drive "SEO"

You are missing out big on the brand visibility opportunities that PR in this digital age comes with. Of course, times have changed. The old tactics of traditional public relations that find expression in strategic event coordination, crisis communication, reputations management, trade shows, sponsorship opportunities, outreach, distribution of press releases and leveraging on traditional media (Radio, TV, Newspapers) -- have now given way to more digital approaches.

The strategies applicable to both old and digital PR converge at the point where connections are built and managed. However digital PR comes with the added benefits of Search Engine optimization and link building across the Internet while also providing measurable and tangible results and insights and producing easily shareable content.

Why Should Online PR be integrated with SEO?

SEO and PR work together in more ways than one. First, creating premium quality content can earn you backlinks to your site. Then the more media coverage your brand receives, the more link back to your site you will get. Lastly, with excellent PR process, you get to build greater connections with influencers in your industry thereby getting more links from blogs and social media posts, leading to an increase in SEO.

Because the realm of online PR is more specified than that of traditional, it will help grow your brand visibility and patronage online. However, the integration between SEO and PR becomes a lot stronger when executed strategically.

Here are 6 top ways to drive search engine optimization with Online PR.

1. Unify your goals across SEO, PR and other Marketing efforts

Each of these marketing concepts has their unique workability styles, yet their aim is the same. While SEO leverages on digital channels to connect with customers and generate more leads, PR relies heavily on media relations to generate more media coverage of the brand. In the end, their target is to reach customers - and that's the part you should focus on the most. Only then can you harness the capabilities of the different channels.

2. Use data gotten from researching both SEO and PR to create an overall persona.

While SEO relies on audience research to create a brand personality, PR focuses on Media research to find out the kind of publications that appeal to a brands target audience and search for reporters that cover topics relevant to the brand. Combining both results will create a strong, unified persona.

3. Coordinate Content and Keyword across all digital channels to project a unified brand identity.

All your social media and blog posts, e-books, newsletters, landing pages, video ads, media messages and press releases should project the image your brand is trying to communicate.

4. Use your PR Expertise as a Guide in Crafting Content.

With proper research, PR experts get data on the kind of content their audience will find consumable, valuable and shareable. Let this expertise guide you in creating high-quality, SEO content. While SEO professionals are creating high ranking content, incorporating the most appropriate keywords and sharing them across social media channels, PR experts on the hand should be busy pitching this content and drawing as much attention as possible to it from high-quality links.

5. PR can Leverage on SEO keyword strategy

The keywords used in press releases can trigger reporters to use those targeted keywords when describing a brand, thus increasing the likelihood a business appears in searches for those specified terms.

PR needs to harness and extend SEO keyword strategy - for example, keywords and keyword phrases should appear in critical statements, press releases, media interview, FAQ documents, Social media bios, Website Meta titles and descriptions and website copy.

6. Connect with high-end influencers in your industry

Influencer marketing is non-negotiable in integrating SEO and PR efforts for your site. Connecting with influencers can earn you high-quality link backs from the media, other businesses, and pages with high traffic. Establishing connections with these influencers increases the chances that they will share your content with their audience and even link back to your site, making such content more visible, linked to and of course share.

SEO is a crucial aspect of building a sustainable online presence, but it performs better when it joins forces with PR to create strong results, A link back from Forbes for instance, even if it's a text link carries a heavier weight than mere blog comments. So you should focus on creating high quality, shareable content. You also want to make your content is adequately and proportionally stuffed with keywords added to the fact that they have to be relevant to a target and  attract audience 

Public Relations As a Management Tools

Public relations (PR) and use the effective tools as a communications process is not advertising in the sense that a product is being promoted. Rather, PR is a process of promoting and managing an individuals or an organization's image and reputation as perceived by the public. The management of the image is a matter of persuasion by an admittedly bias technique, but the bias should not represent any aspect of the individual or organization that is not true.

The effort of PR is intended to persuade the public using the media to establish and reinforce reputation, raise the public awareness of the subject, enhance perception of integrity, and motivate action. The most important factors in public relations in the accomplishment of these efforts is to be relevant to the public mindset while trying to persuade particular point of view and to do so with verifiable substance of information.

To succeed in these efforts, PR uses a number of tools to communicate an individuals or an organization's image and reputation to the public, but there are two primary requirements for successful PR: it must be relevant and it must be timely if it is going to reach the public and persuade individuals to action.

Relevance goes to where people live. It must affect and persuade individuals in a very local and personal way to motivate them to action. If your message attempts to persuade a public perception that they must invest in precious metals, but the individuals reached are poverty-stricken, the suggestion will be ignored as irrelevant to their condition. First, they must be persuaded in the tools to lift themselves out of poverty to a condition of disposable income, then persuade how best to use it.

Timeliness is necessary to encourage immediate action. A promotion to attend a local rally of a political candidate in six months might be a good general story, but it is neither timely nor relevant to the immediate concerns of the public.

There are eight basic tools of public relations:

Press release: an announcement of immediate, timely and relevant information released to the media to inform and educate about issues relevant to that community.

Background: historic information to educate the public about the individual or organization origin and purpose.

Special events: shows, conferences and conventions to communicate current product, policy or purpose.

Point of view (POV) articles: organizational perspective on issues affecting public opinion.

Speeches: personification of issues; relevance and timeliness personified individual to individual.

Photos and videos: a visual record of special events and speeches to communicate to a wider audience than when originally presented.

Print content: brochures, manuals and newsletters to put hard content in the hands of the public for confirmation and background on what is verbally and visually presented.

Internet content: websites, blogs and social media in an effort to combine all the above tools to reach the widest possible audience.

By effective use of these tools using relevant and timely content.

Public Relations And Help Business

No such thing as bad publicity there is an old saying. What that old saying means is that whether you get good press or bad press, it does not matter because the very fact you got attention at all is a good thing. However, this old saying is not necessarily true because bad press can damage the reputation or either a person or a company to the point where no one wants to hear about them anymore. Bad publicity can truly be damaging, but a list of PR contacts can take bad publicity and turn it into good publicity before it is too late.

Turning Things Around with Public Relations

The right PR contacts can make all the difference in the world between a temporary bad reputation and permanent damage to a company that can never be reversed. There are many ways that a public relations firm is going to help a business that is involved in a scandal. Here is more information on how a public relations firm can turn all that negative publicity around to positive publicity that is only going to make that business look good again in the eyes of the public:

• A press release:

When a scandal happens to a company, the first thing everyone is going to want to know is what the company involved has to say about it. This is when the press will gather outside the headquarters waiting for someone with authority to make a statement or issue a statement of some kind. The faster someone says something the better off the company will be because if the press starts to speculate as to exactly what happened, then the situation can be made even worse.

• An apology:

A person that has done something wrong has to apologize for what they did. However, when a company does something wrong, then they too have to issue some sort of apology. Everyone makes mistakes, even major corporations, but owning up to the mistake, and then apologizing for it, is the best way to show everyone that this is a good company that cares what the public thinks of them.

• Make amends for the problem:
 

After the apology, the next thing the public is going to want to hear is that the mistake will be corrected. It does not matter what the scandal was about as long as the guilty person is punished so that justice is served. Once the guilty party is punished there has to be some sort of amends made to the person that was wronged. If nothing is wrong with the scandal, then apology or not, the public will not approve.

Anytime a scandal breaks, a company's reputation is instantly tarnished by it. To control the damage, PR contacts are going be put to good use because someone to clean up the mess before a company's reputation is ruined permanently. A public relations company is going to help the company issue a statement, apologize for what happened, and then punish the people involved so that the public will know that they do care about their image and doing the right thing.