I’ve been in SEO & PR since 2009 and started learning the power of integrated marketing communications way before that.
Why Integration Now?
The digital marketing landscape is rapidly evolving, presenting both challenges and opportunities:
- Depleting Performance of Siloed Channels: Standalone strategies are no longer effective in a highly interconnected digital ecosystem.
- More Complex Customer Journey: Consumers interact with brands across multiple platforms and channels, demanding a unified approach.
- Google’s Declining Traffic: Features like direct answers in search results are reducing the amount of traffic directed to websites.
- Declining Impact of Links: While still important, links alone are less effective in improving search rankings without strategic content and brand mentions.
- Failure of Attribution Models: Traditional models struggle to accurately measure the impact of integrated digital marketing efforts.
Why It’s Important
An effective integration of PR and SEO can:
- Create Funnels: Guide potential customers through a structured path from awareness to conversion.
- Build Links & Mentions: Enhance your site’s authority and visibility through strategic media placements and mentions.
- Drive Brand Search: Increase the volume of searches directly related to your brand, indicating higher interest and engagement.
- Influence Behavior: Shape audience perceptions and actions through targeted messaging and content.
What is Integrated PR & SEO?
Let’s start with what it is not: It’s not channel marketing, an isolated channel strategy with specialists executing independent marketing tasks.
Integrated PR & SEO is a cohesive strategy that aligns PR and SEO tasks around a common goal or objective.
This approach leverages media coverage, search engine visibility, and website content as pivotal touchpoints to funnel the audience to an action on the website that aligns with their goals at a given stage of the audience’s journey to solve a pain point or make a gain around a specific set of tasks or workflows.
PR Helps SEO: It builds a site and an individual’s EEAT to influence an audience and search engine behavior.
- Building Reputation and Authority: Establishing your brand as a credible source of information or a leader in its industry.
- Generating Links & Mentions: Earning high-quality backlinks and mentions from reputable sources to boost SEO performance.
- Driving Search Behavior: Encouraging more searches for your brand, which signals to search engines the growing relevance and popularity of your business.
SEO helps PR: It’s a funnel point that people use when they need to answer a question or understand something better.
- Search engine funnels: Ranking in search engines for specific keywords that are related to the PR effort’s push.
- SEO Metrics: SEO tools like Semrush, ahrefs, or others can show PR’s impact on audience action.
- Enhance Creditability: Ranking for topically relevant keywords and answering questions as users search places individuals or companies as a key source on that topic.
Now that you understand what integrated PR & SEO is (and isn’t), let’s focus on how an integrated PR & SEO strategy works.
Overview
Integrated PR & SEO leverages your EEAT to influence audience behavior and organic visibility.
It works like this:
- Establishing an individual and company expertise to:
- Become a trusted source for the audience and media to secure media coverage and drive the audience to take action.
Search engines understand that you’re an expert in the topic and trusted to rank.
Use your expertise to earn media coverage and improved organic visibility to create PR-SEO funnels that move the audience from media through the search engine and to the website.
Each stage of the audience journey is an opportunity to create a funnel by aligning on-page and off-page content.
This coverage also generates backlinks and brand mentions to improve organic visibility.
Create content for every stage and point out the audience’s journey to build up a tipping point where the audience and search engines see you as the best and most trusted source in a category. This is a full-funnel strategy.
How it Works
Topical Expertise: Positioning ourselves as industry experts not only earns media coverage but also builds trust with our audience, encouraging them to take action based on your authority.
Audience Journey Map: The content and touchpoints an audience engages to identify solutions to their pains or make gains around a specific task or workflow.
Integrated Topic Tours: Select a single topic to cover deeply across press, podcasts, search engines, webinars, and website content. Select topics at each stage of the audience journey to maximize influence on behavior. This generates links and brand mentions in the context of a specific topic.
PR-SEO Funnels: Create funnels at various stages of the journey that start with media discovery, move to search engines, and end with site conversions to create a funnel.
Full-Funnel Strategy: By covering content and touchpoints at each stage of the customer journey with tailored messaging, we create a cohesive marketing effort that increases touch as customers solve their problems.
Topical Reputation: By consistently and deeply covering a topic, an individual or company is seen as an expert in a specific area of expertise. This improves EEAT for search engines and audiences’ perspectives, influencing ranking and audience behavior.
This integrated strategy hyper-focuses your PR & SEO around a specific journey to maximize the impact of each touchpoint individually and as a whole.
