SEO and Public Relations: How to Integrate Search and PR

What’s the difference between SEO and public relations?

It’s easy to blur the two—both SEO and PR promote content to grow your brand. But there’s more to the story.

As an SEO professional, I’ll share the similarities and differences I see between these two types of marketing. I’ll also give my advice on how to get the best results from each.

Editor’s note: Curious how an SEO expert can help you get more traffic, customers, and sales? Send us a message today.

4 similarities and 4 differences between SEO and public relations

Let’s start with four things public relations and search engine optimization have in common:

1. Quality content. SEO and PR are all about promoting your brand’s story through content. The press release and the blog post are different but serve many of the same purposes.
2. Manual outreach. Both PR and SEO involve promoting quality content to gatekeepers and leaders who help your target audience find you. The goal is different—a press spot versus a backlink—but the process is similar.
3. Digital marketing. Traditional public relations focused on old media, like newspapers, radio, and TV. But today, most PR efforts are digital. SEO and PR are all about boosting your online presence.
4. Earned media. SEO and PR help your brand earn coverage. SEO does it on search engines like Google, and PR on media outlets like CNN or The New York Times. SEO practitioners and PR pros help you get coveted spots, but there’s no such thing as “guaranteed” SEO or PR.

As you can see, there’s a lot of overlap. But PR and SEO also have some important differences, like:

1. Your audience vs. others’ audiences. With digital PR, you appear in front of someone else’s audience. With SEO, you attract your own audience.
2. Technical vs. non-technical. You don’t need a computer whiz on your team for great PR results. But your search ranking depends in part on technical SEO.
3. “Evergreen” vs. “breaking news.” SEO works best when you focus on topics that will be relevant years from now. But PR is always looking for a hot story nobody’s covered yet.
4. Small vs. great influencer control. SEO doesn’t depend much on celebrities or influencers. But PR thrives on these lucky breaks.

Even more than these little differences, PR and SEO have very different goals.

Public relations—putting your brand in the spotlight

The goal of PR is to get news mentions for you, your company, or your products.

That goal has some serious advantages, like:

Brand awareness. Did you know that album sales explode by up to 1000% the week after an artist performs at the Super Bowl? Brand recognition works on the same principle. No matter how many fans you have now, you’ll always find more with a bigger audience.

Credibility. The biggest websites all seem to have a row of impressive logos that add instant credibility. Here’s an example from Barbell Apparel:

Good PR strategy makes those logos happen.

Snowball effect. Journalists love covering stories everyone is talking about. A business that appears on Good Morning America will get lots of press—not because it’s suddenly a more interesting company, but because it appeared on Good Morning America.

But focusing just on brand mentions has a few disadvantages, too:

Limited control. You can promote a story, but news organizations will tell it however they like. A few years ago, I was in talks with a startup named Juicero to help them with content marketing.

Juicero’s PR team got the brand coverage almost everywhere. But all that attention brought one piece too many—a devastating Bloomberg report.

Five months later, Juicero was no more.

Some say there’s no such thing as bad PR. But I think the folks at Juicero would disagree.

Low conversions. Think about every brand you’ve seen on a TV program or read about in an article. How many have you bought from? Probably not many. You were there for the TV program or article, not there to buy. It’s a little-known fact that even the best PR campaigns don’t bring in much referral traffic.

Irregular spikes. News cycles are short. Apple has perhaps the best PR of any consumer brand—millions watch its product presentations. But even for Apple, the newest iPhone is old news in a matter of weeks.

Now, let’s turn to SEO.

SEO—attracting potential customers

The goal of SEO is to bring visitors, and hopefully future customers, to your website.

The advantages of this strategy include:

More traffic over time. Over time, SEO efforts become more successful. There are usually very few results at first, but after around 6–18 months, you’ll see SEO results that only keep growing. Expect an upward slope, not a spike.

More targeted customers. A well-crafted SEO campaign will always bring in higher-converting visitors than the best PR campaign. Unlike someone watching the news or reading a magazine, a search engine user is actively looking for your content.

Full control over the message. Your SEO content is your own. When you attract people to your own properties, you don’t have to hope the media will get it right. You’re in full control over the story.

But SEO’s goals also come with some disadvantages, like:

Narrow exposure. SEO focuses on the few people who search for terms that relate to what you sell. While a national PR campaign could reach millions, that’s a near impossibility for SEO.

No halo effect. An article in Forbes is instantly credible. An article on your website doesn’t have the same effect.

Not as exciting. Let’s face it—no matter how much traffic you get, a blog post will never be as exciting as a front-page story or primetime TV spot.

Can you combine SEO and PR?

If you’re deciding between SEO and PR, I recommend choosing which goal matters most right now and focusing on one or the other.

But SEO and PR aren’t enemies—far from it. Great SEO makes PR easier and vice-versa.

Here are some ways PR can give you an SEO boost:

Build high-quality backlinks. PR is one of the best ways to get links from high-quality sources, like major news outlets. If you want top-tier links, PR is one of the best link-building strategies you’ll find.

Strengthen domain authority. Research shows that a website’s overall strength (called domain authority) helps every piece of content rank higher. Getting links from news sites boosts domain authority and makes content marketing work better.

Reinforce credibility. I mentioned the “logo list” earlier, the one that helps brands look credible. While it won’t help you rank, those credibility indicators can increase trust and conversions for SEO traffic.

And some ways SEO can help your PR efforts:

Reputation management. A modern reporter Googles every brand they cover. When you influence how you show up in Google results, you’ll influence how the press reports on you.

For example, Bullet Journal gives one of the best first impressions I’ve ever seen:

Impeccable search engine positioning like that is never an accident.

Build relationships. Promotion and guest blogging, among other SEO tactics, can help you build relationships that you can leverage for PR.

Learn what converts. Part of SEO strategy is learning what questions prospects have and which answers help the most. That knowledge helps you land successful media placements, and it can guide your words in interviews.

Let’s wrap up with when—and how—you should bring on an outside team.

Should I hire a PR company or SEO agency?

You can do both PR and SEO in-house, but you’ll get better results with an SEO team or public relations professional.

It’s the same with, say, hiring a professional to fix your air conditioning. It’s not that you couldn’t learn how to do it yourself.

But is that trial-and-error process the best use of your time, especially when you have a business to run?

It might be. But in the long run, you’ll probably save money (and certainly time) by bringing in an expert.

Here are three tips for hiring an outside firm:

1. Pick a specialization. A combo SEO and PR agency probably won’t be good at either. Especially avoid an all-in-one agency that handles unrelated fields like paid ads, social media, and website design.
2. Look for case studies. An experienced firm will be able to show work they’ve done before. You don’t want a team testing out an SEO or public relations strategy on your brand.
3. Preview their content. The SEO or PR content an agency produces for you won’t be better than their portfolio or the work they do for themselves.

And speaking of previewing content—we write articles just like this for our clients. If you’d like help creating great content like this for your brand, send us a message.