When you realize just how many tactics, techniques and areas of focus are involved in digital marketing, it can be intimidating. What should your brand focus on for maximum results? Luckily, these seemingly disparate parts are all pieces of the same whole and complement each other.
Take digital PR and search engine optimization (SEO). One of these concepts is all about improving your brand’s reputation and authority, while the other is based on creating content that satisfies search engine algorithms. When paired, these methodologies add up to a powerful inbound marketing strategy.
A company should tweak its marketing strategy to suit its specific circumstances but, taking these divergences into account, just about every business has some use for both digital PR and SEO. Mastering these methods and integrating them into your overall approach should be a priority.
Digital PR and SEO: What Are They?
Knowing the difference between digital PR and SEO is the vital first step in improving either or both. There’s a direct relationship between the two concepts. SEO is sometimes listed as a component of a digital PR strategy, and some digital PR activity is very close to classic SEO tactics like strategic link building and creating high-value content.
Once you grasp the details and best practices of these two methods, you can start combining them into a fully featured marketing strategy.
Digital PR
Digital PR is the online descendant of standard public relations tactics. This means it incorporates all the classic elements of PR — promoting your leaders’ personal expertise, publicizing your brand’s successes via press release, angling for media coverage and using other attention-grabbing tactics to build brand awareness. Ideally, you’ll gain backlinks and mentions from relevant sources throughout your field.
The goal of a digital PR campaign is to establish an online brand identity that conveys expertise, assurance and leadership in your specific vertical. When you strike up a brand partnership with an influencer, that’s digital PR. When you release a company podcast or a piece of video content, that’s also digital PR.
Since digital PR is such a broad term, it’s fair to ask what makes it unique, rather than just serving as a synonym for digital marketing. The answer comes down to focus. Digital PR is about winning on the quality of your insights and authority. You’re building a credible brand, one that people will turn to when they want trustworthy data or thought leadership about your specific field.
The digital part of digital PR comprises the channels you’re using to get your message out, such as social media platforms, and also your measurement style. You can use tools like Google Analytics and Ahrefs to see how you’re faring in terms of links, shares, earned media coverage and overall traffic.
Get deeper into digital PR efforts with our team’s insights.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO efforts have a simple goal: increase your company’s presence and position on search engine results pages (SERPs). The techniques and tactics harnessed to achieve that goal, however, are complex and multi-faceted.
Technical SEO is one side of the coin. Search engines prioritize technologically sound websites, with accessibility features, mobile support and more. Crafting online resources that are easy for search engines to crawl and index is part of the battle when trying to boost your overall SEO performance.
The other half of SEO involves content creation, building out a library of deliverables, each written around a relevant keyword and related secondary terms. This SEO content is at its best when it balances optimization with high-quality, well-researched writing that provides valuable information for readers.
Comprehensive SEO strategies combine on-page SEO — both technical and content-based — with off-page SEO, as links from outside your ecosystem build your domain authority and rankings on SERPs. Achieving the simple goal of reaching higher-priority placements in search rankings takes constant effort across this spectrum of activities.
Go deep inside the SEO process with our guide to Domain Authority and overview of how to use it.
How Do PR and SEO Impact Each Other?
The close relationship between digital PR and SEO comes from the fact that they’re both concerned with making your business more visible to your target audience. A focused digital marketing effort will draw from both sides, combining them to produce an overall brand impression that’s authoritative and easy to discover.
Once you see how integral the disciplines are to each other, they reveal themselves as parts of the same whole:
How SEO Impacts Digital PR
Since a major aim of digital PR efforts is to put your brand’s name in front of as many people as possible, it’s clear that SEO techniques can help your strategy succeed. While you’re seeking out earned media coverage and visibility via press releases, influencer partnerships, data releases and more, the whole process is simpler if your brand is easy to find.
Once attention starts to roll in for your PR strategy, will your target audience be able to find your brand? If you’ve optimized your website for SEO, the answer is yes. This is what makes SEO a useful and potentially underrated complement to any digital PR push.
SEO isn’t the only tactic you’re using to promote your brand narrative — there are also social media posts, direct outreach to industry publications and other methods. With that said, SEO is a central piece of the marketing puzzle. The backend principles of SEO are important too, with tracking of traffic, backlinks and engagement. Technology optimized for raw SEO use can help out with earned media assessment, too.
How Digital PR Impacts SEO
SEO techniques aren’t just useful for propping up broad efforts like digital PR, they’re a powerful marketing approach unto themselves. In fact, the focus you put into each digital PR campaign can come back around and have a beneficial effect on your content’s SEO rankings.
When you’re successful in earning backlinks from trusted sources based on the quality of your original content, data and thought leadership pieces, that helps your posts rise in search results. Building a reputation as a trustworthy source begins a cycle of positive impact on your site’s Domain Authority.
Digital PR techniques are a great match for the overall shifts that have occurred in search engine algorithms over the past few years. In the early Wild West years of SEO, brands would try to get ahead by creating low-value, keyword-stuffed pages. In an era when the quality and authority of content are important determinants for positioning in search rankings, it simply makes sense from an SEO perspective to create in-depth deliverables that gather backlinks and earned media coverage.
How Can You Run an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy?
Your overall marketing strategy should encompass the totality of your online presence. No element of your brand identity exists independently of the others — they’re all part of a whole that should be tuned to appeal to your target audience.
While it may seem overwhelming to track so many disparate efforts at once, the symbiotic relationship between SEO, social media, content writing and explicit PR outreach will quickly become clear.
Some rules of thumb for a strong and unified digital marketing strategy include:
- Focus on quality in written content: Whether you’re trying to master a SERP or earn backlinks from industry media sources, well-written, in-depth content is a must.
- Work across media channels: Your brand’s website, social media platforms and partnerships with third-party outlets are all ways to put your content in front of your audience.
- Build relationships and partnerships: Your digital marketing strategy should be viable for years to come, rather than earning quick attention and fading away. Relationships with creators, influencers and media outlets can pay off over time.
- Monitor your results and adjust: No matter which strategy you’re relying on to get your content in front of a large audience, it pays to measure your results with SEO tools and make informed decisions about future efforts.
Digital marketing is an accumulation of good practices that feed into one another. As long as you accept this multifaceted approach, you’re on the right track to make progress in the long term.
Learn the role of effective link building in increasing your brand visibility.
What’s Your Approach to Digital PR and SEO?
There’s no bad time to recommit yourself to a high-level focus on digital marketing and building brand awareness. If your current strategy is lacking in any area — from the personal outreach of digital PR to the best practices of SEO and beyond — you can start correcting the imbalance right away.
Creating high-quality, well-researched content optimized for SEO is a tactic that never goes out of style. It could seem intimidating to implement digital PR strategies alongside SEO work, but it’s made easier by the fact that they’re really two sides of the same overall methodology.
