What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a way to increase the number of people who find a website or web page in a search engine’s unpaid results; often referred to as ‘natural’, ’organic’, or ‘earned’ results.
How does SEO work?
SEO targets different kinds of search, including image searches, video searches, academic databases, news aggregators, and social media websites.
The general goal of SEO is to ensure that pages rank as highly as possible for keywords that are relevant to their content so they become visible when people use those keywords in online search engines like Google and Bing.
Why should Public Relations practitioners care about SEO?
SEO helps people find content. The easier it is to find the content, the more clicks, shares and awareness it will receive. SEO makes the difference between appearing at the beginning of search results, rather than at the end.
The more digital channels publishing content about the product/service/company online, the higher the chances are of being found in search results.
How to increase SEO through PR
In order to increase SEO through PR it is important that you have both strong SEO practices in place, as well as engaging content that can be shared by media outlets via traditional channels such as print newspapers, magazines, TV programs, and through digital channels such as news websites, e-zines, blogs and social media.
Optimising content can be as simple as including keywords throughout your text, or adding meta descriptions that will appear on search engine results pages. Try to include keywords in the title of your article, blog post, or press release and the opening paragraph. Keyword analysis tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner suggest words and phrases that are related to what other people have searched for before they found your website.
Utilise social media channels and hashtags.
Create an Ace Media Newsroom. This will provide you with complete control of the narrative of stories and content; sending traffic to your client, rather than to competitors. It’ll also do a great job for boosting SEO for your client.
Write your copy with the aim of achieving backlinks and brand mentions. For example, the backlink could be to related reference material on your client’s website.
Pitching to media outlets with a Good to Excellent Domain Authority (DA) score will not only help with the visibility of the content in search engine page results, it will also contribute towards improving your client’s website SEO.
Key takeaways
1. Publish content that is relevant to your target audience
2. Utilise social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn
3. Create content through a Newsroom and assign Assets (images, videos, audio, etc) with meta descriptions
4. Use keywords in the title of your posts and use them throughout the text
5. Add links to other related articles within your content or from external websites
6. Write content that attracts backlinks
7. Pitch to media outlets with Good to Excellent DA scores
Tips & Hints 