Boost your PR career with SEO

In today's digital landscape, lacking a basic understanding for SEO could make your job in PR a lot harder than it needs to be – so here are some useful lessons in SEO and how you can apply them to your workplace.

With experience writing blogs for six different websites across various topics and audiences, along with recent training in SEO through LinkedIn Learning, I have developed a solid understanding of how PR professionals can utilise these skills to enhance visibility for websites and campaigns. 

These are my key lessons for SEO, and how you can improve on your existing digital skills with this understanding.

WHAT IS SEO AND WHY IS IT RELEVANT TO PR?

SEO, or search engine optimisation, is the practice of improving elements of your website (and implementing external strategies) to boost its visibility in search engine results, like Google. 

This process ensures that when people search for keywords and phrases related to your content, your website is easier to discover.

For PR professionals, understanding SEO is crucial. By targeting the right keywords, you can generate more relevant and targeted content like press releases that not only engage your audiences but also rank higher in search engines. 

This increased visibility should enhance the effectiveness of your PR campaigns, helping you to more easily reach specific goals set for projects.

LESSON 1: TAKE THE TIME TO DO THOROUGH KEYWORD RESEARCH

Conducting effective keyword research can be great for targeting specific audiences and increasing visibility for pages. Using more targeted phrasing on your pages will increase its rankings on search engine results due to its relevance.

PR professionals may be able to guide how journalists frame stories for their audiences by looking at the phrasings used in press releases. By you effectively researching and selecting appropriate keywords, a journalist may see its relevance to readers at first glance and be more likely to pick up the story.

To conduct this research there are some great tools out there that will help you to choose the best keywords and phrases, including Google Trends, Google Console and Moz’s Keyword Explorer. 

I would suggest playing around with these tools, making sure to test out effective longtail keywords. These types of keywords are more detailed and specific, meaning they face less competition when being ranked in search engines.

LESSON 2: UNDERSTANDING ON-PAGE OPTIMISATION

Whether you are working at a PR agency or an in-house PR team, it is important that you understand certain on-page optimisation techniques that will enhance the news and stories you are publishing about your clients or company. Paying attention to these strategies will ensure the stories you write about are SEO-friendly and therefore rank higher in search engines.

When publishing new pages on your company’s website (or even looking at existing ones), there are certain techniques you can use to better enhance on-page elements. 

For example, you should use results from your keyword research to create more focused content. This may include using longtail keywords that you have researched in your article’s title and meta description, in addition to thinking about how many characters you are using to better suit search engines. 

You should also think about renaming image file names and alt text so that search engines can best understand its contents. With experience and research, you will gain deeper knowledge for on-page techniques you can use for SEO that may include using more targeted URLs for individual pages and taking into consideration how search engines analyse text in close proximity to non- text components.

Through learning first-hand about different on-page optimisation techniques, you will not only have a better idea of how to structure content on your own websites, but also will have a deeper understanding of how you can enhance press releases for journalists that will also be SEO friendly for their sites. Other journalists may even discover the news from your site organically if you make sure to work on your own on-page elements, ensuring more content. Posting content on your pages also ensures journalists can include links to your pages that are relevant and (as you are about to find out) this can also boost your pages’ rankings further!

LESSON 3: RELEVANT BACKLINKS WILL BOOST YOUR PAGES RANKINGS

For those new to SEO, a backlink is a link from some other website to your page. Backlinks help search engines to understand how trustworthy and authoritative your pages are; therefore, lots of high-quality links to your pages can boost your brand’s domain authority and ensures higher rankings in search results.

Search engines will pay more attention to backlinks from well-established and relevant websites, eg industry specific sites and blogs or national news titles. If your page provides additional information on your company or client’s latest campaign than a national news title offers (eg other images or the sign-up page for an event), reporters may include a link to the website which will improve your SEO authority. And if they haven’t, you can always ask!

While links from social media pages are not counted as traditional backlinks, as they don’t directly contribute to the page’s authority or ranking, they can often increase a website’s visibility. This could potentially lead to other websites linking back to your content and creating other backlinks. Additionally, social media links can drive more traffic to your pages, lowering bounce rates and improving engagement, which is great for SEO!

LESSON 4: REFLECT ON YOUR SEO PERFORMANCE

Another great reason for utilising SEO strategies for your own website is that you can use analytics to measure the performance of your content. Through web analytics tools like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics, you can set specific KPIs to measure your successes and failures. Targets may include reaching a set number of organic visits to the website from search engines or focusing on engagement rates by setting goals for average session durations or pages per session figures. You can also use these tools (or other websites like Moz) to understand how each of your target keywords are ranking over time, and how you can improve them in the future.

By looking at analytics, you can also better understand how well specific stories are doing. For example, if you are working in an in-house PR team and you notice that campaigns linked to sustainability and environmental impacts are consistently bringing in more traffic, then you might pitch more stories related to this or increase PR efforts around eco-friendly product launches to draw interest.

LESSON 5: STAY UP TO DATE ON SEO TRENDS

While it is important to do sufficient research into effective keywords, PR professionals should also take the time to research SEO trends generally. This may include understanding how search engines are adjusting their algorithms to favour certain content. Google is now favouring content linked to recognised and knowledgeable authors more than ever, ranking them higher in search engine results as they are more ‘credible’.

You should also take into consideration how people are talking to search engines and how this might affect your keywords. Are users asking search engines questions over statements, and how are they phrasing them?

Finally, you should take time to understand how technology, specifically AI, is playing a role in search engines and how you can utilise SEO strategies to combat this. With Siri and Alexa, voice search is becoming an increasingly popular way of searching for content, so understanding how to optimise your content in voice search results is an important avenue to consider. You should also understand how you can adjust your keywords to better fit the questions AI chatbots are being asked, eg for services like ChatGPT or Bing AI.

It is important that you consistently do your own research and consider how you can make your content more relevant to a search engine and the audiences you want to reach.

Jessica Gaynor is a public relations graduate. Read more by Jessica:

• How to make the most of your PR internship
• PR: a versatile career choice but it's still too male-dominated at the top