Good PR isn’t just about having something worthwhile to say, it’s about making sure you reach the people who are most interested in what you’re saying. And with more and more noise to cut through, you need to find new and innovative ways of reaching your audience.

Optimising your website and content for search engines has become a huge opportunity for capturing people interested in what you’re saying. But why is it important, and how does it work?

The PR Google opportunity

Behind the coveted space at the top of every Google search, lays an algorithm that curates websites into a hierarchy through a quality over quantity equation, continuously building a profile of all web sources. The best receive the highest visibility, and consequently, the highest amount of organic traffic.

The Google philosophy is simple: by creating real value for your users, you will be rewarded with web content at the top of the search engine results page (SERP). Due to the link between the user search query and website content, link farming, keyword stuffing and other ‘black hat’ techniques once muddied the internet with spam pages aiming to top the Google charts.

But this is no longer the case. Updates such as Penguin and Panda focused on reducing the value of low quality sites, thereby removing them from SERPs and resigning them to history. These changes also mean that keyword research is no longer enough. As the backbone of all successful marketing, and as Forbes’ ‘PR theme of 2018’, it comes as no surprise that trust is the crucial and binding factor behind the growing alignment of SEO and PR.

And with Google’s focus on user experience as a core indicator of quality content, in the future, marketers and PR professionals need to build their websites with this in mind to make sure they reach the people they are targeting to their full potential.

Power your digital marketing strategy

Building trustworthy content will improve key algorithm signals such as the time someone spends on your website, which increases the likelihood of the next person finding it. And the visibility of web interactions means that the success of a SEO aligned PR strategy is directly measurable through metrics such as the amount of organic traffic a web page gets.

Symbiotically, social media also helps spread engaging and useful content organically. While this is also measurable through the number of likes, comments and shares that it receives, each interaction in turn shows Google how good your content really is, in real-life contexts, increasing its page score.

So building content that people believe in and get behind, can provide competitive advantage in the digital space, and differentiate you from the crowd of businesses all focused on the same thing; maximising organic traffic volumes.

Key SEO tools

But for maximum effect, the old and new approaches should work together. Once you have created unique and engaging content, there are a number of tools you can use to maximise organic search visibility.

Many of these are free and easy to use, and help to gain audience insight to find out what your audience is searching, assist in optimisation through timing and keywords, and help you to gauge the success of a strategy once it is implemented to see how it can be improved in the future.

Google Keyword Planner – part of Google AdWords, keyword planner helps to find keywords related to the subject you’re talking about, and get search volume data to scope the opportunity

Answer the Public – a fantastic tool for generating ideas for content, particularly for getting traffic to news articles and blog posts

Google Trends – timing is key, and this tool helps you see the peaks and troughs in topic trends that will help get most traffic to your post

SEO Moz – a tool that connects your SEO activity with changes in domain and page authority, a core success metric. The downloadable toolbar is free to use

Google Analytics – a free service that tracks and reports on all traffic that lands on your site, crucially where the traffic comes from. You can set up goals to understand revenue and every metric in between

Search Metrics – a tool that helps to determine a domain’s visibility through metrics of uniqueness – good for planning domain names

Stand out from the crowd

At Man Bites Dog we create end-to-end marketing strategies. From creating a great idea that will engage your audience to delivering a marketing plan to maximise the reach of your message.

We specialise not only in having something unique to say to your industry, but also in getting your message heard. Get in touch today to discuss your PR and digital marketing strategy.