My personal foray into the SEO world is still in its early days after I joined an SEO company last September. I had previously worked in the digital department of a PR agency working on social media campaigns after joining on their graduate scheme. I made the move to SEO in the hope of finding an area which provided more concrete, tangible results rather than the often flimsy output of the social media arena which continues to be very hard to quantify and illustrate ROI.

A Whole New World

When I made the move I was expecting a big change, I was leaving the PR world behind and going into something very different where I would have to learn everything from the ground up. I’d heard people talking about SEO and had picked up the headline information but I believed it was a totally separate entity to PR. What I’ve discovered is that they are very much related and that online PR can play an integral role in SEO. Obviously there is a world of SEO information out there to pick up, but with the small portion I’ve soaked up so far I can see that effective online PR can provide excellent SEO results.

A large amount of the SEO discussions I have read since becoming immersed in the industry seem to focus on quick fixes, shortcuts and ways to cheat the system rather than the obvious way to drive traffic and improve rankings which is being a well promoted, thought leader in your field. The use of effective online PR can produce fantastic, natural and long term SEO results as it raises awareness of your company and this in turn draws traffic and links. Any company in any field can produce a blog which has the potential to show them as an authority in their own industry but it needs to be done in the right way. The problem for most companies is taking that concept from a blog that no-one knows about to one which draws thousands of views on a regular basis.

Integration is the Key

Too many companies seem to approach PR and SEO as separate entities (much as I used to), running either a social media campaign or an SEO campaign, or doing both but independently through different agencies. As far as I can see the key to the success of these campaigns is integration and harmony between the two so the results can be fully maximised. A blog which is written with the idea of building community and interaction is no good if its readership is very low. Equally, a blog which attracts lots of traffic through search but delivers poor quality content is of little use. The two need to be combined so a company blog attracts readers through search and then delivers excellent content so that readers recommend it to others (by linking) as well as coming back themselves. I don’t want to discount the value of a blog’s regular readers and the importance of community, but a community is no good if it only has a handful of people in it. Jason Falls gives an excellent example of this being put into practice with Aprilaire, a company which sells air purification products, who increased the traffic to their corporate blog by 1000% in one year by focusing on winning keywords in organic search. As Jason shows, 80% of their traffic increase came from organic search and went on to convert in various ways. No doubt many of them also became regular visitors and linked back to the site. Measure the ROI on that...

Turn Searchers into Readers and Links

Attracting blog readers through search also gives you the opportunity to garner organic links on top of those excellent traffic results if you add value for the people who click on you in the SERPS. A site needs to be jam packed with useful information, tools or giveaways that will make those visitors link to you and keep them coming back for more down the line. Many of the company blogs that I come across seem to believe that just having a blog there is enough to expect floods of links and comments. Afraid not. That content needs to be bang on every time if you want it to be effective as a link building tool as well as providing ranking benefits. You will never gain sufficient attention from the other major players in your industry (such as Rand, Aaron etc... in SEO) if you don’t give them something to feed on when they visit your site. By writing guest posts it’s fairly easy to draw the attention of key people in your industry and get a link from them, you just need to have something useful waiting for them so they keep coming back to your site and keep linking. If you combine that sort of effective content with a blog which was originally created with SEO in mind like Aprilaire’s then you’re onto a winning formula as far as I can see.

Link Building Made Easy

This approach also provides obvious benefits when it comes to going out and manually link building (compared to it happening organically). Imagine you have one client’s site which is fairly blog standard and doesn’t offer anything out of the ordinary, compared to a client’s site which has a blog packed with useful industry related content and offers free tools and information to its readers. Which will be easier to build links for? If I can go to a thought leader in my industry who writes an influential blog offering fresh, interesting content or tools then I’m pretty sure I could get them to link to my site. If I go to them with “Will you link to my client’s site, it’s really good” when it actually doesn’t offer much added value at all I think my chances would be slightly lower (i.e. non-existent).

This thinking can also be applied to social media where getting retweets, stumbles or bookmarks is a whole lot easier when you have quality content at your disposal and these sites can drive a huge amount of traffic to your site if you generate a buzz. From a search perspective it’s also more important than ever to have a presence in social media as the influence of real time search continues to increase and social media starts to offer visible search benefits.

I realise all these points are pretty top level (c’mon, I am a newbie!) but I think it rings true that often the most simple approach is the best; give people something good and they will recommend it. The problem comes in making people aware of your site in the first place but this style of integrated PR and SEO approach is a great way of getting over that hurdle. Maybe I’m being a bit too much of an idealist (feel free to berate me in the comments) but, as someone who’s had experience in both industries, it seems the relationship between PR and SEO is an extremely close one and that an integrated approach will generate excellent, measurable results - something that is much harder to achieve by approaching the two separately.

Tom Mcloughlin is an analyst for The Web Marketing Group, an SEO and Search Marketing Agency based in the UK. He also writes his own travel blog, Top Backpacking Destinations, which provides tips for travellers on the best places to visit around the world.