When it came to saving the day in the city of Gotham, people always turned to the old reliable Batman. While Batman did an excellent job, he did have assistance from Robin. What’s this got to do with PR and SEO, you ask? Let us explain. When it comes to saving the day in the brand world, brands today turn to public relations. In public relations, you publish communication around your business and what it does in order to get them in the media. PR can take the form of a variety of items, including written articles, videos, and white papers. Information that is timely and newsworthy is the main focus of PR. However, public relations is not just restricted to that; it also looks at managing the reputation of the company and works towards increasing brand awareness and brand recognition, which in turn can result in lead generation and, eventually, an increase in the rate of conversions.
While PR can be called the Batman for brands, relying on traditional methods and sticking to the book to save the day, SEO can be called Robin, who brings different dynamics to the table. SEO is all about building online content, be it in the form of a company website, blog, or anything else that is optimised for search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc., so that these search engines rank your site higher on the SERPs (search engine results pages). This helps boost the brands’ online presence by driving traffic to the site and can possibly result in generating leads and driving conversions. SEO professionals also perform tasks such as keyword research and website analysis in order to understand the fruits of their efforts and identify the pockets where they can improve the communication’s performance.
While PR is all about the "public" part of branding, SEO is more about "visibility". At the end of the day, PR and SEO both more or less focus on increasing brand awareness and recognition, so why not optimise both together? Look at it from this perspective: today's world is online, and there is nothing that cannot be found on the internet. Google, the most visited website in the world, processes over 99000 searches every single second, which accounts for more than 8.5 billion searches a day. What happens if this dynamic duo works together like Batman and Robin? Here’s an example! Surely, when you publish a press release about your company, you expect it to spread like wildfire (positively) for maximum reach. This might happen offline with the help of fantastic PR pros, but what about the online world? If the press release in question is search engine optimised with the appropriate keywords, it will also blow up in the SERP rankings. Similarly, if a person visiting your company's website finds nothing more than a bunch of keywords placed by SEO managers on display, the site will offer nothing of value to the person, and the site may lose its relevance. With the help of strategically integrated public relations, that site can have much more than just keywords; it can have various aspects that bring meaning and life to the site, such as thought leadership, guest input, carefully considered marketing messaging, testimonials, and more.
Batman and Robin are called a "dynamic duo" because even though the two of them, individually, are powerhouses, they complement each other perfectly for the best possible outcome.
Similarly, the finest campaigns combine disciplines from SEO and PR. It relies on public relations teams to identify opportunities for the creation of valuable content, while SEO specialists manage its optimisation and visibility among the target audience. A PR and SEO strategy cannot be implemented in a one-size-fits-all manner. So the question arises, who would you choose for your brand? It is essential to tailor your communication with a balanced integration of SEO and PR based to strike the right goal. Do you still believe SEO and PR are better off as individual practices or would you now vote for the duo to be implemented together?