If you’re the director of marketing or the office manager I want you to do something for me. It will take just 5 minutes of your time and it will be well worth it.
Get two post-it notes and write on each one. “Tell me what you’re working on and your top three objectives.”
Hand one to your PR person and one to your SEO person.
Now get your PR to say hi to your SEO and swap their post-its. That’s it, that’s all you need to do.
The problem is that we are all still working in silos. We can’t seem to help it but this cannot carry on. Channels cannot exist is silos any more, they need to work together (some more than others obviously) but the collaboration that should be screaming out at you exists between PR and SEO.
I’ll tell you why.
I’ve mentioned in previous posts about how PR has evolved and is no longer just about press release writing, media interviews and launch parties. With the newly integrated digital landscape PR today is as much about good quality content and outreach than anything else. Content that reaches out across digital, social media, offline and video. But hang on a minute, isn’t that what your SEO does? Isn’t that an integral part of their objectives and success too? Yes it is. So you see there is a big synergy. Your PR and SEO people will see that there is a big synergy too.
OK so I’m simplifying things a little but you’ve got to start somewhere. It’s unlikely that your PR person will know about the impact their hard earned media can have on SEO and keyword rankings. On the flip side, SEO is rarely taught about PR. Media outreach may be a portion of the job of an SEO but PRs know and understand it very well.
So how can these two teams help each other?
Link optimisation.
A fairly straightforward start would be the SEO helping the PR optimise the links in their earned media coverage. Things like byline articles, blogs and press releases. SEO can help choose links that have keywords needing a boost with ranking, and make sure the right URL is used to link to.
Influencer outreach
OK so if you’ve got a large team there may be more than one team handling influencer outreach. This could be a problem because you don’t really want lots of people from the same company reaching out to an influencer. It causes confusion with them, whether they’re a blogger, writer or journalist and it will annoy them.
You can prevent this by setting rules or guidelines for the types of outreach that each team will own. So for example your content marketing teams could own the relationship with bloggers while your PR team focuses on mass media outlets. If they share their lists and let each other know when a relationship exists it will also avoid wasted time on unnecessary pitching.
Messages and stories
If you have multiple teams responsible for outreach there is going to be multiple stories coming out at the same time. SEO and PR teams can agree on the broader messaging and timing to ensure you are putting out similar messages and not promoting two different things at the same time.
Sharing content
Squeeze every last drop out of your content. It’s time consuming and costly to create good content so you will want to get your money’s worth.
It really all comes down to teams communicating with each other. You’re all working towards delivering the same objectives and targets even if you have different KPIs. If you can, meet regularly with your colleagues, update them on what youre working on. It could save you a whole lot of extra work and help you do your job infinitely better.
