If you have two (or even more) companies working on separate aspects of a marketing strategy (say traditional PR and SEO), it would be safe to assume at some point you would try to get them to work together, right? Wrong. Some mistakenly think there’s no need for their PR company and their SEO company to ever interact because SEO has no place in PR.

Even if you’re primarily focused on traditional public relations and couldn’t care less about abiding by the laws according to Google or Bing, there are probably some ways SEO can complement an existing PR campaign.


See? Marines know how to work together for everyone's success. 

Team Owls

I’m working with a great client who has a very distinct corporate culture. Not only do they have products that are well liked, but there are a lot of interesting things about this brand that lend itself to gaining some media coverage. Let’s call them Team Owls.

Team Owls had their mascot (we’ll call him Herbert) featured on a handful of local television stations to prepare for an upcoming appearance in an area. In addition to the two separate television appearances, Herbert was going to be honored at an event later that evening. Unfortunately, I only found out about this after the events had taken place. My contacts were notified about these events last minute, so even with them relaying the information to me quickly, it was still passed along after the fact.

What could we have done differently to better capitalize on this opportunity?

Knowing about the appearances and event in advance would have been helpful so we could have reached out to the organization coordinating the event and asked if they’d be interested in providing a link to Herbert’s page on the Team Owls website so people could learn more about him.

It would have also been great if we would have been in talks with the television show’s producers before Herbert made his appearance. Most television stations will provide a short summary of a news clip on their website, so when they post the video interview later, there would have been the ability for us to find another opportunity to offer a link to Herbert’s page.

Fancy Pants

Take another recent example from someone we’ll call Fancy Pants. Fancy Pants was working with a PR company to promote a new product release that had the potential to gain a ton of media exposure. The PR company reached out to several news outlets to promote different variations of information to promote the new products. In addition, they also wrote a press release to discuss the new products. The news release was relevant and great to read, but there were some basic SEO oversights that could have been avoided if they asked us to make a cursory review before distributing. One big issue was there was four links to the home page in the release.

I’m sure there was a good reason behind why the PR company did this, possibly to help people remember Fancy Pants’s web address. Or, maybe they just didn’t realize search engines will only read one of those four links within the release, so including the same URL multiple times doesn’t offer any benefit. If they had wanted to put four links into the press release, it would have been more beneficial to put links to four different pages to get the most benefit.

While it might not be immediately apparent how you can take traditional media opportunities and place them online, chances are good that there is some part of your PR campaign that you can take online. So, make sure your PR and SEO play nicely so you can create an end result that benefits everyone.