Despite company marketing and public relations budgets being in a state of ambiguity, many public relations organizations are focusing on social media, trying to figure out “do’s and don’ts” to improve online reach. At the same time, search engine optimization (SEO) of news content is fast becoming an established part of the mix for many public relations programs.

On their own, SEO and social media channels offer attractive opportunities for reaching industry influentials as well as end-consumers through push and pull public relations. Together, SEO and social media combine to create a competitive edge that can boost online public relations results.

Why is this so? Changes in the way the media and end-consumers discover, consume and share content illustrate the intersection of opportunity for both the search and social Web. Today’s increasingly social media savvy content consumer not only expects to find what they’re looking for on search engines, but to interact with the results. Those interactions take many forms including: commenting, voting and sharing. As a result, social media can affect search engine visibility in numerous ways, creating new promotion opportunities for public and media relations efforts.

The PR industry is in a state of flux with increasing emphasis on the digital and social side of communications.   In the context of digital PR, social media and search engine optimization can work together to compound results.  As PR efforts continue to emphasize content publishing, digital and social communications, the opportunity to keyword optimize content for search is low hanging fruit.

Forward thinking companies would do well to assess the SEO and social media readiness of their marketing and PR resources.  Is the current digital PR effort leveraging improved visibility through search engines? Do current PR and Marketing staff or vendors possess the digital PR tools they need to offer competitive consulting in a “PR 2.0” world? Consider the following questions to assess the SEO and social media readiness of your digital PR assets:

1. Is social media participation conducted without attention to SEO?
   According to the iPressroom Digital Readiness Report, social media adoption outranks organic SEO. Yet more than 82% of Internet users surveyed in “When Did We Start Trusting Strangers” (published by Tom Smith, one of the researchers of the Digital Readiness Report) stated search engines are the tools most frequently used to source information about products, brands and services. That disconnect reinforces the need for search engine optimization as a key digital marketing and PR tactic.

Measuring the return on investment from online marketing and PR efforts is essential as an indication of success as well as a feedback mechanism to guide subsequent efforts.

Determining the effectiveness of SEO for Public Relations starts with clearly identified objectives. Matching the purpose for the effort with specific metrics is essential.  For example, if improving brand visibility is a goal, then documenting brand mentions in connection with news & PR content at regular intervals can demonstrate the effect of content promotion and link building.

Online PR metrics and tools often include:

• News wire service metrics (see screen capture below)
• Web analytics for landing pages and web site
• Google and Yahoo alerts
• Monitor blog search engines (via RSS)
• Press release landing page conversion tracking
• Social media monitoring
• Inbound links
• Pickups on blogs
• Pickups on other web sites & online publications
• News and Standard Search Engine Rankings
• Conversions: Less likely sales, more likely white paper downloads, webinar signups, newsletter subscriptions, demos, etc

Say what you will, blogs are increasingly in competition for time and attention against mainstream media news sources. As the importance of blogs grows, many PR organizations struggle to identify best practices for engaging them.

Blogger relations is not a matter of media relations with a new type of media list. Bloggers are typically not reporters and don’t follow the same rules and practices within traditional journalism. Yet a single blogger can attract an audience on par with that of a small news organization.

As a blogger with over 15,000 subscribers, I’ve been on the sending and receiving end of blog pitches. Here are a few hard won insights for media relations professionals trying to make sense of the blogger audience.

• Be relevant. It seems so simple and obvious, yet it is the biggest mistake made when pitching bloggers. Look at the categories of the blog, tags and previous blog posts. Is your pitch REALLY relevant?

• Personalize. Getting an email pitch with no personal reference at all, or just a press release and no message is a sure trip to the trash folder. Take the time to research the blog, make comments and get involved. Be honest about who you are in the comments and provide thoughtful insight that is of value and relevant to the blog post.

The buzz about SEO in the public relations industry has grown steadily over the past 2-3 years. Press releases were the easy target for promotion as candidates for optimization. With the growing use of Google and Yahoo News, optimizing press releases have been an easy way to gain prominent visibility with nominal effort.

As both a SEO and a PR practitioner for the past 8+ years, I get to educate clients and audiences at both PR & Search Marketing conferences. At public relations conferences, I’m the SEO guy talking about optimized PR. At search marketing conferences, I’m the PR guy talking about using PR for SEO.

The continuing convergence of both PR and SEO is inevitable. Neither is based on pay to play, although there are advertorial and paid editorial placement offerings. Editorial visibility in offline and online publications is for the most part “earned” as are the top rankings of web pages on search engines like Google and Yahoo.

Public relations practitioners have significantly warmed up to well documented possibilities and opportunities to extend their effectiveness for clients through implementing search engine optimization into their programs. The reality is that PR doesn’t have control over all of a companies digital assets.