One of the most important advantages that a business can have when it comes to public relations is SEO. Because the goal of PR is to provide relevant and valuable information to the people that are looking for that information. Meanwhile, SEO aims to direct all of that information so that it gets in front of the right people. This, essentially, means that SEO and PR are very closely intertwined.
However, most of the time, businesses are still looking at SEO from a utilitarian perspective and seeing it only to get more clicks. However, the top CEOs are completely supporting their SEO teams because most of the time, it’s the top result on search engines that is the first point of brand contact for many prospects.
When businesses start considering that the search engine results pages are going to be their introduction to many of their future customers, partners, and clients, it’s time to start looking at SEO as an essential piece of a good PR strategy.
Authoritative Presence
These days, Google has been putting a lot more effort into keeping the right businesses, information, and content as the top results, so that people don’t have to click through many websites before they find what they are looking for. However, with the introduction of answer boxes and snippets, companies don’t have to receive visitors on their websites to position themselves as an authority within their industries, because they can provide the information that people need in those boxes.
Nothing is Free
Back in the old days, when there were advertisements on the side of the search results on Google, things were different. However, these days, only a very small percentage of search results are actually organic. With the current climate, most of the search results are dominated by ads, snippets, answer boxes, and other types of content.
Meanwhile, brands tend to focus most of their efforts on the high-volume terms, where they have a lot of competition. Even so, many of the people who are at this point in their research and information gathering journey are already further along on the buying process, which tends to mean that they are already familiar with the brand and its competitors.
Creating and optimizing content that caters to people who are much earlier in the buying process is a great way to get more leads and grow a business because companies will have a better chance of forming a relationship with the potential buyers far sooner than the competitors.
Mobile First
These days, three out of four smartphone users are using search engines as their first point of addressing any immediate need, which means that companies have to optimize for mobile use. For that, it’s important to have a secure website – which also leads to higher rankings in search results, optimizing for voice search; and providing quality text and video content that is decent in length and clearly and quickly addresses any questions.