Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

A typical PR department is primarily concerned with getting your company

mentioned in the media and making sure that the publicity is accurate and—ideally—

positive. Many newspaper and magazine articles, not to mention blog postings, are

triggered by press releases or other forms of contact from a PR department. And it’s

fair to say that search engines deserve a place among these media sources: just like

magazines, newspapers and the like, search engines provide a free, ostensibly unbiased

third-party source of publicity for your organization.

Even more important from a PR point of view, search engines have become a

key research tool for those very journalists, bloggers, and thought leaders PR is chat-

ting up in the first place.

You might meet some resistance from a PR department that thinks of SEO as

strictly a form of advertising. In truth, SEO often does walk a fine line. A PPC cam-

paign is most clearly within the advertising classification, but other SEO tasks, such

as including target keywords in press releases or gaining incoming links from business

contacts, fall more directly into the PR bucket. Once you explain to your PR folks

that you will be seeking their assistance only with organic SEO activity, they should

be more open to the possibilities.

As the department that protects the company brand, PR will likely have a great

deal of interest in the brand maintenance tasks that fall under the SEO umbrella: moni-

toring search engine listings and other online mentions for currency and accuracy. You

may need to educate the PR team about how to find outdated information online, but

once they know where (and how) to look, don’t be surprised if they develop a passion

for rooting out the “uglies.”

What if your website is not trying to sell anything or gather leads, or run adver-

tising for revenue? What if the only goal of your website is brand awareness? This is

when you need your PR department most of all. The folks in PR are already skilled in

handling those difficult-to-measure soft targets offline through clipping services and

surveys. They may even be doing some tracking of online mentions. Now you need

to tie their tracking efforts together with the SEO campaign to make sure that SEO

gets credit where credit is due. We’ll talk more about online brand-awareness tracking

options in Part III, “Your SEO Plan.” Luckily, PR people are generally very comfortable

with documentation. You shouldn’t have too hard a time convincing them to document

their SEO successes.

Pearl of Wisdom:

Your PR department can think of search engines as a particularly big

media outlet.

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