More often than not, I get a strange look from people when I tell them that wedü’s public relations (PR) division is part of our digital marketing team. To anyone that views PR in strictly traditional terms, yes, this is a unique setup. If you look at PR with a broader view and understand the implications it can have on lead generation and digital marketing overall, it starts to make much more sense. Over the next few days, I will be covering three critical areas of digital marketing that a quality PR strategy can directly benefit: SEO, Blogging and Social Media. I hope this series of posts will help you understand where we see PR heading and how critical it can be to online branding and lead generation.

Benefit #1: SEO

Google has made some pretty significant changes to its algorithm that decides search result rankings. A big part of this is their recent crackdown on backlinks. A backlink is a link on another site that links to yours. Traditionally, the thought was that the more outside links to your site, the more people care about it and the better its search ranking is. SEO specialists have exploited this part of the algorithm to the nth degree by creating backlinks in some not-so-genuine ways. Google, being concerned about the integrity of their search engine, have smartened up to this practice and have created a way to penalize sites that gain backlinks in shady ways and reward those that gain them naturally. So you now know about backlinks, but how does PR fit into this discussion. Simple, digital public relations can generate very high-quality backlinks for a site by securing online placements. A link to your site on a high-traffic blog or news site not only will drive direct traffic to your site, but also serves as a feather in your SEO cap in Google’s eyes. Additionally, PR teams can improve site SEO by just sending out press releases digitally. By using a digital wire service like Marketwire or PR Newswire, you not only reach the journalists you need to for traditional pick-ups, but you also benefit from having your release included on a highly-optimized site that will be picked up by the major search engines, including Google News usually. Because of this built-in optimization, including a link to your site in your release generates additional web traffic to your site and creates a great backlink to improve SEO. In my next post, I will be expanding on Reason #2: Blog Benefits from PR. Please be sure to sign up at the top of the right menu for email notifications so you don’t miss the follow-ups to this post!   Image Credit: Mike Licht