Marketing trends come and go, but those that survive tend to have two key elements: adaptability and profitability. Search engine optimisation has always had to adapt because it deals with consequences of algorithm changes by the search gods such as Google. Its profitability has always been more of grey area, and in that sense it has a lot in common with public relations, which has often come to an idea first but failed to make the money out of these ideas which advertising seems to have done so naturally.
But with the latest changes for both, we have witnessed a growing convergence, often under the banner of “search content marketing”, the creation of content for audiences (traditionally a PR stronghold) which is not only optimised for search (SEO’s historical strength) but actually created for search (the battleground).
This means that to many current experts, PR and SEO are actually one industry. There are even a few who claim to practice SEO PR, which is an unhelpful new piece of jargon.
But within this new world there is both opportunity to profit, in a results and financial sense, and to lose sight of what should be the ultimate PR master – strategy. I shall seek to explain this.
First, many PRs are now focusing on landing coverage online, which contains a link back to the site of the business they represent. If Google ranks the site providing the link as a trusted and authoritative source, this increases the authority of the represented site and, over time, increases its own search ranking, ie, it appears higher up the results. Google changes its algorithms to constantly alter what impacts its ratings. Over time, editorial value and quality of source has outstripped dated practices such as stuffing website copy with keywords, and this is what has led to third party editorial content being valued and chased by SEOs, leading them to not only hire PR people but to practice it themselves.
To look at this battleground in its simplest sense – what PRs and SEOs refer to as authoritative link building – then it is useful, especially if you are in-house or representing companies that primarily trade online, as the ability to show traffic, links and even purchases from PR activity is far more useful for demonstrating results than advertising equivalent ever was. (Oh, and while we’re at that, whoever tried to run with “earned media equivalent”, nice try, but please stop.)
There are real benefits in this modern digital public relations, illustrated by communications teams that are proficient in analytics and in using social channels to help messages reach and engage a wide as audience as possible.
Despite the positive changes digital has had on public relations there is, however, another aspect that worries me. I recently read, but won’t link to avoid irony, an opinion piece on a popular SEO site in which several PRs were giving advice on creating quick short-term online links that would have, to paraphrase the argument, no impact on brand reputation but would sit in digital limbo as search content marketing. Rather than a result of the communication strategy, the point they were making was that this race to arms for search content was the communication strategy.
It’s a worrying example of how the cart is being put before the horse. SEO is taking priority over PR campaigns, but it is the communications people advising it. This blurring of disciplines comes at a price. In same way “buzzfeedification” of media creates link-bait, the wrong type of SEO-focused PR campaigns can create low-impact, high-volume generic content that threatens to become the norm rather than the exception. You can spot them a mile away, ‘guest blogs’ on obscure international business sites, bland infographics - search driven content designed for the link and which could be interchangeable with a thousand organisations, all lacking the spark of originality and creativity that gets the heart racing – and lacking strategy.
The strategy should serve to meet the objective of any good PR campaign, that is to alter perceptions or behaviours of target audiences to improve or protect an organisation’s reputation. It doesn’t matter if the message the channel is communicated is the written press, an event, or a blog, as long as it serves this strategy.
Any pound spent on PR that fails to do that is a waste and could be spent better elsewhere. It works both ways, as modern PR campaigns should contain all the necessary facets to work digitally, with communications and digital teams working to one strategy. This is ultimately what content should refer to, and able PR people have long since moved beyond delivering just a press release.
By sacrificing the management of reputation to focus primarily on search and link building, the PRs who play this game are in danger of being the turkeys that voted for Christmas, as these jobs can be fulfilled by SEOs, no doubt at a cheaper price.
I’m a massive digital advocate, I think it is changing communications for the better and providing the opportunity for public relations to find a transparency that held it back in years gone by.
Yet I urge PR people to be careful about trying to take on the “SEO first” mantle. By putting Google on a pedestal at the expense of sound, long-term strategies, the industry is agreeing to play by its rules, rules inevitably linked to Google’s own advertising and revenue models.
And, after all, isn’t SEO Google’s greatest PR creation?
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