The good news: a very kind industry contact has invited me to speak on a panel titled, SEO in 2019: New Strategies, New Tactics, at the Mid-Atlantic Marketing Summit in Washington D.C. on Friday, April 26th.
The bad news: I need to prepare to speak in front of hundreds of marketing and communications executives throughout the region attending an event to discuss high-level issues through a series of panels, keynotes, presentations, exhibits, and networking.
OK, it’s not all bad (just a little intimidating), and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t really looking forward to the Marketing Summit.
In addition to my genuine interest in FischTank’s practice areas, I’m equally interested in why and how public relations can impact marketing. This is why our team has put so much time into understanding the intersection of Public Relations and SEO, the practice of utilizing media relations and content marketing to impact search engine results and position. This is a strategy we employ for our clients that conduct their business primarily online, generating leads to support business development, increasing traffic to ecommerce platforms, and other objectives that come with the daily grind of online marketing.
I can wax poetic (sure?) and explain why companies should hire FischTank (yes, you should!), but I’ll take the rest of the time in this blog ahead of the Marketing Summit to ask some friends and peers in my network what they think about this topic:
“In a world of links of dubious value, true, expertly done PR generates not just publicity for the business, but good links that continue to reverberate throughout search engines. We typically see media earned links as some of the most valuable links when conducting SEO analysis. I’d encourage everyone to look at their business for hidden opportunities for press.” – Josh Greene, CMO for The Mather Group and the moderator of the upcoming panel at the Marketing Summit.
“The intersection of PR & SEO is critical as PR provides one of the best opportunities to attract links from high quality publications to your site. With links still remaining one of the top two search engine ranking factors your PR efforts can increase your sites authority, rankings & traffic. It’s important for your PR & SEO teams to be on the same page and to know for instance that getting links to the primary website is much more important than social media channels and to also push your contacts to make sure they include proper link attribution in their coverage.” – Ryan O’Connor, Founder of One Tribe Apparel
“Content is meaningless if no one can find it in search. Whether it’s a hard earned news article, a well-crafted blog post, or even a mention by an influencer, ensuring that your content is properly tagged, titled, optimized, and focused on your brands keywords are critical for ensuring search success. A properly curated digital reputation need not rely on a deluge of content but rather a few well crafted, strategic pieces that reflect the best about you or your business. It makes no sense to waste precious space in your search results for poorly written, meaningless content merely designed to fool the algorithm. Better to leverage the power of search to shape the reputation you need and want.” – Sam Michelson, CEO and Founder of Five Blocks
“Google is smart. Once upon a time, if you threw enough links any links at a site, it would rank. That’s not the case anymore. A site needs live mentions on topically relevant, high authority sites (with or without a link). Google’s bot is smart enough to know when your brand name is mentioned in an article in the Wall Street Journal or New York Times. A link in that article is the icing on the cake.” – Alex Deckard, SEO Manager, Aeroflow Healthcare
“Companies looking to raise capital from either the public or institutional investors need to be cognizant of their message to the market, but also the results search engines show when people are doing their due diligence. This is especially true in emerging industries, such as cannabis, cryptocurrency, renewable technologies, and others where competition is fierce and there is an increased need to separate yourself from the rest of the pack. This is where media relations and content marketing come into play, ensuring both transparency and a high quality of results appear when someone Googles or otherwise searches a brand.” – Kendall Almerico, Principal at Almerico Law
“In recent years, SEO has become much more precise, more transparent, and more results oriented. As a result, public relations has started to play an even more important role in the successful management of SEO. It has become obvious to marketers that if you want your business to be visible and easily found, you have to understand that there is no successful SEO without proper PR.” – Larissa Pitersky, Chief Financial Officer of Apex Capital Partners
