How to Align Your PR Strategy with SEO Trends

As the importance of digital marketing continues to reach new heights for modern businesses, SEO has become a critical component in getting the right people to a business website at the right time. Search engine optimization has emerged as an important consideration not only for marketing teams, but PR groups too – particularly as marketing and PR become more intertwined.

Here, we’ll take a look some of the ways that you can align your PR strategy with the trends in SEO most important for companies this year.

Use More Video Engagement Touchpoints

Part of getting the search engines to pay attention today is taking the time to create the right content. For PR agencies that really want to make their clients shine, video could be a good step forward. Engagement with video has been trending up quickly lately, thanks to things like faster internet speeds, social-media solutions like Facebook Live and more. Search engines are likely to recognize video trends and start supporting companies who use more video.

Filtering Non-Credible News

As concerns about “fake news” continue to grow, many companies have struggled to maintain their reputation after allowing fake news. PR agents will need to make sure that the things they post about their clients are as credible as possible, with quotes and statistics from reputable sources to help back them up. This means that PR reps will need to do more research into the things they want to publish.

Social Media Searching

Another trend in SEO lately is that a lot of people are beginning to use social media platforms as search engines. While search engines still have a lot to offer the modern marketplace, they’re not the only way for today’s customers to get the news and information they need. As this trend for using social media as a search engine continues, content will have to be social media optimal. The good news is that many PR agents already have a lot of experience with social media.

Featured Snippets and Voice Search

Today, one in five mobile queries come from voice search – a number more likely to rise up as an important factor as Assistant-enabled factors continue to grow more popular. As voice search grows, we’ll also see more featured snippets in SEO strategies – something that PR agents will need to keep in mind. There’s already evidence that growth is taking place. Companies may also need to start thinking about how they can adjust their SEO strategies to include more semantic keywords.

Placing Quality Over Quantity

For a long while now, the rules of SEO have been suggesting that big companies should produce content constantly if they want to get good rankings on Google search. Although producing a lot of short content is great for getting brand authority and awareness – it’s not going to help when organizations are trying to rank for a specific and highly competitive keyword or phrase. 2018 will push PR agencies to release more high-quality and long-form content.