SEO for PRs

There was a day, a long, long time ago when the existence of your average PR person was much more simpler, but it was also a lot more boring… Today PR people have a lot on their plate and are often required to understand several other areas of expertise in order to be good at one they do. One of these is SEO.

Now, I’m not saying that we all need to to go out become SEO experts overnight, but getting a good understanding of it will help you and your clients.

So, here are a few simple tips for PRs venturing into the SEO space

• Go and talk to the SEO team for your client and find out what they are doing, what they are focusing on and get their Keyword glossary from them
• Review the areas that your working on and select the most relevant keywords from the keyword glossary that the SEO team shared with you – telling them which words you’ve selected
• Integrate these words in to as much of your online communications as possible – headers and body text for SMPRs, descriptions and tags for other content like video and pictures
• Incorporate your keywords throughout any social media profiles you might have
• Be sure to include your client’s name along with a link through to further information along side your keywords in all activity
• When spokespeople are commenting on blogs posts, forums or community sites make sure you include relevant keywords along with the company name and links through to further information 

The important thing here is to remember that we’re communications experts and when we use SEO, it must not overtake the conversations, so don’t try and shoe-horn keywords in where they don’t fit. Remember to provide links through to further information from your client, this will help with tracking and measurement.

There’s loads more to this debate and these are just a few thought starters, if you’ve got more, add them below.