Align SEO with digital PR to create SEO PR

Alan says: “Companies should be aligning their digital PR and SEO efforts into what I call SEO PR.”

What is SEO PR?

“SEO PR is nothing crazy. A lot of our clients have a PR team that comes to us and asks, ‘How can we make the most from the work that we do?’ There’s a disconnect between what a lot of classic digital PR teams do and what the SEO team does. Most of the time, the two departments don’t even speak to each other.

This creates problems. For example, some of the very good backlinks that the digital PR department creates don’t have the efficacy that they could have if they just followed some best practices.”

Where are digital PR teams not following best practices?

“The most common problem is when the digital PR teams create new content pieces that they get published on big, new publications, but there isn’t a link pointing to the client’s company. There might be a brand mention, but it’s not linked. That’s wasting some huge potential.

In other cases, they might have a link to the brand or the homepage when there could have been a link to a deeper page on the website. Again, it’s wasted potential.”

Should SEO and digital PR be working together on all link acquisitions?

“You should prioritise your media and outreach lists into different segments.

There should be sites that you just do classic PR for, but there should be some that are specifically qualified for SEO purposes.

When they are publishing content that’s relevant to specific pages that you want to rank more highly, that’s where you should be prioritising more of an SEO thought process.”

Should teams like link building and digital PR be sitting and working together all the time?

“As a minimum, they should be aligning every month on the specific efforts and campaigns that are going out. Beyond that, there are some basic guidelines that digital PR people should learn and follow themselves.

It doesn’t need to be super technical and deep; it’s pretty simple. I typically suggest that, instead of just prioritising websites from a domain rating or domain authority standpoint, they should look at 4 simple but key metrics – and I divide them into domain-level metrics and page-level metrics.

On a domain level, it’s domain authority and the traffic to the domain that you want to get a link from. The page-level metrics are the URL rating, which is the authority of the specific page, and the traffic that the specific page has. These are super simple metrics that are essentially the same, but on a domain and page-level basis.

If digital PR teams prioritise their media list using these 4 metrics, that would already make their efforts much more impactful.

PR people tend to shy away from some of these more technical things, thinking that they are vanity metrics. They want to focus on brand awareness, and they have a more holistic view of things.

That said, it all depends on what the company’s goals are. If the company goal is to get more revenue, more signups, or more free trials, and the SEO team has specific pages that can do that very well, then it’s in the interest of the whole company for the two teams to work together and get those pages to rank higher.”

How do you persuade digital PR teams to create link-worthy content that serves both PR and SEO goals?

“You’re not really asking them to change the type of content, it’s usually more of a relevance discussion. I like to suggest that they prioritise topical and thematic relevance.

To get their content published in news articles or lifestyle magazines, a lot of digital PR teams use very broad topical relevance. If it’s a sales software company, their digital PR team might come up with an infographic showing the most famous salespeople in history. It’s visual and dynamic. Then they would get that published in a lifestyle magazine.

That doesn’t work very well for telling Google what the company or product is about – and passing on link equity to the pages that have the potential to bring in sign-up trials. Doing something super broad can get a lot of links but, if the links are not as effective as they could be, there’s really no point.

I suggest having a slightly more targeted approach. Prioritise websites that are relevant from a domain level, but also have content that is more specific to your product.”

Do you also need to educate digital PR teams on the placement of links?

“Yes, placement is very important. I use 4 link placement scores.

Number 1 is a nice placement score, which is just a mention. There’s a mention, but there’s no link. This is good for brand awareness, but it won’t send people to your site because there’s no link.

Number 2 is a good score, and that’s a nofollow backlink. You’ve got the mention, and you get the link, but the link is not passing SEO value. This could send people to your site, but it doesn’t do much for the SEO.

Number 3 is a great score, and this is a mention that is a link, and the link is dofollow. This can provide SEO benefit.

Number 4 is the perfect link: a mention with a dofollow that links to a deep page (a specific article or landing page), that has relevant anchor text to that page.

The digital PR team can divide their media/outreach list into these 4 different scores. Then, based on what they think works best or how aggressive they need to be, they can go after these types of links in different ways.”

What can the SEO team learn from the digital PR team?

“The main thing is everything that has to do with outreach; how to write emails, how to do custom pitches to get people interested, etc.

The problem with link builders specifically is that they always try to scale things up too fast, and they get stuck using the same old template that everybody’s using. That ruins the game for everybody. PR people are very good at writing emails. They reach out, make genuine connections, and create partnerships. They can definitely help SEO teams with how to write emails, copywriting, and how to create genuine partnerships that can eventually lead to a link.

In terms of what they are doing better in their emails, firstly, it’s the structure. Link builders tend to follow specific templates. They have a template for broken links, a template for skyscraper technique, etc. By now, most people who run websites are used to seeing these frameworks, and the way the email looks is very telling.

As soon as I open an email and see the first line says something like, ‘Hey, I’ve read your post about X, but I have this article that is about Y…’, I already know that it’s an email from a link builder. Having a different format and wording things differently, not using the same things over and over, that’s the first improvement.

Then, they’re also very proactive and customised. You could add a P.S. at the end of the email to say, ‘Hey, I noticed that there’s a link that doesn’t work on your page or a sentence with an error in it.’ Take the time to really look at the content. Obviously, you can’t scale this so it’s more difficult and it takes more time, but the results are definitely worth it.”

What types of content are digital PR teams creating?

“Most will focus on news articles. If something happens at the company, they get those articles published in industry-related news sites. Companies that have the budget will have an actual digital PR team that can do creative content, and this can be infographics, interactive data studies, etc. It’s content that has the potential to be linked naturally, but they also get it published on various websites.

Some other companies that are more proactive will also do link insertions. They will find pages that have been recently published and pitch the addition of an extra paragraph or a sentence. We’ve done this for our clients, and it’s been working very well.

We just got a link from a WordStream a couple of weeks ago and we reached out because they have an article on PPC for B2B SaaS companies. Our founder, Dev, had just published a webinar on LinkedIn where he was talking about our unique point of view on some things to do with the topic.

So, we reached out to WordStream and asked if they wanted to include an extra paragraph, talking about the same topic, but including this unique perspective that only our company has. They agreed because they thought it was unique and would help their content rank higher. Within the pitch, we mentioned that, if we helped them refresh their content, it might help their page rank higher because Google typically prioritises fresh content.”

How is the time scale of digital PR project different from that of a link building project?

“It can take months, so it’s definitely a longer process. With the link that I just mentioned, we’ve been going back and forth with them for weeks to get the content done, then approved, and then inserted on the site. The bigger the site you’re dealing with, the more time it’s going to take because there are multiple people involved, they are super busy all the time, and they are publishing a tonne of content already.

Something else that link builders could learn from digital PR people is being patient and trying to prioritise quality over quantity. It takes time to do things well.

Obviously, you do need scale and I’m not saying that traditional link building doesn’t work anymore. It still does. It still has its place, and we still do it. However – especially in the age of AI with all of this content being produced that looks and sounds the same – people should be moving into more of a quality approach instead of quantity.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“Stop producing content (if you have already produced a lot) and focus more on making sure that this content sees the light of day by getting it to rank. That could be through link building or making sure that the content stays fresh.

Do regular content updates. Every quarter, look for pages that get a lot of impressions but not a lot of clicks, and go after those pages. Improve them, add extra content, and optimize the SEO again.

That could be a better use of time, especially in the age of AI where a tonne of content is being produced every single day and people have found a way of scaling that up really quickly. Content that sounds human and is very good quality and insightful is definitely going to have more of an impact over the long term.”

Alan Silvestri is a Digital PR Consultant at Powered by Search, and you can find him over at PoweredbySearch.com.