Many consider Public Relations an outdated mode of promotion and brand building, especially in our increasingly digitised world. But if you lift the curtain and take a closer look, what you’ll see is that PR isn’t dead—it’s just evolving. To keep up with the times, PR leaders are incorporating hybrid strategies to ensure that businesses are doing more than simply showing up online, but standing out when and where it matters. This is where SEO and PR collide.
Individually, both do a lot of the heavy lifting around online brand reputation, but the truth is that, on their own, SEO and PR carry flaws that can present significant challenges to the modern marketer—even more so to the small business with limited resources to devote to either.
Thankfully, when combined, public relations and search engine optimisation fill the gaps left by the other, enabling and enhancing the effectiveness of both digital marketing strategies for a winning online presence. And that’s exactly what this guide is here to explain.
Now, let’s get your digital presence humming.
Skip to:
- PR vs SEO: How they compare & contrast
- Why consider combining them?
- 9 PR SEO strategies that hit different
- Real-world results: SEO + PR in action
- Recap
PR vs SEO: How they compare and contrast
Whether you’re a PR professional, SEO copywriter/strategist, or the owner of a small business struggling to be seen online, a reminder of what makes both strategies tick couldn’t hurt. The crux of the matter is this:
PR is story-first, audience-focused and placement-driven, while SEO is performance-first, keyword/technically driven and backlink-focused. The former is all about wherecontent appears and the type of engagement, perception and relationships it fosters. And the latter? Its aim is to improve your brand’s chance of ranking, so targeting not just people, but search engines and, more pressingly, AI and large language models.
To put it another way, think of PR as your message or story, and SEO as the megaphone that makes sure it’s heard by as many of the right people.
What is PR?
PR stands for Public Relations. It’s the practice of growing a brand’s reputation and advertising its offering by building strong relationships with the public, journalists, and media. Press releases, news items, employee advocacy and partnerships are all staples here.
PR best practices typically include:
- Production of eye-catching, uniquely angled, newsworthy content
- Development of strong media relationships
- Creation of a strong brand and an instantly recognisable brand identity
- Hosting outreach campaigns to expand the brand’s reach
The challenges of PR in the information age
Traditional public relations once relied heavily on print advertising, in-person networking, and other forms of physical media such as newspapers, magazines, and billboard advertising.
Unfortunately, in the information age—where print plays a much smaller role compared to online platforms—these forms of PR are fast becoming obsolete. And in a busy online marketplace, fighting to make your PR team’s voice heard above the humdrum of activity can be daunting, if not downright impossible.
What’s more, as a fresh face on the digital block, PR does not tend to have in place the tools necessary for measuring campaign success.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It covers a range of techniques and practices used to make your website and webpages easily discoverable and optimally relevant to search engines like Google, Safari, Bing and Ecosia, for instance.
SEO best practices typically include:
- Technical SEO for a well-structured, easily navigable, and fast-running website
- Creation of high-quality, original, authoritative, relevant and engaging content
- Keyword research and optimisation of online copy
- Acquiring quality backlinks from trusted third-party sources
The hurdles of SEO in a busy digitised world
Optimising your website and the content you post online for search engines is not just beneficial to businesses operating online; it is inarguably fundamental. And yet, with so many millions of brands shouting to be heard—many of them outbidding you for prime space in paid search— raising your voice above the others with SEO alone is a challenging and often long road to walk.
One of the trickier elements of running a modern SEO campaign, particularly for small- and medium-sized businesses, is knowing how to make the right connections to gain quality backlinks and representation (think brand mentions, shout-outs and reviews) on other, higher-quality or higher-ranking sites.
Where they overlap
As shrewd readers may have already caught on, there’s something of a grey area between both disciplines. In placing a PR piece—let’s say a product launch press release—on a local news site that links back to your own website, you’ve coincidentally earnt yourself a backlink. If that link in question has all the right signals, like authority and trustworthiness, search engines take it as a vote of confidence from a reputable source and thereby bump you up the rankings.
Similarly, in SEO outreach, you find quality sites to snag links from, but this time with the express purpose of improving your backlink profile. Here, the strength of links drives your interest and search engine performance, but you might also find that the outreach piece excels in the realm of PR.
So, what ties SEO and PR together? Brand awareness. If it’s a journalist quoting your CEO or a blog linking to your how-to guide, high-quality content helps more people hear about you, trust you, and remember your name. Which is what SEO and online reputation management actively thrive on.
Why you should consider combining SEO and PR best practices
It’s not uncommon for digital marketing or SEO teams and their PR counterparts in a company to work independently of each other. In fact, it’s probably more common that the two operate without any knowledge of or insight into what the other is doing. Yep, it’s siloes all the way.
This is at best an inefficient way to work, and at worst a recipe for failure on both accounts.
But by combining your SEO and PR teams—training each in the ways of the other and encouraging collaboration and a cross-pollination of ideas—you can ensure that the challenges discussed above are easily overcome.
By using SEO in PR and vice versa, small businesses and big alike can maximise the potential return of their online marketing budget in terms of brand awareness, click through and conversion rates, customer value and campaign cost effectiveness. Music to our ears.
9 PR SEO strategies that hit different
As we mentioned, the interplay between SEO and PR enhances the impact of both: as a hybrid strategy, SEO PR can be a much more effective way of reaching new customers, expanding business reach and improving brand perception than either can provide on its own.
Here, we’ve broken down how they can benefit each other into two chunks, starting with the advantages of SEO for PR.
4 ways SEO can optimise your PR strategy
1) Get to know your audience better
One of the core elements of SEO is keyword research and optimisation. Keywords are the words and phrases most searched for by prospective clients and leads in your industry. The most relevant keywords are those that 1) pertain to your unique offering and USPs, and 2) can be targeted as niches yet to be dominated by competitors in your industry.
Once you’ve nailed the right keywords for your business, SEO best practice would then be to optimise the copy on your website and webpages (product descriptions and blog posts, for example) to include these phrases. This helps make your content more easily discoverable to search engines and, when implemented effectively, helps that content rank highly on Search Engine Page Results (SERPs).
With publicity, keyword research can help your PR team get to know your audience better. By identifying the industry-relevant queries potential customers regularly search for, SEO can illuminate the kinds of issues, concerns, desires, and queries your target audience is interested in. This allows businesses to build a PR strategy which directly addresses the needs of customers, ultimately making your content more appealing to the people your business’s success relies upon.
2) Improve the UX of your PR content
Another key element of SEO happens behind the scenes and is known as ‘technical SEO’. Technical SEO deals with the structure, accessibility, speed and quality of your web pages—i.e., all of the things impacting the User Experience (UX) of customers visiting your site. It’s everything from formatting copy with metadata like H1-H4 headings and using images to make pages more visually appealing, to drafting the meta titles and descriptions, which help your pages rank higher.
The content produced by PR teams—including press releases, ad campaigns and more—can greatly benefit from technical SEO and an improved UX. The better the user’s experience when visiting your PR content and website pages, the more likely they are to stay on-site for longer, to leave with a positive opinion of your brand and, hopefully, to convert their visit into a sale or lead.
3) Accurately measure brand reputation and customer awareness
We mentioned in our introduction to PR that one of the trickier challenges to traditional and digital PR campaigns is the apparent inability to measure their success. Thankfully, many of the metrics and measurement tools regularly utilised by SEO professionals can also be leveraged to assess the impact of PR. And these tools really are a game-changer.
To give you an example, Google Search Console, a go-to SEO tool, shows you how many people are actively searching for your brand online, as well as how they interact with your brand and website when they find it, allowing PR teams to identify the impact on brand reputation their campaigns are having.
4) Use SEO analytics to assess and improve your PR strategy
In a similar vein to the above point, there are a number of other SEO analytics tools and metrics which can further improve the ability of your PR teams to assess and improve their strategies.
By utilising free-to-use tools like Google Analytics, PR teams can easily track the referral traffic of their various placements to your website, as well as the conversions which come from this traffic.
With these metrics to hand, SEO allows PR professionals to better adapt their campaigns for greater return—an assessment-and-improvement process which works iteratively, continuously helping your business grow its audience and conversions.
5 ways PR can benefit your business’s SEO
1) Leverage higher-quality backlinks with PR
Much of a business’s ranking on web browser SERPs—such as the first results page of a Google search—comes down to a network of backlinks informing search engines of the reliability and trustworthiness of your site and brand.
A backlink is a link from a third-party website back to your own, or even better, to a specific relevant webpage of yours—e.g., a product page or page dedicated to a specific service you provide. The more authoritative the third-party source, the greater advantage a backlink has to your business. The process of acquiring these backlinks is called ‘link building’.
The problem is that through traditional SEO methods alone, building a high-quality portfolio of backlinks can be a real struggle, which is precisely where PR comes into play.
PR professionals are experts at identifying and making connections with quality, trustworthy, relevant and authoritative sources—from national news outlets and online magazines to popular independent blogs and beyond. By building strong relationships with high authority domains, you are better positioned to acquire high-profile backlinks capable of greatly improving your ranking on SERPs.
2) Build a more authoritative domain
And speaking of high authority domains, it is equally important that you build the authority of your own domain.
Tools like Ahrefs enable businesses to see their domain authority score on popular web browsers like Google. The higher the score, the more likely Google (or any other search engine) is to rank your website high up on SERPs—search engines want to provide their users with trustworthy sites which provide relevant answers to their queries, and so prioritise high authority over low authority domains.
PR teams aiming to build relationships predominantly with high-quality, high-authority outlets can significantly enhance your SEO—over time increasing your domain score through link-building and well-placed guest posts.
3) Use PR to improve brand awareness and click-through rate (CTR)
Recent studies have illuminated a curious fact about the outcome of the average Google search. Interestingly, in the EU and USA at least, around just 40% of web searches actually result in a ‘click’—i.e., less than half of all web searches lead to the user clicking on one of the links displayed on SERPs.
What this means for the small business and digital marketer is that getting your web pages to rank highly on SERPs is only half the battle. The other half is having a brand name behind the link strong enough to reel in your prospective customer.
When a user enters a search query into Google and is presented with a list of websites to choose from, they are more likely to click through to your website if they already recognise your brand. And PR is all about brand.
By employing digitised PR best practices to enhance brand awareness and improve brand reputation, you’ve a good chance to bolster all that SEO work you’ve done with a name which pulls in users and urges them to click on your content.
4) Improve the UX of your SEO content
Above, we discussed how SEO can help to improve the UX of your PR content. Of course, the same goes for the other direction. User experience on your website can also be enhanced by the efforts made by PR to connect your business with other high-profile brands.
Where PR is successful in having your brand mentioned by, or better still, partnered with reputable companies, you can then highlight these connections in a UX-friendly banner or widget on your website. As a result, the visiting customer is liable to have a better experience and deepen their appreciation of your brand.
5) Engage in traditional PR techniques to create engaging content
Lastly, we would be remiss not to mention the beneficial interplay of SEO and PR in creating timely, engaging, and original content.
Content marketing is a cornerstone of any digital marketing strategy—used to produce eye-catching, relevant blogs, videos, articles, and more that answer web user queries informatively whilst selling them on your brand or a specific offering.
By looking at SEO content through a PR lens, you can produce search-engine-optimised material and publish it at the perfect time to dominate the issue before your competitors have a chance to. In doing so, you establish your brand as an authority on the matter and simultaneously draw in potentially thousands of viewers, many of whom your combined SEO and PR efforts will convert into customers or clients.
Real-world results: SEO + PR in action
We’ll close out our guide to combining PR and SEO with a real-world example that shows everything we’ve covered in action.
Screaming Frog’s work with Nuffield Health
One standout example of PR and SEO working in harmony comes from Nuffield Health. As part of a digital PR campaign, they focused on creating content around mental wellbeing—an area deeply aligned with their brand values. Rather than chasing clickbait, the campaign targeted relevant trade, stakeholder, and health publications with poise and care, leading to 117 pieces of media coverage—nearly four times their target. Crucially, 81% of that coverage included a backlink, many from high-authority sites, which helped improve their domain authority and organic visibility.
Here, it serves as an important reminder that you can get powerful SEO benefits by placing your stories where they matter most to your audience, even if they’re not on the front page of a national newspaper. Still curious? You can read the full case study on Screaming Frog’s portfolio.
Recapping the symbiotic relationship between SEO and PR
In our cluttered digital world, full of small businesses fiercely competing for the limelight, SEO and PR used independently of each other are rarely capable of achieving the sort of online success necessary to keep your brand growing.
When combined, however, the challenges of one digital marketing strategy are overcome by the other, and vice versa. SEO and PR have a symbiotic relationship wherein they enhance and optimise the impact each has—channelling into one another on a positive feedback loop.
Whatever your online business goals, you’ll need to reach the right audience at the right time and in the right way. To achieve this, it’s time you considered merging your own SEO and PR teams into one unit, and start implementing the combination techniques outlined above. Or get one of our digital marketing specialists on the case—we’re ‘buzzing’ to take your SEO to new heights.
