The SEO & PR connection, described as digital PR or just off-page SEO/linkbuilding, has always been vital for success. However, this is often ignored since less control exists than on-page or technical.
AI search results though, with their reliance on third-party sources, has revitalized this collaboration.
A balance needs to be struck… you never want to disrupt good journalism. That harms relationships with both outlets & potential leads. Bad content is bad SEO.
Yet the best approach here is to incorporate SEO & AI search visibility best practices, often in subtle ways:
- Craft a boilerplate together, or the About Us description placed at the end of a piece describing your company. This should have keywords used naturally. If you rely on a Media/Press Kit page, ensure this is optimized too.
- Verbatim keyword phrases are forced when placed throughout articles and not likely to be accepted anyway. However, do include core topics & themes. This frequency across the web improves your brand’s likelihood of being mentioned & cited, and SEO will have useful input here.
- Be thoughtful with internal linking. Perhaps your leaders are interviewed, with a backlink for them for your site. Ensure they have bio pages, marked up with proper schema, that then link to their specialties, which are hub pages that also showcase them! This shows genuine expertise behind your business, both for LLMs/search engines & users.
- Consider relevant alt text in any images shared. For example, in headshots, include their names (and specialities, if it makes sense). This may further help with entity matching, associating experts with your content.
- Link to more specific pages when possible, for example your Solutions pages, versus only the homepage. These should have relevant anchor text when possible. Helpful deep resources that are more directly helpful can also be shared, representing more information related to the piece, which can then reference key pages.
While SEO often needs to make compromises here, PR must broaden its scope to realize that key citations aren’t always the traditional industry outlets… any site pulled for citations & brand mentions across prompts are worthwhile to consider. Traditional SEO metrics can be helpful for evaluation here, and in turn provide data showing that PR is successful!