SEO should integrate with other digital marketing teams to improve natural search results. Since links pointing to your site are essential for organic success, leveraging PR is vital. Here are tips to maximize the SEO value of your PR efforts:
- Request follow links. Using Google Chrome, right click and then Inspect a link for a similar piece from the source’s website. Look for rel=nofollow or rel=sponsored within the HTML, which shows if non-followable. If this isn’t a sitewide policy, get these tags removed.
- Avoid sources that saturate their content with links, which is common when paying for them. I would consider any article with double-digit outbound or internal links, and below 1000 words, as saturated. This dilutes their worth.
- Relevant text surrounding a link is important. Even better is a whole domain that is relevant for your keywords. Poor content addresses many topics, often happening when writers sell out with numerous paid links as mentioned above.
- Though branded keywords are safe, don’t ignore non-branded keywords for anchor text. Search engines determine relevancy from outbound anchor text, not just what you write on your own site. This is the best way to improve stubborn keyword rankings.
- Think about qualifying authorship to improve E-A-T. This works well if the PR opportunity is an interview with a company leader. One of the links should be a bio page for them on your own site, containing links with credentials and other PR.
- If the publication wants to link to a blog or another deep content piece instead of a more important page, add internal links to key pages from this linked post directly in the body.
- Diversify away from the homepage as the only landing page.