IMarks Blog An Introduction to PR Strategy for SEOs

First, let's set the record straight."The Avengers" as an example (Joss Whedon fans, unite!), "SEO" is actually just a slang term for a collection of best practices - it is doing web development well, content creation well, social media well, PR well, and so on. This is why successful SEO, and digital marketing in general, necessitates that companies "assemble" a holistic, integrated team with expertise in numerous disciplines. And that includes public relations.PR By Any Other Name...I can already hear the groans: "But, wait! I'm not a PR flak! I'm an inbound marketer!" I completely understand - as a former journalist, who only later went into SEO, I specifically had been looking for something in marketing that was not PR. But the fact remains that much of inbound marketing is just PR by another name:Are you interacting with influencers, journalists, and bloggers on Twitter? Sure, you can call yourself a "social-media marketer" - but you are really doing PR Are you pitching guest posts by-lined articles to news outlets and other online publications? It is not "guest post marketing" - it is PR. Are you e-mailing people in the hopes of getting links, mentions, or anything similar? It's often called "e-mail outreach" today, but it is just doing PR via a specific communications channelIt took me a long time to accept the fact that a lot of what we do as "SEOs" is actually, well, PR. But the sooner that we accept that fact and throw away our preconceived notions about PR, the sooner that we can start to learn, adopt and benefit from its best practices.Here's the kicker: Technologies and communications channels change, but people do not. Publicists, for example, may contact reporters with Twitter more than the telephone today - but it is still one human being talking with another human being. And PR experts know how to work with people. Social media is often just a communications channel - and not a discipline unto itself - that can be used by PR professionals, customer-service representatives, lead generators, and more.The Basics of PR StrategyThere are many types of PR. But since the idea for this post was born out of a discussion on guest posts, I will discuss PR strategy here specifically on pitching content and story ideas to journalists and bloggers. This is a brief summary of some of the ways that The Cline Group works with our PR clients - and the resulting "hits" (in PR-speak) give them the added bonus of gaining quality, natural links and social media exposure as well!The first thing to understand is that public relations is an art, not a science. There are specific, defined ways to create XML sitemaps, ensure that Google can crawl and index a website, avoid duplicate-content issues, reduce page-load time, and more. PR methods, however, can vary as drastically as the number of people using them.Here, I will present the overall strategy that The Cline Group uses in our public-relations work. This strategic, step-by-step process delivers the best [...]