With content marketing being a 44 billion dollar industry, it is vital now more than ever for PR professionals to be on top of their game when it comes to digital communication. Here are 5 SEO tactics every public relations pro should know:
- Create Compelling, Link-Worthy Content: With digital coverage for our clients becoming more and more powerful each year, it’s imperative to understand the power of back-links. When a website links to your client’s site, Google gives SEO-points for being in a place that a reader found relevant and interesting. The more popular the website is that linked to you, the better. Take away note: You’re already pitching and blogging for your clients, so to increase back-links make sure you’re linking to relevant content on the client’s website. Pitching your client as a contributor to high-traffic websites is another strong way of garnering back-links.
- Understand keywords: Headlines, titles, and content written in each page of your client’s website greatly contributes to their SEO strength. Search engines crawl the meta data on your client’s website, which in turn dictates where it appears under search results, so make sure you’re helping clients write concise, keyword-rich information to describe themselves.
- Know what works on social media: Google recently announced that tweets will now appear in search results, creating more opportunity for our client’s to increase their search presence. To ensure this, creating consistent, quality content for readers that’s relevant, helpful and share-worthy is the best way to garner a higher ranking in search results.
- Use photos: Someone once said, “a picture is worth a thousand words”…or in this case, clicks. Pictures not only spice up our social posts, but they can assist in building higher ranking search results. Like webpages, pictures are also indexed on google, so be sure to name your photo files (typically .jpg or .png) with meaningful titles, just as you would title an article or blogpost. This will aid in supporting your client’s SEO strategy.
- Keep Google happy by keeping the user happy: While it’s tempting to use every keyword your client wants to rank for, try to control yourself because it could backfire. “Keyword stuffing” your client’s website or blogpost with irrelevant keywords that don’t engage the reader not only creates a negative user-experience, but it could harm your client’s SEO efforts. Be sure to only use necessary, descriptive rich keyword content to keep the Google police away.