To improve your company’s SEO, leverage media placements to build backlinks, anchor text and credible website authority.

As a public relations professional, you may not consider yourself a search engine optimization expert. However, by understanding a few basics, you can leverage your public relations skills to help boost SEO for your brand—driving more qualified traffic to your website and positioning you as an expert in your field.

Start by identifying priority keywords
Work closely with your SEO and content colleagues and ask them what keywords and phrases potential customers might be using to search for your products or services. Another easy way to generate a list is to compile common questions you receive from prospects and identify common words or themes.

Once you have a broad list, plug the phrases into the Google Keyword Planner to assess search volume and competition. Focus on phrases that have moderate search volume with low competition—overly competitive phrases will be difficult to rank for, especially for a newer domain without much authority.

Assess the competitive landscape
Search for your target keywords on Google and list the domains ranking on the first 1-3 pages. Using a browser extension, you can view the domain authority of each website. Compare them to your own website’s authority (using the same tool) to determine if you can reasonably “compete” with anyone.

You can compete with websites that rank 15 points higher than you in domain authority. This analysis will inform your target outreach list.

Strategize
Target placements with websites that rank well for your phrases, especially those with higher domain authority. Getting a placement on credible, topic-relevant websites will signal to search engines that you are also an authority on the subject matter. These higher ranking websites will essentially pass their authority to your website when you receive a “dofollow” backlink from them.

Not all placements will offer a “dofollow” backlink. Some will only offer a “nofollow” backlink or no backlink at all. While you won’t receive the authority pass-through from these placements, they’re still an important part of building your authority and brand recognition.

Safe backlinks and anchor text
The goal is to secure backlinks: strategic mentions of your brand name that link to your website. This signals to search engines that others consider you an authority. Anchor text (the visible, clickable words in the link) is also important. Try to have the anchors use your target keywords.

For the best results, link to deeper content that is focused on the topic, not just your homepage. Think blog posts, reports, videos or other content that you’re positioning around the phrases.

Track and measure
Use Google Analytics to see which publishers are driving the most referrals and learn about visitor behavior. Are people staying and browsing more pages from certain linking sources?

Most importantly, track your organic rankings on your target phrases week over week. With persistence and the right media placements, you can shift keyword rankings and website visibility by linking PR and SEO efforts.
We can help you secure these valuable links and placements to improve SEO and boost your credibility and brand recognition.