When work­ing togeth­er, SEO and PR are the dream team. It leads to high qual­i­ty links, a stronger online pres­ence, and a uni­fied brand strat­e­gy. How­ev­er, this is dif­fi­cult to achieve. SEO and PR have a dif­fi­cult time work­ing effec­tive­ly togeth­er. They work side-by-side, but not with one anoth­er, thus los­ing on a valu­able oppor­tu­ni­ty to com­mu­ni­cate with the user.

Often, PR focus­es on men­tions from edi­to­r­i­al sources and influ­encers with­in the indus­try. Their goal can focus on brand affin­i­ty, pro­mo­tion of a new product/line, or pos­i­tive sen­ti­ment, such as a rave review for a new movie. On the oth­er hand, most SEOs focus on cre­at­ing con­tent for the sake of rank­ing, lead­ing to an extreme­ly sat­u­rat­ed space with just “OK” con­tent.

Rather than get­ting men­tions and cre­at­ing con­tent for the sake of PR place­ments and rank­ings, these tac­tics should be serv­ing a greater pur­pose for both the brand and user. Cre­at­ing a cer­tain piece of con­tent and achiev­ing a place­ment on a rel­e­vant site helps tell your brand sto­ry while assist­ing the user with more valu­able infor­ma­tion.

So, how can we solve this dis­con­nect?

It’s sim­ple – com­bine the efforts of your SEO & PR teams to cre­ate engag­ing con­tent that pro­vides use­ful infor­ma­tion for the user while telling your brand sto­ry.

Topic Research

It all begins with research. A wide vari­ety of infor­ma­tion is avail­able for you.

Using tools such as Google AdWords Key­word Plan­ner, you can research var­i­ous queries that peo­ple are already search­ing for. Sim­i­lar­ly, you can use the site search data with­in Google Ana­lyt­ics to see if users are try­ing to find a spe­cif­ic piece of con­tent on your own site.

From here, plug this data into Buz­zSumo or a sim­i­lar tool to see what pieces of con­tent are already trend­ing for these top­ics:

Like­wise, PR agents can share their indus­try insights. What are jour­nal­ists writ­ing about? What types of quotes or infor­ma­tion are they request­ing about this brand?

Ulti­mate­ly, jour­nal­ists are per­form­ing the same task – pro­vid­ing use­ful con­tent for the user – so any insights from them can be extreme­ly use­ful.

Develop The Content

Both teams must joint­ly decide on a top­ic that answers a con­sumer’s ques­tion. Once a top­ic is decid­ed upon, var­i­ous con­tent pieces can be devel­oped to address it. Whether it’s a guide, info­graph­ic, blog post series or new prod­uct fil­ter, this con­tent piece should address the con­sumer query in a clean, yet infor­ma­tive way.

Don’t rush this process. You don’t want to be cre­at­ing more “OK” con­tent that sat­u­rates the online field. To help with this, rely on UX experts as well as your SEO and PR teams. They are going to assist with seed­ing this con­tent, so you want to make sure they believe in it as much as you do.

The Art of Man­li­ness does an excel­lent job devel­op­ing con­tent that’s use­ful for both SEO and PR. For exam­ple, they cre­at­ed a video, “How to Trim a Beard”, that answered any beard trim­ming ques­tions for their tar­get demo (ful­fill­ing a need).

Fur­ther­more, this con­tent was eas­i­ly incor­po­rat­ed into off-site arti­cles by indus­try blog­gers.

Seed The Content

Before even pub­lish­ing the con­tent, you need to cre­ate a seed­ing plan for how you plan on pub­lish­ing, ampli­fy­ing and push­ing this con­tent to your con­sumers. See below for an exam­ple seed­ing plan.

• Pub­lish the con­tent
• Share con­tent on rel­e­vant social chan­nels (Face­book and Pin­ter­est)
  • Pro­mote post with small bud­get ($100)
• Incor­po­rate con­tent into time­ly email blast
• Reach out to var­i­ous relat­ed jour­nal­ist, blog­ger and sites shar­ing the con­tent with them.
  • SEO out­reach list
  • PR out­reach list

The dig­i­tal PR team has two options for how to seed the desired top­ic. They can ask jour­nal­ists to incor­po­rate the con­tent into an exist­ing arti­cle or pitch a sim­i­lar idea for a com­plete­ly new off-site con­tent piece. Either way, con­sumers will still be able to find the infor­ma­tion they need and asso­ciate your brand with pro­vid­ing this infor­ma­tion.

Using this approach to cre­at­ing user-cen­tric con­tent has many ben­e­fits. It:

• Focus­es SEO & PR goals on the user, rather than quan­ti­ta­tive met­rics.
• Leads to bet­ter qual­i­ty con­tent that res­onates with the con­sumer.
• Increas­es the effec­tive­ness of SEO & PR work­ing togeth­er.

Are you using SEO and PR to cre­ate engag­ing, con­sumer-cen­tric con­tent?