Transcript
Hi guys, and welcome to another edition of Zupo's SEO Talk & Tea.
Today's conversation is about where SEO and PR meet. SEO and PR kind of have an interesting relationship in that they are separate fields of advertising and marketing, but they do have a lot of areas where they overlap and actually need each other's services to benefit the other. So, that's the conversation we're going to have today.
But of course, this is Zupo's SEO Talk & Tea, and so I want to introduce the tea we have today, and actually we have a special tea today. This was a gift for me from one of my friends who, well, she got married, she actually was gifted this but she doesn't drink tea, so I got some free tea out of it. This is, I guess, a Hong Kong company, that I even believe is publicly traded, I don't even know. I've already drinken most of this, so you don't really see what's going on in here. But tea was gifted in here. Today, the tea we'll be drinking is a Pu-Erh tea, which you can see the wrapper right here. It's already in the teacup, but I just wanted to show you the case here. Again, Pu-Erh, I drink this a lot. Most of my videos actually have a Pu-Erh tea in them. Like I've mentioned before, it's a very strong tea. It's as close as you're going to get to black coffee, in my opinion, because it's so dark and strong. So, let's go ahead and get brewing and talking about SEO and PR.
So, the reason why I want to discuss where SEO and PR meet is that a big part of SEO, one of the three pillars, is link building and referring domains.
It's kind of a huge portion of SEO, where you're really going to move the needle in the sense that you need to have links and referring domains to grow the authority and expertise of your website in the eyes of Google. The more links and referring domains you have coming in, the more stronger your site is for SEO purposes, and the higher your rank for the keywords that you're optimizing for. That's generally kind of the understanding. Now, the reason why I want to discuss PR and SEO and where they overlap, is the fact that I've mentioned this in some of my other videos, but link building is difficult in the sense that, in the beginning you can link build on easiest sites like Facebook, Yelp and Google and stuff like that because they have directories where you really just need to exist and then you can add to your listing and you can have a link to your website.
But at a certain point that ends. There's not that many directory sites out there. And even if you went to all of them, the value you get from a link from a directory is pretty weak. They're not really going to move the needle because Google would know that there are directory links. The best links that really will move the needle, are the editorial type, or links from other websites that just aren't directories. So, a good example is like your local newspaper, or another company's blog, or a big media publication on the web. These are sites that if you do get a link, they carry much more weight because Google knows that the person sending you the link, has a lot of authority, strength, and they have a presence that they're sending to you by linking to you. So, where I'm going with this is, once you hit the ceiling of directory sites and those easy link building opportunities, you need to actually start going out there and being noteworthy and special enough or unique enough, so that other people will link to you,
whether that be, like I've just said the journalist, the other blogs or other websites, because you can't just exist. I can't go to another website and say, "Hey, I exist. Link to me." That won't work. You need to have something that is worthy of the linking to you. And that's where PR meets SEO. PR will help you get the word out. So, I talk about this in another video called SEO Isn't About Great Ideas But Execution. At a certain point, you can come up with great ideas and stuff, but you need to get the word out about your campaigns and what you're doing. So, if your company has won an award, if it is running a great special or campaign, or doing some altruistic social good work, you need to get the word out and that's where PR comes into play. You can come up with all these great ideas and you can put them on your website or let people know that you are doing it.
But unless you can get it to the right people in the right audiences, it's not going to really going to carry much weight, especially in the SEO sense when you need to do link building. So, if you're going to run a link building campaign or trying to get more notoriety for your company and you're trying to do so through a specific special, you won an award, you have some campaign going on, you're doing some social good, whatever it might be, you have to engage in PR strategies like, can I go to the local newspapers, can I go to these publications, can I go to these websites? Would they be interested to link to me? And there's a big difference of doing PR well, just like sales. You can do cold PR, which they don't even know about you and it's not even a really good fit.
You don't know who they are. They have a [inaudible 00:04:43] you're going to pitch to them. That's pretty cold. Or, you can do a solid way where you're preening and finding the right companies, organizations, knowing that they all share information that you're sharing to them and then pitching to them. So, another version of this is thought leadership. So, for a lot of our clients, they provide thought leadership. They're experts in their field and they'll publish articles about marketing development, HR, company workplace environments, all the gamut, right? You can have that information, but what really kind of moves the needle is our ability to get it out. So, for our company and when we work with our clients, we do that PR work of going to different publications that we know write about topics that our clients are writing about and then letting them know, "Hey, we'd be happy to contribute to your blog," and therefore, when we do contribute on their blog, we drive links back to our own site because it's a win-win. They get content, we get a link back because they're in the author bio, in the copy of the content, there's links coming back to our own pages.
So, PR and SEO do have a really strong relationship. And especially when it comes to link building and driving referring domains. You need to do that PR work to get the word out, to drive more links, and therefore, make your site rank stronger. Otherwise, if you don't have that PR, you're not going to really move. You're not really going to get any strong links and you're going to stagnate, and that's where your SEO will end. Hopefully, that kind of clarifies where SEO and PR meet. I think it's very important to understand these things. A lot of people are a little bit too passive when it comes to SEO. They think that they can just do nothing. I don't want to say do nothing. They think that they can stay on their own website and optimize the site by just focusing on their own website.
And that's not really the case. You need to go out there, do PR, do some networking, to go talk with other organization's websites and drive links back to your website. And that's where you're going to really see the value and optimizations happen for your site. And then that's when you start ranking well. So, hopefully that was beneficial, that you learned something from there. But it's something that I really want you guys to take away and start thinking about for your own company. I'm going to go ahead and start pouring my Pu-Erh tea, but if you guys liked this video and found value out of it, please like the video and subscribe, and I hope to see you guys again soon. Thanks. Hot, hot, hot, hot.