SEO and Digital PR: How to Make These Strategies Work Together
I often hear marketing professionals talk about SEO and digital PR as if they’re completely separate disciplines. “We need to improve our search rankings,” they might say, followed by “and we should work on our exposure in the media too.” What many don’t realize is that, in a digital marketing landscape, these two powerful strategies work best when they’re deliberately integrated rather than operating in silos.
The Symbiotic Relationship
Think of SEO and digital PR as two sides of the same coin. SEO provides the technical foundation and keyword strategy that ensures your content can be found, while digital PR creates the signals of authority, relevance, and trust that help your content rank higher. When these strategies work in harmony, they create a virtuous cycle of increasing visibility and credibility.
Consider what happens when you secure a feature article in a respected online publication. Beyond the immediate exposure to that outlet’s audience, you gain a valuable backlink that signals to search engines that your site is worthy of attention. That backlink passes authority to your domain, potentially improving rankings for dozens or even hundreds of keywords. Improved rankings drive more organic traffic, which creates more opportunities for engagement, sharing, and additional earned media.
Aligning Your Keyword Strategy with PR Outreach
One of the most powerful ways to integrate these disciplines is to align your keyword strategy with your media relations efforts. Start by identifying the high-value keywords that your audience is searching for. These aren’t just any keywords—they’re the phrases that indicate genuine interest in your solutions, services, or expertise.
Once you understand these valuable search terms, you can craft pitches that naturally incorporate these themes. When an editor or journalist picks up your story, they’ll often use similar language in their coverage, creating content that reinforces your relevance for these key phrases. The result? Coverage that not only raises awareness but directly supports your search visibility for commercially valuable terms.
Creating Content That Serves Both Masters
Content that performs well in search often differs from content that attracts media attention. Search-optimized content tends to be comprehensive, question-focused, and structured around specific keywords. PR-worthy content, on the other hand, needs a compelling angle, timeliness, and relevance to current conversations.
The secret to content that serves both purposes lies in layering these approaches. Start with a newsworthy foundation—original research, a unique perspective, or a timely tie-in to industry trends. Then build your SEO elements around this core: keyword-rich headlines and subheadings, comprehensive coverage of the topic, and structured data that helps search engines understand your content.
This approach creates assets that journalists want to cover and search engines want to rank. Your original research becomes a linkable asset that attracts backlinks naturally long after your initial PR push, creating sustainable search benefits from a single strategic investment.
Amplifying Success Through Measurement and Refinement
The true power of integrating SEO and digital PR becomes apparent when you measure their combined impact rather than evaluating them separately. Traditional PR metrics like estimated reach or advertising equivalency tell only part of the story. Similarly, looking at organic traffic without considering how your PR efforts influence those numbers misses crucial insights.
A more holistic approach tracks how PR coverage influences search performance for targeted keywords, how long those benefits persist, and ultimately how these combined efforts impact your conversion metrics. This comprehensive measurement allows you to refine your strategy, doubling down on the types of coverage and content that drive meaningful business results.
Practical Integration Steps
If you’ve been treating SEO and digital PR as separate workstreams, how can you begin integrating them more effectively? Start by ensuring that your teams are sharing insights and planning together. Your SEO specialists should be informing PR pitches with keyword data, while your PR professionals should be targeting publications that can provide not just reach but valuable search authority.
Make sure your content briefs include both PR angles and SEO requirements. Train your subject matter experts to incorporate important keywords naturally when giving interviews or quotes. And develop measurement frameworks that acknowledge the interconnected nature of these disciplines, looking beyond immediate metrics to understand the long-term value of your efforts.
In Conclusion: A United Front
When SEO and digital PR work together, they create results far greater than either could achieve alone. By breaking down the artificial barriers between these disciplines, you’ll develop more effective strategies, create more valuable content, and build more sustainable visibility for your brand.
The most successful marketing teams understand that today’s digital landscape doesn’t respect the traditional boundaries between earned, owned, and technical media. Instead, they pursue an integrated approach where each element supports and amplifies the others. The result? A unified digital presence that builds both immediate awareness and long-term search equity—driving not just traffic, but meaningful business growth.
Bill Threlkeld is president of Threlkeld Communications, Inc., a Digital PR, SEO and Content Marketing & Measurement consultancy. Built on three-plus decades experience in Public Relations and Content Marketing. Bill’s unique value is in leveraging PR to create content “clusters” and campaigns integrating a blend of Public Relations, SEO, social media, and content that can be tracked and measured for optimized performance. Bill’s experience includes: tech, musical instrument, pro audio, legal, entertainment, apps, software, cloud services, travel, telecom, and consumer packaged goods.