One of the new media areas PR people may not be too familiar with is SEO – search engine optimization. The reason could be that SEO is usually regarded as a marketing and sales tool. Most pieces of content are crafted to reach customers and elicit a lead or a sale.
Lee Odden points out that SEO can be used specifically for news content.
“The intended audiences are journalists and bloggers, not consumers looking to buy products. The desired outcome is not a sale, but to be selected as a topic, contributor or interviewee for an article/story published in the media.”
How does that work? Several studies have confirmed that when journalists begin a story they do a search. And now that Google has Universal Search – that is, they blend search results from images, news, blogs and videos, not just websites – it’s become vital to have your news content in all these buckets.
When PR understands search and SEO, and uses it to optimize news content, press releases, videos and images can grab the attention of a journalist who is searching for sources for a story.
SEO will not only improve your media relations, you might even find that the marketing folk pay attention to what you’re doing. It is possible to have a optimized press release with an image show up on page one for your keywords and affect the overall ranking of the website.
