Jed Hallam

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SEO and Public Relations

Geek / Public Relations / Social Media

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February 17, 2009 View Comments

So I had my geekiest moment last night. An epiphany of geek if you will… I went to bed relatively early after having a pretty rough day, and did the final check of email and twitter and I caught eye of a fist fight little debate that was just winding up on Twitter involving Wadds, Ste Davies, Tim, Jaz, Lewis, Pete, Rob, Ian, Melanie and Ian – ‘has PR missed a trick with SEO and should agencies offer it as a service?’. So I made a few inappropriate penis jokes about it ‘not being how big your search engine rank is, but what you do with it’ and then decided to actually contribute something…

Rob Brown summarised the conversation nicely early this morning (although it carries more than a bit of spin ;-) ) and I would expect that the rest of the contributors will probably post something up today or later this week.

There were a issues established during the conversation’;

  • PR has missed the boat on SEO and should now be looking to WOM on SocNets,
  • PR can still offer SEO but faces increasing competition from SEO agencies offering online PR,
  • SEO, like online PR should become an element of every PR campaign and should be treated as a tool, not an industry,
  • PR cannot sell itself and its services like other industries do.

No doubt I’ve missed a few points, but come on, it was late!

My argument was that while SEO agencies have the experience and knowledge of techniques to boost visibility, they’re not necessarily concerned with content quality which is becoming the most important factor of online visibility; you can increase your visibility, but if you’re not saying anything interesting, people will soon attach this non-content approach to your brand. Whereas if you write quality content for the purpose of contributing something, then visibility will increase as a side-effect of this. PRO’s are trained (arguably) to write professional (again, arguably) whereas SEO people are trained to write with keywords in mind.

Tim Hoang (who started this whole debate off!), Stephen Davies and myself finally agreed that SEO is merely a factor of a PR campaign. Let’s just get back to basics; PR is about raising awareness and visibility, so online PR is about the same and you achieve that using SEO techniques.

SEO is a technique, not an industry.

Social media is a technique, not an industry.

It’s these two statements that people tend to forget in the hype of an emerging industry, no single technique can be used on a complete campaign to raise awareness – you’ve got to use all the tools in your armoury to achieve that. WOM on SocNet’s is going to be another technique that PR needs to claim as it’s own – although I massively doubt that another industry would be able to stake that ground.

All of this comes back to Ged Carroll’s meme from December on technical skills that PRO’s should have. PR needs to get smart, before digital/SEO/advertising/marketing/online agencies begin to learn traditional PR skills (or hire in smarter).

It’ll be easier for PR to learn a few additional techniques than for the agencies that specialise in these niche areas to learn PR – but if PR keeps hitting the snooze button, it won’t be long…

And finally, PR has never been good at handling its own reputation and selling itself – but that’s an argument for another time I think!

  • JND
    SEO is just a portion of any marketing campaign, it is not that big a portion either in my opinion-it can bring boatloads but is it as effective as other mediums of PR (industry dependant)?

    But your point is true, SEO firms and agencies do miss the point of quality content and convertible info which often goes overlooked as Rankings are the factor of success or failure.
  • lmdavis2

    Using search engines to benefit out profession is very important. We have to always make sure the reputation of your client is positive and learning how search engines work will help in that objective.


    This comment was originally posted on PR Campaigns - The blog

  • cafuller

    A huge part of being a PR practitioner is staying up-to-date on things. We need to know all about the new trends and new ways of communicating. I definitely think that the adaptation of social media makes it absolutely necessary to learn those SEO skills. Like you said, SEO doesn’t have the background that actual PR professionals have, but what good will that background be if we don’t adapt to this new trend? The internet and online communication is such a major movement that any company, whether it’s a PR firm or not, will have a hard time staying afloat if they don’t utilize it.


    This comment was originally posted on PR Campaigns - The blog

  • gbohulan

    What an interesting article? I think it is something we can’t deny. PR today is so different from what it was just a few years ago with everything being online. I believe SEO that is just ONE element to be cognoscente of for our clients. I could not imagine SEO companies taking over traditional PR companies. They are not the trained problem solvers we are with the excellent writing and communication skills required for the job. We’re too good for that.


    This comment was originally posted on PR Campaigns - The blog

  • Twitter Comment


    What I’ve missed – the big RSS catch-up [BuzzTracker.com - Twitter] [link to post]


    – Posted using Chat Catcher


    This comment was originally posted on Simon Wakeman - Marketing and public relations

  • Shame I missed the twitter banter, but I'm picking up the gist of it here and elsewhere. Great discussion to have...

    The truth of the matter is (imho) that everyone here is lucky. We're all pushing boundaries between communications disciplines. And sometimes we don't share the same definitions of those disciplines before we start violently agreeing with eachother.

    There's a huge amount of cross-over between PR and natural search. And there's going to be a lot more going forward.

    Natural links from high page-rank sites, natural links from high-traffic driving sites, and natural liks from "influential" sites are all extremely valuable - though they all offer different sorts of "value". Could us PR people (though I do prefer communicators) be the ones who advise clients and comms directors what that value is and what the focus of their online campaigns could therefore be? I hope so.

  • Public relations is about reputation, not SEO…


    Jed Hallam has been involved in a fascinating Twitter debate, this time on the relative merits of public relations and SEO (or search engine optimisation). I started to write a comment in response, but then decided it was probably worth……


    This comment was originally posted on PR and the Social Web

  • @mindy Obviously an amazing story will always create interest, but how do we create those great online stories - are they different to stories targeted at "traditional" media? In what form will they take - video? photo? blog? How are they seeded? - are there specific sites that will link back to you more than others - certainly many of the news sites that PR's traditionally target do not always grant you a linkback even if your press release is featured.

    Maybe, everyone's right and a good story will ALWAYS rise to the top of SERP. I'm just interested in whether PR can influence it at all on the way up.
  • Thanks for the clarificiation there. To be honest I think the role of SEO and PR has a huge overlap. SEO - at least the way we do it here at I-COM, is internet marketing. We offer copywriting, have a Paid Search (PPC) department, we do online PR, look at usability and accessibility and teach companies how to blog and use social media and how to protect their online reputations.

    We often work with traditional PR companies to convert their offline press into online PR that will bring in links and we work with advertising agencies to ensure that offline branding gets carried across into a company's online marketing efforts.

    I think the Wikipedia definition of SEO is ok from a traditional perspective - SEO even 3 years ago was all about PageRank and traffic numbers - but the emphasis today, at least with any reputable SEO agency, is on the QUALITY of traffic, not just traffic for the sake of it.

    Our objective is rarely just rankings or improving the numbers of people we drive to a site but instead how much we improve sales, profits and visibility for each client. There is no point in us getting any site a 100% or even 1000% increase in traffic if every one of those new visitors leaves straight away - so we not only work to improve rankings and bring traffic, we focus on keywords that convert into sales and we look at the individual pages on websites to try and deliver what visitors need - better copy, better calls to action and overall improved user experience.

    The more SEO becomes part of mainstream marketing budgets the more people will learn about what their SEO consultant should be doing for them and the more those keyword-stuffing, auto-spam-generating cowboys will be driven out of the marketplace.

    I think you are right that traditional SEO agencies are in danger of being driven out of the market because the SEO consultant now needs to be a marketer or a PR specialist (or both) and those companies which will thrive will have a full-service offering which incorporates traditional SEO techniques with online branding, marketing and PR activities which will be co-ordinated with traditional/offline PR and marketing/advertising campaigns.

    Oh and @Tim there is amazing potential for PR to help with the ranking of a website - every online story generated potentially brings highly authoritative, on-topic links to go along with targeted traffic which together is the holy grail of "off-site SEO".
  • Peter Sigrist
    I had the (dubious) honour of doing PR for a small Edinburgh-based SEO company that had an office next door to us in 2001. It was called Big Mouth Media. Now, clearly Steve, Heather, Lyndsay and the team were on to something big, and I'm not sure we ever truly grasped how big. But one thing was for sure. They saw PR as peripheral, and SEO as core to getting the right message to the right people.

    The funny thing is that - and I think I'm in furious agreement with everyone here - PR has moved closer and closer to this digital focus. Possibly this is because so many "digital natives" have entered the fray, as you say Jed.

    Another anecdote - when a friend sent me the job spec for "Head of Media Relations" at Spannerworks (now icrossing) a couple of years back, I was struck by how they were - like the Big Mouth guys - not really interested in PR. At least not by my definition.

    So what does it all mean? My money is on the digital techniques, tools, industry (delete as appropriate) - but I think the smart "PR" people will end up playing a major role in that, because we have a deeper interest in linking content with what people care about - after all, that's all that successful MSM has ever done, and many of us have grown up trying to influence that.

    @psigrist

  • Hey Rob,


    Ian Delaney made a great point, in that i-Crossing ws farsighted in taking on ex-PR Antony Mayfield, ie bringing PR to the socnet party.


    I strongly believe that SEO is more akin to PR than the web dev sector, as it should be about great content and effective distribution – two facets which belong in every great PR campaign.


    This comment was originally posted on PR and the Social Web

  • Jed
    @Rob,

    You make a great point - the problem would be that it'll be easier for PR to take on a single 'spoke' of communications than it would be for SEO to try and take on lots of 'spokes'...

    Just a thought.

    @Pete,

    You and me both!
  • All I know is that I should have gone to bed earlier...
  • Jed,

    I think there is a danger that SEO agencies will move into PR - why not?

    Why even partner with PR agencies as is happening when you can hire one or two PR professionals and market the service yourself?

    Rob
  • Jed
    @Kate, I would certainly agree with that, then we could make a fresh start and pull each individual 'spoke' into the same wheel.

    @Tim, you know by now that I'll do it again...
  • Don't do it again
  • Jed
    @Tim and @Mindy,

    Please both forgive me, I hadn't realised the ambiguity of using a word like 'technique' - the intention was, as Tim rightly pointed out, to suggest that SEO was tool.

    I hadn't meant to minimise it quite as brashly!
  • I think this whole debate would become so much clearer if we started calling PR 'communications'. PR is still too closely associated with 'media relations' (and for that, read 'press relations'). If you look at communications in the round, then of course SEO is one of the tools you use.
  • @Mindy it's difficult to put across your argument on Twitter, hence there was some misunderstanding of which side I stood on in the PR vs SEO debate.

    Jed, forgive me if i've got the wrong the end of the stick, but by "technique" you mean another discipline in communication - much like we would like to view digital/ social media. SEO should be another tool for us to use and integrate rather than as an add-on or afterthought.

    I'd tend to disagree with some of that statement but only because you haven’t considered what SEO is exactly. Just as Mindy rightly points out, SEO is more than merely optimising press releases [there's still debate as to how much effect the techniques specified by a number PRs which we've [the Pr industry] has taken as gospel]. There's coding, website build, etc, which is too advanced for most of us.

    There is room for PR to help with the ranking of a site. However, at the minute, this is still vague guesswork. I’ve been told that my blog is a bit too honest in revealing what I do and do not know about SEO, but I’d rather come at it with a blank canvas than pretend to know what I’m talking about and present opinions as fact. It’s easy to say “my blog ranks highly, without applying SEO techniques, therefore SEO does not work” – but I’m trying to find out why it does rank highly and whether we can apply it to other clients and rather cynically, make money from it.
  • Jed
    Hi Mindy, thanks for taking the time to comment – it’s pretty integral to get an opinion from someone working in SEO, so thanks!

    I’m obviously talking from my own experiences with SEO people and in my experience SEO is a tool to raise awareness of a website/company – which is exactly what PR is. Wikipedia defines SEO as;

    “Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Typically, the higher a site's "page rank" (i.e, the earlier it comes in the search results list), the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.”

    And while I’m not the biggest fan of Wikipedia that definition is my understanding too.

    The final goal in SEO is more traffic, which has direct parallels with PR’s end goal which is more attention.

    It’s this parallel that shapes my opinions on SEO – I’ll agree, yes SEO is a set of skills and techniques, but with more PRO’s becoming interested in web design and development (most digital natives in PR have a basic understanding of design code), and with copywriting and marketing both being part of the PRO’s core skill set – SEO skills are just a few clicks away. And as for no two SEO campaigns being the same; it’s EXACTLY the same in PR.

    I’m not saying that SEO agencies are heading towards becoming obsolete, but (like PR, which is the point being made) SEO agencies will have to develop their skill sets past SEO.

    SEO lifts awareness, as does PR, but PR has the benefit of being able to offer huge campaigns around awareness – online and offline.

    I have to come back to my original point though, I’m talking from the perspective of a PRO that’s seen both good and bad SEO at work.

  • I can’t quite see how WoM in SocNets is the future as far as SEO is concerned – many social networks are ‘walled gardens’ and their deep content blocked to social networks (Facebook the most classic example) and some social networks implement nofollow on published links (e.g. Twitter) – so relying on them to help SEO may be the wrong target.


    I watched the Twitter debate last night [and declined to join in as it just was just too late in the evening to think about work, so I just got a bit grumpy about all the extra noise ;) ]. To me there needs to be a better distinction between SEO in terms of technology – a well-formatted, standards-compliant platform which allows descriptive titles, URLs and metadata, accessible to search engines and not bundled up in Flash – and SEO in terms of content: creating the right keywords, headlines, intros and links.


    It’s this latter role that PR agencies can both offer insight and learn new skills – although many themselves have to relearn how to write and circulate press releases and other publicity. Borrowing a few tricks from SEO here is essential, along with telling the SEO guys what the audience wants and needs in terms of content, and getting the technology underpinning the site to support it as easily and seamlessly as possible.


    Of course with all these boundaries being redrawn we may end up having to get rid of concepts such as SEO and PR and come up with new ones, and all this discussion might be entirely moot :)


    Final thoughts – as more content gets put into video and with no easy way to ’search’ within video, that represents a real challenge for search. Switching from a keyword focus to a behavioural focus may come to dominate SEO in years to come, and then we will all have to learn new set of skills all over again. :)


    This comment was originally posted on PR and the Social Web

  • I agree with Chris. SEO and social media are often interlinked - and the sucess of any campaign comes down to relevant content.
  • SEO is far more than a "technique." Anybody who says that has no idea what SEO actually entails. It incorporates web design and development, usability, copywriting, marketing and PR and no two SEO campaigns are ever the same beause every client has different needs and different objectives.

    Our campaigns range from writing a bit of content to restructuring navigation to emphasize the hierarchy of sites to rebuilding entire e-commerce sites so that their HTML code makes sense.

    Furthermore, any decent SEO agency/consultant will know that content has to appeal to users and will be far more concerned with improving the sales of a business and its public profile than with getting top rankings in Google/Yahoo/etc.

    SEO as an INDUSTRY should have close ties with PR as an INDUSTRY as we give PR the tools that you can use to help you online - but if it were a bunch of "techniques" then somebody would have already written a manual that wouldn't be obsolete the following week.
  • Good post Jed - one of your best I think.

    SEO and social media cross over quite a lot but as you say it's all about the quality of the content. Whether our industry will benefit from SEO remains to be seen.
  • Never heard so many people in "furious agreement" before. If it is a debate, aren't you all supposed to disagree a bit??! :-p
  • Hi Jed, Great to talk to you last night. Here's my response: http://www.rainierpr.co.uk/blog/2009/02/twitter-debate-pr-and-its-role-in-seo.html. I think we're all in furious agreement.

  • Thanks for the summary Rob. Have quoted your bulletpoints in a response here: http://www.rainierpr.co.uk/blog/2009/02/twitter-debate-pr-and-its-role-in-seo.html


    This comment was originally posted on PR and the Social Web

  • Rob, I am sorry I missed this debate last night as I would have got involved. I think this is certainly an area which will make for an interesting debate as SEO is an area I have a real interest in.


    Unfortunately, the PR industry may miss a trick here and the other disciplines could benefit by taking the big budgets because traditionally I believe we aren’t as good at packaging our services like the others. They have been used to making money from emerging technologies like online advertising, SEO, viral video and experiential techniques. I have met with a few digital marketers recently and they are all trying to add social media to their growing portfolio and have declared an interest in what we do and how we do it.


    Analytics will be critical to the development of content so is bound to be important. I am going to watch this area with interest as there is certainly some cross over as someone must benefit.


    This comment was originally posted on PR and the Social Web

  • Thanks for the write up – was a fun debate [We are so dull].


    This comment was originally posted on PR and the Social Web

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