• Blog Post
  • by JD Bowles
  • June 08, 2017

Don’t Forget to Pack Content Marketing & SEO Together in your PR Luggage

Mom always reminds me when I travel, “don’t forget to pack your toothbrush.”  Great advice to the frequent business traveler. I had the recent opportunity to travel to the PRSA Travel and Tourism Conference in Palm Springs. The annual gathering of the Travel & Tourism’s best PR & Marketing minds is a chance to hear what successes, challenges, and frustrations -- practitioners are experiencing. Naturally I’m curious as to what they’re experiencing in the online media environment.

One of the common threads I had in my conversations there dealt with Content Marketing and how incorporating this concept into PR/Marketing tactics resonates with their audiences, ultimately increasing their brand and traffic. If you’ve already got a Content Marketing strategy in place you know that telling your story outside traditional communication methods is attractive to today’s audiences - people love a story, whether you’re driving it with multimedia --images or video - or using a human emotions angle. Regardless we know that increased traffic and audience engagement can lead to a potential increase in sales and revenue.

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When you engage in Content Marketing there’s an SEO benefit to what you’re doing that must be considered as well. The tech world would like us to think that SEO (Search Engine Optimization), is as complicated as Einstein's Law of Relativity - E=MC2!  It’s NOT -- it’s about HOW you write your story and the format you present it on the web. Here’s a couple things not to forget that will help your SEO. 

  1. Headlines with Keywords - Google loves headlines that relate to your organization and what you’re trying to promote. Use Keywords strategically in the headline and in the first paragraph that will attract Google as well as your targeted audiences and consistent with meta-tagging tactics.

  2. Be the Source & Self-Publish - You must be your company’s best source for news, not a third-party media outlet. That might sound obvious, but the goal is to have journalists and your followers come to you first, not seek the information on their own. As you know all know, the days of posting the same news or press release via multiple press release vendors was nixed by search engines & Panda algorithms.  In fact, Big Brother Google rewards those who post and source their own original content with higher rankings.

  3. Visual Storytelling  - A picture tells a thousand words and when attached with your content, video and images can drive traffic and increase your audience on a larger level. Multimedia that is tagged, displays properly on mobile devices, and is fresh to the site goes a long way to not just tell your story but increase your SEO value.  Remember, images and video are THE most viral and liked assets on both B2B & B2C platforms.

  4. Links, Links, Links - You’ve got to drive your point home with links - no more than 5-7 per page for Google - that direct your audience back to your website to consume more information (click-thrus) about what you want them to see. Just because you’re using a Content Marketing tactic doesn’t mean you can’t link and reference related items.

  5. Keep the Content Fresh - The beauty of Content Marketing is that it opens up the number of story opportunities that can attract different audiences. The other side of that is Google loves fresh content. Greater content frequency receives higher points with Google in your SEO rankings. Just rearranging widgets and images is equivalent to “rearranging deck chairs on the titanic!”

You know your audience and what they like better than anyone. Be sure as you’re creating a unique story and utilizing the best of Content Marketing practices to maximize your corporate  SEO ranking.  After three days in the beautiful desert of Palm Springs, my personal kudos to Travel and Tourism PR practitioners for making us want to visit our favorite destinations more - they’re a good example of Content Marketing at its best.