Digital marketing facets cannot exist in isolation.

You cannot use SEO alone to grow your brand. Or public relations. All these pillars work together.

You probably have heard of SEO and I am sure you’ve also seen the term PR somewhere.

But have you ever thought how these two would help your business grow and thrive?

Let me show you how.

First, we need to define what SEO is.

It is the process of continuous improvement of a website’s search engine ranking with the goal of gaining more visibility and clicks.

Related: SEO Articles By Jeder Agency

On the other hand, according to Wkipedia, public relations is the practice of managing and disseminating information from an individual or an organization (such as a business, government agency, or a nonprofit organization) to the public in order to influence their perception.

Other people would call it Brand Management.

So how do these two intersect?

Through a pillar of SEO we call off page SEO.

Off page SEO focuses on efforts you perform outside your website. These activities include, link building, and digital Public Relations.

Related: Off Page SEO

Let’s start with link building.

What is link building in Kenya?

It is the process of acquiring links from authoritative websites to point back to your website.

An example, Business Daily in Kenya is featuring business A on its website.

Business A would want Business Daily to add a link on that feature article pointing to the website of Business A.

Related: Learn More About Link Building in Kenya

Why is this important?

When an authoritative site links back to your site, this acts as a referral or vote of confidence in Google’s eyes.

Since Google trusts this authoritative site, when they add a link pointing to an external website, Google takes this as a sign of trust and therefore passes the “link juices” of that page on Business Daily’s website to the website of Business A.

Now that we understand what link building is and how it works,

Let’s now talk about digital PR.

Digital PR looks at managing the online image of a brand. The statement is simple, the work, not as easy.

Digital PR aims to paint a good light on a brand on different digital assets. These assets include social media platforms, online magazines & publications as well as optimizing content on the brand’s own website.

Now let’s look at exactly how SEO and digital PR intersect.

Outreach

The digital PR team will reach out to relevant publishers to request them to write a feature about their company, or the CEO, or one of the company’s products or services. Now where SEO comes in is through the link building process.

The SEO team will instruct the digital PR team to ensure that the publishers/individuals that agree to feature the business, to add a link pointing back to the business’s website.

The SEO team will also advise the digital PR team to ensure certain keywords and phrases are used in the article.

So the digital PR team gets the publishers (to improve brand affinity and awareness), and the SEO team optimizes the content (to get traffic back to the business website).

Outreach can be categorized into two, organic and sponsored outreach.

Organic outreach

This is where you do not pay to get featured in a publication.

There are a number of scenarios where one gets organic outreach. They include:

• Being listed in an online directory,
• Being discussed because of having a strong brand,
• Because of great organic PR work, or
• Because you developed something amazing.

Sponsored outreach

On the other hand, sponsored outreach is where one pays to get featured in a publication.

For example, Business Daily, or Tuko has a sponsored section where companies can pay and have their products/services featured as an article.

When there is a clear sign that you have paid to be featured, ensure that the links attached are tagged with the nofollow HTML tag to avoid any penalties from search engines.

There is another way to utilize these two teams. Through influencer marketing.

Influencer marketing

The digital PR team will once again use their networks to get the right influencers to work with the business. Once they get a match, the work does not end there.

The SEO team will come in different ways. They include:

• Providing a UTM tagged link to the influencer if running an online campaign,
• Monitoring and measuring brand mentions. The team can use Search Console. Google Analytics to measure traffic spikes.
• Ensuring the influencer uses the right hashtags and keywords when posting on their social media platforms.

Some companies that have used Digital PR well in Kenya include:

Pezesha

Pezesha is a company that provides financial solutions to SMEs.

Their founder, Hilda Moraa is quite active on platforms such as LinkedIn. And because she created a company that provides a great solution, she, together with the company get a lot of mentions online.

But that isn’t the only reason.

I do believe they have a great PR team behind their success that ensures industry experts mention the brand once in a while.

Recently, they released Pezesha 2.0, an event that saw them get a lot of online press.

These are some of the ways of utilizing these 2 incredible teams. If you would like to book a consultation, reach out to us here.