When it comes to marketing, we understand the importance of building trusting relationships with existing and potential customers. Marketers spend hours perfecting customer journeys, analyzing different touchpoints, personalizing their messages, and using data to learn more about customers in order to target them more effectively. But when it comes to marketing that doesn’t engage directly with consumers, it suddenly becomes less personal and more about reaching goals, updating spreadsheets, and copy-pasting email templates with little personalization. I'm referring to the practice of link building, outreach, or authority building. It becomes a numbers game - how many links can we get? What does our backlink mix look like? What is our Domain Authority Score? All important considerations, but where are the relationships that marketing builds? There is a lot of overlap between the work of an SEO professional and that of a PR professional, and it seems right to combine each other's strengths to overcome weaknesses. While SEO can overemphasize numbers and links, PR often doesn't pay enough attention to this. While PR focuses on building relationships, positive coverage, and brand awareness, SEO often overlooks this aspect, focusing instead on efficiency and purpose.

Whether you call it link building, outreach, authority building, media outreach, image building, content amplification, influencer marketing, internet marketing, or community building, one thing is clear – if you want long-term success, relationship building Should play a major role in the event. Hit more birds with the same stone Although the word "digital" means that we are dealing with machines, in essence, digital marketing is no different industry mailing list traditional methods, where a face-to-face relationship is the key to success. Granted, we don't have much face-to-face interaction, but at the end of the day, we're still dealing with humans (for now). If anything, accessing data should lead to better relationships as we can find information about people, businesses and brands more easily than ever. The problem is that many times, the different channels don't work together seamlessly. SEO operates separately from PR, PR operates separately from social media, and social media operates separately from content. There may be some communication between these, but in many cases this is not enough.

In an ideal world, every piece of content would be carefully optimized by SEO professionals, it would contain the right boilerplate and brand terminology, and PR professionals would deliver to high-quality publications, and of course, links. All the right brands will then be fully shared on social media, tagged and mentioned, building conversation and engagement. It will then be discovered by other high-quality publications, who will request similar high-quality content, and the links will continue to grow! Writing it down sounds obvious, but how much time and effort did the PR team put into achieving amazing coverage just for it not to contain a link to the website, or to share it on social media without tagging the brand/company that wrote it? Or have the SEO team go after backlinks and just write thin content that doesn't meet brand guidelines or use the right PR boilerplate? Take a leaf from the PR book and combine it with the SEO book The PR industry is all about building relationships. Whether it's your little black book of media contacts or your long-standing relationship with journalists, successful PR will be the one with more personal connections. Digital marketers can learn a lot from this.

Whether you're building backlinks and boosting your Google rankings, gaining more social followers, or getting your content out there, the foundations of good PR will play a key role here. Of course, while PR professionals are great at building relationships, they tend to overlook the more important aspects of SEO like backlinks and keywords. Since many PRs have a news background, there is a tendency to get creative with the language and use many different terms, rather than sticking to what the SEO team considers "target keywords". But it's important. Spending hours writing great content just for it to have a short shelf life is a waste of time - let's make it work even harder by implementing some SEO best practices! 1. Find your influencers and build relationships with them : Finding influencers in the industry you’re targeting isn’t difficult, it’s just time-consuming. But take your time and it will pay off in the long run. You will find that focusing on influencers (i.e. people) rather than publications (i.e. websites) is a better use of your time, as these influencers often write about multiple topics or multiple websites.