Comments on: Understanding the difference between online PR and SEO

By: tug

tug — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 16:42:01 +0000

Search engines often overlook what you might assume are some of the web’s best pages. Just think of the tools many designers use to make web pages exciting. Great illustrations, stunning photos, animation and emoting music. Throw them all onto your pages and the world’s most important web ’spiders’ might just crawl right past you.

By: Al Fox

Al Fox — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 20:27:05 +0000

It’s abundantly clear that the more technical SEO types take every chance they can to dismiss PR as history and champion SEO as the only way forward. I agree with Lance and Mark P in that there are still differences – as sometimes there is a different objective to achieve.

Take Client A who makes gadgets. He needs great SEO to ensure he’s found in the search results for important and relevant keywords. However he also needs potential consumers to read about why his gadgets are different – and better than his competitors. Probably on independent websites, forums, blogs, etc. In his world, it’s vital to differentiate (and trying to do that on his own website is not going to persuade as well as it would on independent resources). If there is a link to a dedicated landing page, all well and good – great SEO to boot, but if there isn’t, is it a waste?

No, it’s still achieving a hell of a lot. And that’s PR.

By: Roger, Online PR Agency C&M

Roger, Online PR Agency C&M — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 20:36:13 +0000

robin you are a tease

By: Robin Grant, We Are Social

Robin Grant, We Are Social — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 01:11:00 +0000

Interesting – was originally going to leave a comment based on Lance’s post saying something like “I agree 100%” – now obviously I have to deal with all the comments too – clearly I’m going to have to think about that – I’ll be back once I have.

Until then, Roger, Lance is right, you are wrong…

By: Roger, Online PR Agency C&M

Roger, Online PR Agency C&M — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 20:30:04 +0000

This is an interesting thread. Sorry Lance – I still disagree. I know that PR is funded by a salesman, and every business is a web business now…. So it’s all one big soup. PR for PR’s sake is simply a goner.

By: Mark Pilatowski

Mark Pilatowski — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 14:10:49 +0000

I agree with you in a sense. PR is more than just taking up space in the SERPs. It is about engaging your audience, evangelizing your brand, and dealing with any negative issues that may arise. SEO is a powerful weapon in an overall PR strategy. A strong SEO strategy allows you to put your message in front of an audience who is looking for your product or service. It also provides a good defensive strategy against negative press by taking up valuable space in the search results. It can also help broadcast accomplishments and new initiatives to a larger audience who might not be reached through traditional PR methods. There is another aspect that is not so closely related to SEO and those are the conversations with consumers, offline efforts, etc.

It is important to note that there is a difference between PR and SEO but the fact is you can’t craft a competent PR strategy without SEO anymore.

By: Stephen Pratley

Stephen Pratley — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 12:15:26 +0000

I have to say I agree with you Lance.

Search Marketing as a whole is about capturing existing demand for products and services and directing it to your website.

PR is more about generating new awareness and demand for the brand.

Our most common example of where the two differ is in new fashion brands who have, at the outset, noone looking for them. These people need people with PR skills to engage with the bloggers, forums and social networks where the fashion-forward spend their time and get them talking.

As their name grows, consumers will start looking for the brand name, and as a happy result of the PR activity and some good on-site optimisation, the brand will appear at #1 in Google for their own name, rather than the sites of the likes of vogue.com who initially will outrank the brand website on the basis of their own reputation.

SEO is more than PR in that it includes technical and mechanical aspects, particularly in the optimisation of the actual website, but PR is more than SEO in that there is an aspect of brand growth and development that mechanical SEO practices just can’t deliver to the same extent.

To maximise client value, each side needs to recognise it’s own skills and work to common targets to provide what they do best.

By: Lance

Lance — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 10:47:12 +0000

Thanks for all the comments. I should preface this by pointing out that I’m relatively technically minded for a PR person – I was the technical editor at Internet Magazine back when it was still running – and I do understand the importance of SEO and the nuts and bolts of how it works. And I’m not denying that a lot of what we do looks very similar to SEO.

Nevertheless, a lot of the points people have raised are based on the assumption that the client is an online business, or that the primary purpose of a campaign is always to drive sales via a website. This is clearly not the case. When people hire a PR agency, on or off-line, they are frequently looking for more than a traffic boost.

If you’ll forgive me for trotting out a few tired old lines: PR is about protecting the client’s reputation and to do that you need to build relationships with key influencers and engage your public in conversations. I think SEO is a part of that, but the two things are not the same.

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 10:13:15 +0000

Sorry (with all due respect) you’re talking poppy cock. This is the usual spiel that old style PR’s come out with when they feel threatened by the technological understanding required to run online PR successfully. The genie is out of the bottle – either come to terms with the technical aspects or stick to offline PR…

Oh and Online PR and SEO are intrinsically tied – that’s a fact, and it’s not going to change anytime soon……

By: Kate Hartley

Kate Hartley — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 09:34:42 +0000

There’s no easy division between SEO and PR as this debate shows! If part of a company’s overall communications strategy is to engage with customers, say, in an online community, then part of the engagement programme is to help them find that community… likely to be through Google. So SEO becomes part of overall communications or engagement strategy. But I completely agree that PR is about reputation, not just SEO. I think it makes sense to say they need to work together, in order to support the bigger picture of communications.