E-consultancy Blog

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“Public relations is the discipline which looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics.” – Thanks to the CIPR!

I agree that PR professionals need to educate themselves about the online aspect of PR as the Internet is probably now the most influential information outlet. It is essential that a clients reputation is managed well online, as well as offline, as news and information travel fast particularly in times of crisis!

This is where I personally feel PR would win over SEO. Could an SEM agency really cope with 20 odd news thirsty journalists constantly calling at all hours of the day???

With this in mind I don’t think the argument should be one versus the other. Like others have commented, it should be about working together to achieve maximum results for the client.

Will be interesting to see what the future has in store!

Public relations by nature lives in the grey area between orthodox and unorthodox techniques for garnering publicity. And yes, many PR companies have got it wrong, such as limiting their domain to optimization of press releases or through “invisible hand” blogging (flogs, sock puppets and astroturfing). The worst cases blow up in the corporate sponsors’ faces, which makes the mainstream blogosphere color the entire PR industry in that color.

But Connors, for example, is capable of auditing a company’s information assets and determining what percentage is still not being used to bring in new customers through search. After completing that audit, we go in with alternative presentation layers to their content management system, and fortify their website–sometimes all-out replacing what they had. This is the equivalent of brain surgery to a website, changing everything the client took for granted about web publishing.

Usually within a few months, the Web becomes their new #1 lead generation source. Or their initial referrers and page views gets boosted dramatically. And it might be a matter of semantics. But we don’t consider ourselves primarily an SEO company. But neither can we purely call ourselves public relations, because of our counterparts who “don’t get it”. We’re looking for some other term to call what we do. But in the end, it’s about connecting people who turn to the Internet (or any other media, for that matter) to get their information.

Can you recommend anyone we could approach to work with?

It’s set science. Are all dogs mammals? Yes. Are all mammals dogs? No.

Is all SEO PR? Yes. Is all PR SEO? No.

Therefore, people with the human relationship skills who also master information science have broadened their human relationship skills, and are better positioned to help companies in their mission to get and keep customers.

the charlatans and snake-oil salesmen of today aren’t to be found in public relations. They’re to be found in SEO.

It amuses me when people start throwing around derogatory names about things they clearly don’t understand.

I do agree that SEO is not as strategic as PR and I doubt that SEO will absorb PR. Yet they both have synergistic qualities.

I also agree with Brian that PR and SEO need to work together. As an owner of both types of agencies, I can assure you the results are formidable.

For a basic example, search Google for “pr agency” “pr firm” “public relations firm” “public relations agency” and so forth. Our PR firm (M&O) is in the top ten for all and many more. That’s the start of SEO and PR working together.

That would be a heck of a skill set…

As for PR engulfing SEO, I think that will come down to profit. If search marketing makes more money then the acquisitions will be driven by them.

Its going to be an interesting one.

It’s clear to me that Social Media will force a new breed of marketing professionals that will engage with PR and SEO.

I’m only calling all of this out to help the industry wake up – or at the very least, inspire the promising stars to rise up and succeed on their own.

You’re article right on. Most companies think that because their releases show up in Google or Yahoo, that their SEO is effective. But it’s not about finding your company online when you search by company name, it’s about showing up at the top of the list when searching other key words.

I honestly believe that most PR doesn’t truly understand SEO and most SEO’ers don’t understand markets, pain points, and benefits in order to accurately construct a compelling press release (but then again, most PR pros don’t either.) Perhaps the two should work together…

I do accept that the most important media company in the world today is Google. Since Google doesn’t employ a single journalist (to the best of my knowledge), then media relations is clearly no longer the only game in town. But SEO will become a part of public relations rather than vice versa.