SEO vs PR - Friend or Foe

April 11th, 2007

I recently came across a “whitepaper” from Daryl Wilcox of Daryl Wilcox Publishing (associated with Sourcewire etc), which provided a very interesting overview of the future of traditional PR, which began with an interesting conjecture in 2017

However it soon returns to normality, and highlights what many PR organisations are starting to consider, namely whether to adapt to changing trends and behaviours as to how people read and gather news. To quote the whitepaper:

“The worst case scenario for PR, and this is real world and not fantasy, is that PR loses significant ground to an apparently more dynamic and imaginative profession - search marketing. The danger is this new discipline will take a bigger slice of the marketing budget at the expense of search marketing will start to take on communications roles which were previously part of the PR function”.

As the report goes onto state, there is already significant evidence of this. Many traditional offline publishers are now pouring money into online. Just look at the BBC. The cricket world cup has coverage from every angle including the widespread use of blogging in order to provide a more personalised overview of the world cup.

Search engines are also the weapon of choice when researching products or services, once the sole domain of offline publishers. Companies are getting wise to this, and the associated spend online is reflective of this trend. Added to this, is the ability of search marketing in order to drive traffic to the site.

Search marketing budgets are often similar to PR budgets nowadays - ranging from retainers for small clients of circa £500 per month to budgets of over circa £50000+ per month. However search marketing has one significant advantage over traditional PR in as far as it can demonstrate return on investment more effectively, easily and objectively. This is particularly important in many companies where every penny is accountable. As a result many search engine marketing companies are offering a range of online PR services such as PR syndication. This impacts PR as many organisations that would never have previously considered PR are now introduced to PR by search marketing agencies.

However the PR industry have been fairly slow in response. The report highlighted the CIPR conference in November 2006, where not one of the 14 sessions had any Online PR bias. As the report puts it - “The transformation of the media by the Internet was not a revolution, it was a slow burn. Now it as a raging fire”

However I am in danger of singing the whitepapers praises too highly. Whilst I fully agree with much of the report (particularly with my SEM hat firmly on), the reference to PR professionals being potentially better at SEO than search marketeers seems slightly of the mark. SEO is not all about numbers, numbers is merely a part of the fully equation, and it is this attention to the numbers along with the terminology and phrasology, that allows us search marketeers to leverage this ROI from online.

However Daryl’s document is written with the PR sector particularly in mind, and as such does an excellent job as such in advising PR of the potential of the Internet, whether or not they choose to utilise that information is another question. To be honest, there is no reason why Search Marketing and PR cannot cohabit side by side. I am currently working with a well respected PR agency, who are wholly embracing Online PR and the opportunities it can offer, and I am sure they want be the last.

To PR agencies. If you haven’t embraced the Internet, call us for a quick chat, to find out more on 01282 411170

To download the whitepaper go to http://www.dwpub.com/whitepapers.php?int=Public_Relations_Versus_Search_Marketing

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Entry Filed under: SEO Industry, SEO, PR Syndication, Online PR