PR Firms Missing SEO Opportunities

One of our clients asked us to work with their public relations agency to further harmonize their digital communications. Their firm had created a Web site for our client. While it was an excellent site, we were surprised to discover that they had not developed it as a “search engine friendly” site. The firm had some of the appropriate coding for search engine optimization (SEO) but not enough to drive the site to a desired position on Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Given this is a core competency for Strategic Domain, we were able to help the PR firm drive our shared client’s content to appear on the first pages of the leading search engines. Our approach to SEO collaboration ensured a very productive joint effort with the PR firm to deliver the desired results for our client.

PR Firms and talented web developers may have some SEO knowledge, but SEO is not their core competency. These firms lack the staffs that live and breathe SEO everyday with many clients.

From this experience, we became curious about whether PR agencies were employing SEO protocols effectively. One of our search analysts reviewed 25 PR agency Web sites to see whether they had optimized their own corporate Web site to rank well on search engines. Our analyst canvassed a range of firms, small, medium and large.

To our surprise, none of the 25 PR agencies had effectively optimized their own Web site — even though they claimed to provide digital services and more specifically with some, SEO capabilities. In all fairness, some of these sites had a few SEO protocols in their code. But frankly, not enough to do the job. PR is a very competitive industry and being able to deliver search engine rankings could be critical to keeping or gaining new clients.

As I’ve suggested in earlier posts, talented Web designers and programmers may have some knowledge in this area, but SEO is not their core competency. These firms lack the staffs that live and breathe SEO everyday with many clients. And, they don’t have a tightly disciplined analytics program in place to measure success and failure on a regular basis.

Our experience is that to be successful in SEO, you have to be committed to integrating SEO into the fabric of the company and embrace all of the current protocols. This means maintaining a high level of vigilance with the continual stream of algorithm changes that flow from Google and the other leading search engines. Alternatively, finding a partner who has a solid SEO practice can be a quick and efficient way to solve this problem when PR firms are charged with building Web sites for their clients.