Battling between Public Relations and SEO for the betterment of ORM!

Public Relations and SEO, both are battling over the fact that who’s better at online reputation management for decades. Both are putting their best foot forward for the scenario, while PR firms claim better media mentions improve brand sentiment, while SEOs argue these placements are meaningless without search visibility. So, who’s right?

Let’s get into the minimalistic details about their strategies.

What PR does for reputation management?

There’s no diffidence that the earnings, buying and amplifying positive mentions of public relations agencies are great. These placements further help to control the discussion around your brand by shifting the narratives to something more positive.

Talking about the king of brand status management, Starbucks has maintained an impressive response to the infamous incident which took place in one of their Philadelphia stores. They pushed out various headlines – shaking stories so that they could counterbalance the negative press havoc of their search results in a relatively short span of time.

Public Relations not only helps to dilute the negative press in Google’s Index but also work hard to present positive, constructive, and pragmatic brand narrative. Google is likely to determine that such subjects are related when there’s a high topic density connecting a brand with an unflattering event. PR firms can shift this frequency/substance away from negative topics and towards the practical and positive press, and this influences everything from search results to autocomplete.

Drawbacks

Paid PR placements contain no follow links so, therefore, articles have no SEO impact if they link to any of the content you want to rank in your search results.

How SEO improves your online reputation?

While dealing with SEO, they have a different approach to online reputation management. Search engine optimization companies begin by creating and optimizing digital assets you control rather than placing content on the biggest sites and wishing they rank for branded queries.

Company’s social profiling, blogs, and websites carry a lot of weight in search results, and they are exceptional at making sure that they rank for branded queries. Further, SEO will identify or publish additional positive content about your brand and then build links to this content from other trusted websites to improve search visibility.

Drawbacks

If done inadequately, SEO can hurt your website and experience of the user by focusing too much on search engines, and less on users. As per the SEO content placements, they are less brand-focused than PR introduces/mentions. Therefore, they won’t do much to improve the brand image as a stand-alone strategy. The main purpose/target of these placements is to get other content to rank for your brand.

Why do you need both strategies for online reputation management to be successful?

Public Relations and Search engine optimization, both are highly specialized in the fields that require years of competence and expertise, and there’s often a disconnect when one attempts to do the other. Moreover, SEO fails to write compelling content that shifts brand sentiment whereas public relations agencies don’t have enough technical expertise regarding how Google’s algorithm works.

For this reason, it’s often said that brands don’t see online reputation management as a choice between public relations or SEO!

Usage of public relation tactics can be done which secure positive media mentions and also showcase the best qualities of your brand and dilute negative press.
When you are through with the above content, then turn on your SEO engine so that your content can be on the top of Google where your customers can easily access it.

“A successful reputation management will take place when there will be the right amount of balance between the two strategies.”