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This week, we had the opportunity to talk with Laura Mallinson, the Senior Digital PR Manager at Seeker Digital. She offered her insights into the best practices for integrating keyword optimisation without sacrificing the quality and authenticity of your PR messages and the essential steps people should take if they've never done this for a campaign before.
At its core, keyword targeting is the cherry on top of crafting hyper-relevant campaigns for your sites – something that everyone should be doing in the wake of Google’s latest algo updates. ~The leak~ confirmed what good PRs have been banging on about for yonks: irrelevant links and content placements will be useless for your site rankings and brand positioning.
So, when you’re thinking about PR relevancy, you can also weave in targeted keyword optimisation for even better SEO results. When considering your overall digital PR and SEO strategy, think about the branded and unbranded keywords you want your site to rank for – these are the broader keywords that you’ll give priority to in your digital PR campaigns, impacting not just keyword rankings but also share of search and brand positioning.
When creating your strategy, map out the broad sector-relevant keywords you want the site to rank for, including site-wide and category targets. For example, here are a few keywords we target for our furniture client…
Site-wide targets: online furniture store, online furniture retailer, contemporary furniture shop
Category targets: garden furniture, outdoor furniture, dining sets, dining table and chairs
General site-wide keywords can be used across all PR activity; from introducing an expert in a comment to defining your brand in a reactive PR pitch, you can start optimising your press outreach to include these straight away – making this the best place to start.
Category-specific keywords will likely be used less frequently and need to be aligned with relevant topical campaigns. To authentically target these keywords, you need to consider these from the concept development stage and not just bung them in haphazardly – it needs to make sense to the reader and to search engines. So, once you’ve got your priority category keywords, dedicate some of your ideation time to campaign ideas related to these topics.
For example…
“online furniture store [linked brand name], specialists in outdoor garden furniture, provide expert tips on how to revive your garden furniture ahead of spring.”
“Interior designer [expert name] at contemporary furniture shop [linked brand name] analyses dining set trends as ‘tablescapes’ take over TikTok.”
You can easily emulate these examples using this link surrounding text framework:
General brand positioning keyword → linked brand name → specific keyword for the theme covered in the campaign
We know that PRs relinquish editorial control to the journalist once we hit send, but the description line for the brand or expert is often unchanged in published coverage. So this is where you can have the most impact when it comes to keywords. Plus, the optimised text will be published next to the brand link, which we know Google reads to get a better understanding of the link context – making this an important part of the puzzle that we can’t ignore.
Once you’ve mapped out the keywords you’re going to target in your PR activity, set up monitoring for rank tracking and traffic analysis (I tend to use Ahrefs and SEOMonitor for this). You can then report on the impact your keyword-optimised press pitches have had on your core search terms, drawing the line between PR activity and share of search, market reach and overall organic growth – and unlocking a new value signal for the great PR work you’re delivering! Instead of relying purely on reporting on coverage numbers, you can demonstrate the direct impact of your work by tracking the number of ranking keywords, SERP positions, and the organic traffic generated by these rankings.
For on-site and hero campaigns, you can follow SEO best practices for keyword placements and targets – using keywords within headers but avoiding ‘keyword stuffing’, for example – to show that your campaign page is more than just a link attraction asset. Here, you can be more targeted with your anchor texts and internal linking, enabling you to funnel users and channel the link authority to the category, product or service pages you want to ‘power up’.
By ensuring your campaigns have a connection to the keywords you’d like to rank for, you’ll likely be on the right track for building relevant campaigns and controlling what search engines (and AI) will semantically connect with your brand.
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