The overlap between PR & SEO — Chris Dickey // Visably

Quotes

• “I never expected or had in my career radar that I am going to be a tech entrepreneur. Ive always been a creative marketer and I have worked in-house and with early lifecycle companies. I enjoyed that challenge and being materially involved with decision-making.” -Chris

• “I work in PR and PR is this qualitative and kind of soft storytelling discipline. We are absolutely storytellers and we are using third-parties to tell our stories and leverage those audiences. But at the end of the day, we are still beholden to the metrics and we have to tell the clients how we moved the needle for them.” -Chris

• “We started identifying who Google was rewarding with top search placements and then one by one we started flipping the SERPs. It was interesting because we would work on it and we would come back three or four months later, we check it again and there we were 7 out of 10 organic results are recommending our clients stuff. It was stuff you couldnt pay for and I thought it was gold.” -Chris

• “I would caution that what we are doing is called SEO at all. What I would say though is that at the end of the day, the marketers dilemma is always the same and that is, How you facilitate brand introduction or product discovery especially within the search landscape.” -Chris

• “If you look at it through that lens of how do we get to a customer, then you really shift the conversation from saying Its all about my website to saying This is about every potential touchpoint on the first page of search and that is reallywhere we became focused on.” -Chris

• “70% of all the clicks for any given keyword is going to happen in the first 5 organic results and then below that it just kind of trails off to close to 1% by the bottom of the page. Given that real estate, you have a very, very limited amount of real estate to make an impression, why not focus on every single potential touchpoint, and PR plays a huge role in that now.” -Chris

• “What I end up calling this is the term search engine visibility and it is the idea of whats the likelihood that a consumer is going to discover or find your brand in search.” -Chris

• “Its an interesting take that PR is not an SEO because your job is to get placement on other websites. Its not necessarily something that you are optimizing for your own site.” -Ben “I would say that link-building and building the brand recognition of your domain falls into the purview of SEO.” -Ben

• “I would say that marketing is heavily siloed. I would say that between the SEM, the advertising team, SEO team, and the PR team there are thesegrey areas of overlap where SEO is not just taking a look at these technical aspects of a site performing but also looking heavily at the content and that bleeds closely into a PR.” -Chris

• “PR is all about content and all about leveraging third-party audiences to distribute your message. I think at the end of the day, these teams dont talk to each other enough and I think that when you look at search and look at whats showing at the top of search results, its a multi-channel playground.” -Chris

• “It seems like PR is essentially big game hunting for link-building strategies.” -Ben

• “I dont many people have deliberately gone out to say, I want my PR to be actually reaching customers at the top of the search. I see that as a very powerful strategy on a couple of levels. One, PR can reach into search results that typically a brands own website could never get into.” -Chris

• “I think you can look through the lens of link-building but I think theres a bigger conversation to be had building around search engine visibility using these parties to promote your brand.” -Chris

• “We talked a lot about SEOs needing to be good cross-functional partners, most of the time that is learning how to talk as a digital marketer is supposed to in SEO specialist. You have to move your seat left sometimes and sometimes you have to move it right, over to the creatives, over to the PR team, and some other people that will get your content and your brand mention in high visibility spots. We all have to be a bit mobile interms of where we are sitting to make sure that we are getting the most face time to the people that matter.” -Ben