Having a founder that’s worked at a magazine, and we’ve always being surrounded by PR individuals, we know better than anyone the importance PR can play on your business success.
However, gone are the days when you could get some coverage and become an overnight phenomenon. Even more so, gone are the days where you could sustain growth as a business, relying just on traditional PR methods.
Nowadays, it’s more important than ever that your SEO strategy & your PR strategy work together to achieve the same goal: long term increased revenue.
How can they work together, based on our experience? Below, we’ve put together our very own NOVOS cheat sheet to make sure you’re maximising your SEO performance with your PR & hitting 2, maybe even 3 birds with one stone.
Why you need links for SEO
Strong, high quality links from other sites are a key factor when it comes to how high your pages rank in the Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) – the higher you can rank your product & category pages, the more revenue you’ll make from your eCommerce store. As a result, PR plays a huge part in acquiring these backlinks to your site, whether it’s from bloggers, traditional publications or influencers.
On the other hand, if you have a bunch of poor, low-quality links from poor websites, Google can actually penalise you, which will lower your rankings & thus lower the amount of revenue coming from your eCommerce store. This is a big reason why one of the major tasks we always undertake in the first couple of months when working with clients at NOVOS is to spend time evaluating the backlinks a site currently has, what category they fall under, and whether to disavow a selection of them.
To avoid having a spammy site and being penalised by the search engines, you want to make sure you acquire your backlinks in an honest, fair & best-practice way. We’ve put together a mini checklist below to help you achieve the best possible PR & SEO results.
How to get links for SEO
The main ways to get links are:
- Through a press release sent out to publications with a link to your site/specific page. For example, for one of our clients in the past, they were launching a new range of women’s shoes in collaboration with a very famous fashion designer – this was then the perfect opportunity to put a link to the new collection within the press release, as well as having a timely hook so we knew it’d get published.
Deleted:
- Through a creative content campaign – for a client in the past our founders in the past illustrated a brain-teaser for Easter, where we hid an egg amongst a field of flowers and put some paid social behind it to get responses & gain traction. This then was combined with a press release and achieved coverage across hundreds of publication which a large percentage linking to the Easter flower collection that we wanted. (they now repeat this traditional egg hunt every year)
- Another way to get links is by establishing yourself as a thought leader. There are tools out there, such as Help A Report Out, who send 3 emails a day asking for expert opinions and they likely give a link back if the piece is published. We use this for individual members of the team to build influence.
How to make sure your links are of the highest quality
- Try and link through the brand e.g. “Dyson hair styler”
- Make sure to use a naked URL as the link e.g. https://www.opumo.com/clothing/jeans-opumo.html rather than a parameter or UTM URL
- Use contextual links where possible – so the link naturally is used using anchor text that fits perfectly in a sentence, rather than feeling like the link doesn’t belong there
- Try not get an author link if you’re writing a piece yourself – avoid linking your name if there are other alternatives within the content
- Make sure to ask for a “follow” link where possible – having worked in a magazine before, I know that naturally publications with give nofollow links which don’t pass any SEO value to your site. Follow links are what you need
- Make sure to analyse the sites before you reach out for the link – using tools such as Majestic will help you identify which sites could be seen as “spammy” and which ones you actually want links from!
If you need some help boosting your SEO & need a review of your backlinks, get in touch with us here at NOVOS by reaching out for a free consultation here and we’ll be happy to help.
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