The times when SEO was only about keywords, ranking, crawling and linking have gone.
Many innovations have been introduced in the last few years, like Semantic Search, User Intent, Accelerated Mobile Pages, A.I., User Experience, Structured Data, and these are continuously creating areas where SEO overlaps with PPC, social media, traditional marketing, PR and content marketing. As a result, it has become nearly impossible to carry out SEO as a standalone activity: a synergy has become necessary to capitalise on all opportunities and tailor your marketing efforts.
So, how can you integrate SEO with Marketing, Social media and PR to achieve the maximum visibility and promotional impact?
Let’s say you are about to launch a new product targeting B2B prospects; you want to promote it and create a dedicated page on your website.
First get your SEO team to do the keyword search for that product.
Your marketing team will, then, develop copy for the new product page around the key search terms; a blog post will be created highlighting the new product with all information including launch date and links to the new product page. A mail shot will be sent to all clients and newsletter subscribers.
Your SEO team will optimise the new page and the blog post including on-page SEO and structured data, where applicable (local business, event, product). The SEO team will ask your webmaster to add the new product page to your website’s XML sitemap.
A video will be created highlighting the upcoming product; it will be uploaded on your YouTube channel and the SEO team will optimise it.
The social team will add the event to the Social Calendar and start a campaign to promote it.
The PR team creates a press release containing the keywords and links to the product page and distributes it to the major PR companies.
The PPC team launches a campaign to target buyer personas with ad-hoc promotions.
The SEO and PR teams reach out to influencers and bloggers to inform them of the launch of the new product.
Your Lead Generation team will follow up and call all prospects who visited your website coming through all your tracked channels (e-mails, social media, PPC… ) and to arrange a demonstration of the new product.
As all these efforts progress, the SEO, social team and e-mail marketing track landing page visits, social signals, brand mentions and inbound links to the product page. They pass all this information to the Lead Generation team.
All teams meet on a regular basis to monitor progress and respond by channel.