PR activities, as we know, usually encompass helping the public to understand the company and its products. More often than not, PR activities are leveraged for hiking sales and humanizing the image of a company. However, there are also quite a few clever ways to leverage PR for your SEO success. This post will help define some of the factors, suggesting how you can leverage the PR for more satisfactory search engine optimization.

Leveraging your company’s commanding personality

Choose someone from your company’s leadership team, maybe the CEO, COO or CFO who is your company’s own Academy award winner and leverage him/her to start a periodic column for an online publication to be run by the company. If he or she happens to be not a very powerful writer, enlist the help of a professional writer who can put the right word in the right fashion before the audience. However, make sure that the columns are totally free of sales pitches and contain only matters that are of interest for the general public. For instance, if you are dog breeder, continue columns on care and maintenance of different breeds of dogs, their features, characteristics, ailments, cures, etc.

This may be followed by pitching to local media outlets, industry-dedicated websites or media. Remember, it is easier to get on media outlet sites as compared to TV, radio or print. Nevertheless, this will give you the added advantage of securing a reliable link from a quality website while at the same time help you reach a grander audience. If you intend to do it more professionally, provide several articles and pitching these to the websites directly or through a PR agency that knows how to project these before the right people.

Incidentally, when placing the link, refrain from putting a link in every article as it will look overtly sales-y and discourage the affiliation with the website. As a matter of fact, one link from the bio section will be enough, since with each new article published you will secure additional links to the bio page, strengthening that link back to your site.

Sponsoring Competitions and awards

Think in terms of entering the top executive awards that will lead to gaining links and exposure. Examples include some of the following:

• Top executive awards, wherein C-suite management can enter to win a top CEO or Smart CXO award
• Growth awards such as Inc. 5000 or local area fast growth company awards
• Best workplace type awards
• Awards for going green or for innovation

Secure press coverage by doing something real good

Look for opportunities to  help people and try to fulfill the job within your means. This will automatically entitle your company for press coverage. Thereafter you can take advantage of the link value it will provide.

Subsidize Contests to grab press attention

The lure of winning a contest for free has universal appeal. When you are the sponsor, you  will automatically get press attention and the resultant advantage. It may not be out of place to mention that while all forms of contest might not earn you links (from the press), some of the following surely would.

• Offering Scholarships (not a fortune) to students can help your company list on university websites as well as getting adequate press attention, both of which will help attain links
• Honoring Local Heroes will also bring you under the limelight and gain press coverage. Tie in Social Media too for getting additional links.

Conclusion

SEO primarily entails links. If your PR is leveraged fully and effusively, there will be no dearth of fully relevant links, which in other words mean successful SEO for your company.