The importance of SEO

For a long time now SEO (search engine optimisation) has been thought of as a dark art, black magic or an immeasurable formula. However with the growth of the internet age, this area of Public Relations is not to be overlooked.

Search engine optimisation in its simplest form is to try and make companies feature higher in Google’s rankings when entering keywords. It is important however, not to overuse these keywords as Google has the right to penalise and even take down your site off their search results pages. The ultimate goal of SEO is to increase traffic to a particular website in order to increase sales. A good way to measure how successful an individual is performing in his or her job role is to see the amount of hyperlinks they attain back to the company’s website.

Image sourced from Google

The real reason why a business needs SEO is to aid the search engines into seeing the quality of your website. With new updates coming out every six months; the major engines are always on the lookout on how to improve their technology and how to crawl the web more deeply to return better results to users. SEO used to be a game of numbers, attain links and you will be first in Google. Today this is known as spam and to be successful you have to have as many organic links and pieces of work as possible.

My personal experience within SEO is that it is more a segment of marketing and not so much PR. Public Relations is definitely incorporated within SEO, however. For example some idea generation for campaigns that you could possibly strategise for a particular client is an example of how PR is useful to someone working in SEO. Having said that, I do believe that SEO is moving more towards Public Relations as companies are now realising the benefits of making good relationships with those who they work with.

Search Laboratory, the company that I work for, has now hired a PR professional to come and deliver meetings to our employees to hone their skills needed to be effective when using Public Relations. Most of the employees that I have spoken to have all said that the practitioner was useful and that they now feel they could perform their particular job role to a higher standard. It has certainly improved my quality of work.

So in the future when someone claims to you that they are annoyed that Google is not on their side and they are not featuring well in terms of rankings, tell them the benefits of SEO. Even if you are trying to do it yourself! Yes, that’s right - once you’ve learned the basic concepts of SEO you can transfer it to all walks of life... Well in terms of getting traffic to a website anyway. So what are you waiting for, go out, get researching and make your blog feature higher within the major search operators.

Max Lamont, first year Public Relations and Communications student

@LamontMax