Social media programs are increasingly being rolled out with Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and PR campaigns.  Social media and SEM share many similarities, including broad online reach and quantifiable metrics that can be tracked with web-based tools.  To get a better understanding of what SEM experts think of social media, I sat down with Ralph Hibbs, principal at Red Apple Marketing, an online lead generation company based in San Francisco.

Ralph Hibbs – A smiling face in the search engine marketing space

I recently attended a free webinar, “SEO + Public Relations = Your Secret Marketing Weapon in 2009,” put on by the team at Webmarketing123.com. They made the case that SEO and PR should by joined at the hip.

I have to say, I’m still not convinced (this is my view and not necessarily shared by my colleagues at Page One PR).

While Paul Taylor, the presenter, did a great job of walking us through the benefits of SEO-izing your PR and marketing collateral and results, I’ve had experiences where that just doesn’t work.

Example 1: Optimizing a press release for SEO and PR

You can do this two ways and I’ve tried both:

1) Write a release, then look at a list of key words to insert.

2) Look at the key words, then write a press release with them in mind (try to use each 1-4 times and space them out).

The second worked better for me, but if you’re supposed to insert your URL and keywords ~3 times each for near optimal SEO, it gets rough and the news starts to sound like giberrish. If the release then needs to go through legal approval and potentially partner or customer approval, you’re in trouble.

That’s only one example, but I do think there’s more beyond just blending SEO with PR and, voilà, you’re on page one of wherever you want to be. The challenge often seems to be a classic case of having too many cooks in the kitchen. You’ve got the outside agency teams, such as the PR firm, the SEO firm, potentially the SEM consultant, and then all of the internal constituents, such as the corporate marketing/advertising team, sales, product marketing, etc. Each can have different business goals and be focused on maximizing content value for that agenda. Sheesh.

BusinessWeek ran an insightful article by B.L. Ochman recently, “Debunking Six Social Media Myths.” Though I appreciated every myth debunked, I really feel the writer’s pain with Myth #4: You can do it all in-house. It’s true – you can’t!

With regards to effective and viral social media campaigns, Ochman writes:

“It is rare indeed to find an in-house team that can not only conceive and execute a social media campaign but also drive traffic to it with effective e-mail segmentation, search optimization, blogger outreach, blog advertising, Google ads, and more.” Agreed.

I do believe things like SEO and PR should work together – of course it’s good to have a well-oiled machine running on all cylinders – but I don’t think it’s as easy as simply “working together.” Further, given that both PR and SEO are often outsourced strategic services, is it reasonable to expect both sides to come together without the forcing factor of the client company embarking on a holistic marcomm campaign which takes months of pre-planning and coordination? That’s hard to come by when you’re working with startups, particularly high tech startups.

I remain optimistic, however, that there are definitely lessons both PR and SEO can learn from each other. Throw social media in there, and you’ve got a party!

I’d appreciate any wisdom out there about the evolution of these siloed services and think I will continue to attend free webinars on the topic to keep me engaged in thinking about the right combo of SEO + PR.

As a PR firm, we are always looking for ways to promote our clients, either through traditional PR activities like press releases or new social media campaigns. A few months ago I began investigating ways to give our clients more bang for their buck by checking out search engine optimization (SEO) tactics to see if our PR activities could help us boost SEO results.

SEO is basically a way to increase your rank on a search engine results page for a certain key word term. If you want your website to be at the top of Google’s list, there are a number of techniques to help you get there, like coding the term into your website, including the term on the content of your page, and having other websites link to your site (ideally using that term).

If a PR firm is supposed to be getting a client’s news out all over the Internet, getting links to a client’s website all over the Internet doesn’t seem like a big step. However, it’s surprising how few people in PR know how to improve their clients’ search engine status (folks in marketing generally seem to be ahead of the curve). Public relations firms are just now starting to “get it.” The upcoming Public Relations Society of America conference includes a few sessions on SEO tactics, but they are mostly aimed at beginners.

Over the past six months, we have seen a real desire from our clients to partner more on increasing their web traffic, search standings, and lead generation. With access to Google Analytics information to gain a deeper understanding of how press coverage drives traffic to their sites, we can talk with clients about the keywords and search terms that they want associated with their website.

For me, the most exciting part of integrating SEO and PR practices is the impact that clients can see as their inbound links and web traffic rise. It is cool to know that a link-rich story that ran a month ago is still sending readers to the client’s site, or that a certain publication was one of the top sites sending the client traffic.

For example, the links in a June interview in Dr. Dobb’s Journal with Jason van Zyl, founder and CTO of Sonatype and creator of Maven, sent readers to the Sonatype website as recently as last week. Folks who came to the site from that story tended to stay longer, and the percentage of those who were visiting the site for the first time was higher than average. In contrast, links on the popular developer website DZone tended to send people over to the Sonatype site more regularly, but most were people who had already been there. Sure this is interesting, but why is it useful?

From a PR perspective, you get a whole new understanding of the publications. Even though they have a very technical audience, Dr. Dobb’s Journal is a better place for high-level stories that preach the gospel of Sonatype’s Java development infrastructure. Even though they have a large readership, DZone is a better placement for stories that appeal to those familiar with Sonatype and Maven. Looking at search engine and web traffic flow can help PR firms better target story placements to advance the business interests of the client.

The big question is: why don’t we see more integration of SEO and PR?

What do you think?