SEO and PR are more similar than you think. By using some basic principles, public relations can become an effective driver of search engine visibility, argues James Crawford, Managing Director of PR Agency One.

For many in the creative industries, SEO is something of a mystery. It is often seen as a dark art, practiced by socially dysfunctional geeks obsessed with often confusing terminology such as PageRank, word density and link equity.

In reality, SEO is changing and is actually a very simple and transparent discipline. What is more, SEO is becoming more and more closely aligned to public relations.

Ask the really serious practitioners of SEO about their discipline and most will say that, as long as a website is built to the latest web standards, then for good search engine visibility, a business needs great onsite content that is interesting, newsworthy and sharable.

Take, for example, Rand Fishkin from SEOMOZ, who is one of the biggest SEO authorities on the planet right now. He’s a great example of the ‘content is king’ ethos. He was recently asked: What is the single best piece of SEO advice? His response was unequivocal:

“Create a site, service, product or hook that has a natural, viral feedback component accessible to search engines (via links, embeds, badges, incentives to share, etc). Make it repeatable and compelling."

Creating content that is naturally viral, newsworthy and sharable is exactly what a PR consultancy should do. To this end, the difference between a PR and SEO practitioner is negligible.

By using these PR techniques, creative businesses can secure inbound links in online news sites, and blogs that have a natural page authority. Google will like this, and increase the visibility of the site accordingly.

The same content can be tailored to be used on site, on the company blog and via social media. Again, Google will like this. What is more, this approach is much more natural and is a longer term strategy than a lot of the spammy, outsourced link building that is often the perception of SEO.

James Crawford is managing director of www.pragencyone.co.uk