Nothing lives in a vacuum, so it’s important that you ensure the various departments or teams working for your law firm mesh well together. This particularly applies to legal SEO and PR professionals.
Check out four ways that public relations and SEO overlap for law firms.
Education
Often, those in the PR profession aren’t taught the impact online media has SEO and keyword rankings. It’s important that your PR team seeks SEO education so that they have an understanding of how their work can affects SEO and vice versa.
Your SEO and PR teams should reach out to each other and collaborate and communicate regularly.
Link optimization
PR impacts SEO through backlinks. How? Because your PR work allows your law firm to increase the number of backlinks it acquires from third-party sources. Additionally, it’s likely that your law firm is also working with an SEO firm, so they should be helping to optimize all of the links your PR firm earns through any media coverage (press releases and non-paid stories, most likely).
| Expert tip: Make sure your firm’s PR and SEO professionals consult about paid sponsorship links and ensure they’re deemed “nofollow” so there’s no penalty from Google. |
Media outreach management
Media outreach can be a tricky aspect of marketing because the size of your firm could mean that there’s more than one team working on outreach. When this occurs, you want to ensure that only one person is reaching out to an influencer because communication could become muddled.
This confusion can be eliminated by having your PR team own any relationship your firm has with mass media outlets, while having content marketers handle any relationships with bloggers.
Release alignment
If your law firm utilizes multiple outreach teams, then you’re likely to have stories (articles, blogs, etc.) released together. To avoid further confusion, ensure your PR, SEO, and other content creators align their release timing and ensure what’s being released has a comparable theme (or at least doesn’t contradict itself).
In other words, make sure your firm doesn’t end up with mixed messages.
For more helpful ideas on how to improve SEO, read this post about five important SEO moves your law firm should be making in 2018.
