Wide Reach and Narrow Focus in SEO PR
Getting your messages read, reported, reproduced, and reverberating around the on and offline world can require an overall strategy which includes the tactical use and combination of a number of tools. PR occupies such a valuable place partly because it brings the all important visibility. On the web today however there are a number of different ways that people, be they end consumers, journalists, bloggers etc, can meet their needs for information. This should therefore have implications for your PR Strategy.

The Widest Reach
Sharing content in as wide a way as possible is a good idea in PR environment where those who can influence and report, and those who are the end users can be reached directly using the same communication. Whether adding a new search engine optimized press release to a web page, adding a new blog post, or communicating a PR message using video, communication of this fact needs to take place across a number of platforms in order to reach all of those important prospects who could be receiving information via or researching information using those different platforms. This means developing an understanding of using social networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter as well as using RSS feeds for people who get information from their blogs that way.

Although wide reach is initially good aim, where PR is concerned credibility needs to accompany visibility. A focus on producing good quality, interesting and highly newsworthy content for those various platforms is a must. To meet the different information processing and preference requirements of your message recipients, a combination of text, pictures and video can bring greater PR results than just the traditional text press release for example. Utilizing the scope of the Web in terms of its possibilities and its reach can bring long lasting rewards.

A Narrow Focus
Successful online PR today should embrace the benefits of search engine optimisation to help bring about the maximum visibility. Content which uses the right key phrases in the right places in the right way, coupled with the power of high quality incoming links is likely to rise higher up the search engine results and become more visible, but what about the threat of competition?

Competition and Focus
The generic nature and popularity of many keywords and key phrases also brings the challenge and threat to SEO efforts of high competition. The natural counter to this in SEO terms is to focus on a niche, and often this can involve focusing on a long tail key phrase.

Even though long tail key phrases tend to deliver less visitors to a web page, blog etc, the visitors they do deliver tend to be those near to taking action of some kind. Focusing on long tail key phrases in SEO as part of your PR efforts could be relevant when e.g. there’s a very specific product / service / brand name, or when there’s a very specific topical and current newsworthy item to which the PR is linked, thus giving it greater power.

A specific and informed type of search is also something which may be a feature of a more informed researcher e.g. a person who runs a specialised blog. This focus on the long tail keywords in the SEO aspect of your PR can therefore be a very powerful weapon in getting the PR message to highly interested parties whether they are influencers, journalists, bloggers, or all three.