Guest Speaker
Robert Hickling Associate Director, Say Communications
Rob provides strategic marketing & comms advice to his clients on all sides of the technology spectrum. Whilst Rob has a natural passion for technology, he is driven by innovation. With the mantra of outcomes not outputs, Rob creates cutting-edge campaigns that work, ensuring every campaign has demonstrable business results.
Main host
Yaser Ayub
Founder, of Rayze Digital and Yaser UK. A marketer with over 15+ years of experience in the financial services, Fintech, B2B, and B2C industries. Yaser's focus is on driving business growth and ROI by developing and implementing marketing strategies that align with company objectives.
Webinar Transcript
Yas is a marketing professional with over 18 years of experience. He has traditionally held VP of Marketing roles, including at Rocket Internet, and also served in senior positions for a challenger bank. His expertise lies in SEO and paid search, and he was formerly a web developer—though he learned early on that he absolutely hates designing. His agency has been operating for about five years and ranks very competitively in the UK, achieving number one and number two positions for “SEO consultant.” The agency is also a strong advocate for Webflow. During his time at Rocket, Yas lived in Berlin and had two daughters, who are now big Arsenal fans.
Rob Hickling is Sales Director at SAY Communications, an award-winning integrated communications agency with two specialisms: B2B technology and healthcare. Of particular note, SAY is also a founder member of an international network called Plexus, which comprises like-minded PR and communications agencies that can support campaigns worldwide where needed. On a personal note, Rob is a Leicester fan with no children, but one very grumpy foster cat named Keith.
This webinar addresses three main topics. First, why PR and SEO sometimes come into conflict. Second, why these two disciplines should be much more aligned in most companies, based on insights from shared projects and collaborations. And finally, several case studies that demonstrate the value of this alignment.
Traditionally, PR companies and SEO agencies aren’t always friends. This often comes down to SEO agencies simply asking, “Can you give me a link?”. PR agencies want to tell great stories, while SEO teams want their content to be found online. These functions are often treated within silos as different projects, and they measure success differently: PR teams measure coverage and brand awareness, while SEO teams focus on search rankings.
Both disciplines also share a common challenge—and opportunity: they sometimes struggle to measure the ROI of their efforts individually. Teaming up together has enabled both sides to help solve that problem.
Research suggests that buyers, especially in B2B, are typically at least two-thirds of the way through their research before they ever make themselves known to a company—before they ever speak to anybody from sales. The online content they find for themselves significantly impacts their decisions. This immediately highlights why both PR and SEO need to be performing well.
If great content is developed without any thought given to how that content is found, then what’s the point? Equally, if you focus everything on ranking without giving enough consideration to what you want to rank for, you might even harm your cause if you’re found for the wrong thing. Having someone thinking about the reader alongside someone thinking about the discoverability of that content is really quite powerful.
PR should really be the backbone of a successful SEO strategy. Great content is what Google wants, and it’s what needs to be found.
If you work in PR, you probably get tons of emails that look quite spammy asking for links. Links are important because they’re part of Google’s core algorithm and always will be. Although there’s a lot of content online suggesting that links are diminishing in importance, that’s not actually the case—they’ve always been really important.
A link, specifically the anchor text of somebody linking to your website from an external domain, can be good or bad. A good link comes from a site with relevant traffic to your product, is built naturally, and is not purchased. A bad link is one that’s purchased, comes from spammy directories where your users won’t be, or originates from low-traffic, irrelevant domains. For example, if you’re a healthcare company or in fintech, why would you want a link from somebody selling fish tanks?
Google’s policies are very clear: exchanging money for links is a no-go, exchanging goods or services for links is a no-go, and sending someone a product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link is definitely a no-go. While there’s a big industry around manipulating links and people selling them, it’s not a sustainable strategy for the future. Google consistently releases algorithm updates, and the latest was a big spam update that penalised and devalued many websites using these spammy tactics.
You’re not going to rank without links. Links enable search engines to discover your content, and they’re really hard to get—which is why PR presents such a great opportunity to build them. Good links boost your domain authority, which is a metric that many tools use to evaluate the quality of a website out of 100.
Links from trustworthy websites act as a vote of confidence for your brand. Getting a link from a university, for example, is a great vote of confidence. If you’re building a link from a relevant domain, think about whether your users are going to be on that website—you want to be getting links from sites where your audience actually is.
Links also support something called E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) and “Your Money, Your Life” criteria. If you’re working within healthcare, for example, these criteria involve making sure you have enough signals on your website to tell Google that it’s as trustworthy as possible. The good news is that if you’re creating great content, E-E-A-T involves having signals about who’s creating that content and where the original source is—all things that good PR does naturally anyway. It’s just about adding an extra layer so that Google can read and understand it.
SEO professionals know what people are looking for and like to create content that is valuable, trustworthy, and can ultimately be found. They understand where links add value and how to send signals to point to your website in ways that drive value. What “value” means depends on your business KPIs. If it’s about generating leads, you might want to send traffic to a highly converting landing page about your product rather than a blog. If it’s about brand awareness, it might be about sending traffic to either your homepage or a blog to improve your domain authority.
Understanding link building is really important for SEO and for building your brand. SEO is increasingly about brand building—getting your brand mentions up, your brand signals up, and more people searching for your brand. This is why working with PR is such a great opportunity.
PR teams spend their days keeping on top of the news agenda and knowing what’s trending. They’re also looking to create news for clients, which means they’re a great source of new material, new content, and new ideas.
What makes PR somewhat unique is that PR professionals tend to receive sometimes brutally honest feedback on what’s working and what won’t. You can put anything on your own blog, and you can pretty much pay to run anything as an advert. But if you actually want to earn attention for the right things, you have to take that story to a journalist and convince them it’s going to be interesting enough to their readers to publish. If it isn’t good content, they probably won’t be polite about it—or even worse, they’ll just ignore it.
This can be really useful because, feeding quite early on into the strategy, PR can say whether something is landing or not landing with journalists. This often provides a very good idea of what to double down on or what to abandon and rethink. It really helps to get campaign messaging right early on, before going down the wrong route.
When someone asks PR for a link in coverage, the response is generally understanding—links are important, and PR will always try to get a link into what they do. However, frustration arises when everything gets boiled down solely to the link.
Consider an example of a previous client who had an amazing story in the Financial Times. Direct calls came in based on featuring in the FT with the exact messaging they wanted, with a good summary of what the business did and its differentiators—but with no link. Because of how this was being measured, that coverage wasn’t given any weight. Meanwhile, the same company could get a post in a relatively irrelevant directory, but if it had a high domain authority, they would consider that quite valuable—even though it wouldn’t drive any of the right traffic back to the site.
Wherever possible, links should be obtained. But there is still benefit to a brand mention without the link. It’s still important to get coverage across all suitable channels. SEO is one means of getting people back to your site, but PR also wants to shape perception more generally. The issue arises when everything is reduced to “it only has value if it has a link.”
One additional consideration: domain authority can be easily manipulated. If someone contacts you saying they can post you on a website with a domain authority of 70 or 80, it’s important to dig deeper into the quality of links pointing to that site. The takeaway from this webinar should not be to start entertaining all the requests from parties offering high domain authority. It’s really important to do some in-depth research into what their link profile looks like and how relevant that site is to your audience.
A similar comparison can be made between PPC and SEO, and between advertising and PR. What SEO teams and PR teams are both naturally attuned to do is earn their results organically, as part of a long-term brand strategy. There’s a natural affinity there.
Both disciplines are also incredibly vital if a strategy depends at least somewhat on reaching new prospects who aren’t already known to the business. There are lots of other great tools—account-based marketing campaigns, for example, where you know exactly who the customer is and can be more direct. But if success is dependent on being found by new prospects, then both PR and SEO should be part of the thinking.
Both disciplines also enjoy creating narratives and perceptions that determine how other people think of you. This is vital because a lot of what people know about you and think about you is what they discover for themselves online. They only reach out to you if they’ve passed the hurdle that this is someone worth speaking to in the first place.
There are several link building strategies where PR and SEO can work together effectively.
Digital PR and Statistics Pages: Leveraging news and branded content through statistics pages is incredibly effective. For example, one client in the Islamic finance space built a landing page containing statistics about their industry. These statistics pages rank really well. When journalists are trying to reference a piece, they go online, find that content, and link to it. The page got ranked number one in Google within a couple of weeks and generated about 62 unique links.
Podcasts: Podcasts are a great way of building links. If someone in your senior management team joins a podcast, they tend to link to you from their websites. Another benefit of podcasts is that if you’ve spent a lot of time producing research or analysis for one channel—whether that’s an article for your website or a byline placed with one publication—podcasts offer another outlet for that same work. You’ve done the hard work, and podcasts give you an extra channel to push it out to the audience.
Original Research: Original research is usually the best way to generate links. For example, using business statistics to identify where companies were most likely to open up in the UK, then summarizing that data and using it to outreach to publications, generated numerous links from good domains.
Interactive Content: Infographics, charts, videos, and other interactive, useful assets all help build links.
This case study involved a client in the finance space seeking to rank on page one for “unsecured business loans,” which is a super competitive term. After hitting all the main SEO elements—tech infrastructure, crawlability, content, internal linking—it came down to the fact that really trustworthy links were needed to rank.
You can’t get better links than from universities. At the time, “fintech” was a buzzword, and universities like Cambridge and Oxford were actually offering fintech degrees. The strategy was to build a campaign offering students up to £8,000 towards their fees if they could explain why they wanted to get into fintech.
An interactive landing page and video were created, forming a real interactive campaign that was then outreached to all the universities offering these degrees. As a result, at least 32 links were built from universities across the UK, US, Australia, and New Zealand. These links enabled the client to build brand awareness and get on the first page for a really competitive term.
This example demonstrates both a successful media campaign and an opportunity for improvement through SEO integration.
Digital Barriers was a company that wanted to be strongly associated with the responsible use of facial recognition in tackling serious crime. Their CEO, Zach Duffman, was an incredibly good spokesperson who could speak expertly and knowledgeably on this sensitive topic, making it easier to secure high-profile spots including live broadcast media.
The strategy was to put him forward as the “grown up voice” willing to defend the use of this technology and bring balance to the debate. The results were impressive: a 15-minute feature on BBC Newsnight, coverage on Sky News (syndicated to other countries including Danish TV and NBC in the US), and features in The Telegraph and The Financial Times.
At the time, that was considered job done—the goal was to get this out through mainstream media. However, looking back, if SEO had been considered at the outset, there would have been much better metrics available. The coverage did drive traffic and inquiries, which could be seen in basic Google Analytics, but links weren’t front of mind at the time.
If running the campaign today, much more consideration would be given to where SEO fitted in—both to capture the value and to help measure the impact. For example, Sky News footage can be purchased for commercial rights quite inexpensively, and incorporating such video assets into the company’s own website would have provided ongoing value. The brand awareness generated from this coverage definitely does help SEO, including the number of brand mentions it creates.
This case study demonstrates how PR and SEO worked together to help a client completely own the topic of “solar crime.”
The client, Detertech, has a brilliant crime intelligence function that does a very good job of figuring out where crime is happening, how it’s evolving, and what organisations could do to keep themselves safe. Through conversations with their experts, it became clear they had uncovered a real problem around the security of solar farms that hadn’t yet broken into the mainstream—no media had reported on it.
This was a huge opportunity to bring this issue to public consciousness and present the client as the solution. The first step was asking the SEO team what people were currently searching for around solar security and solar crime. That list was paired with information from the company to produce a comprehensive asset—developed with the idea of pitching it to media, taking it to events, and having the sales team hand it to prospects directly.
Originally, this asset was a PDF. The question became: “This is great content—why is it only a PDF? How are people finding it?” The solution was to reimagine it as interactive web content that could rank and be found via Google.
The interactive guide incorporated E-E-A-T principles: trust logos above the fold, author bios that explain who the real person behind the content is, and other trust signals. All the information was already in the PDF—it was great content—but putting it into a format Google could understand, crawl, and index allowed it to rank for multiple relevant terms.
The results speak for themselves: for the search term “solar crime,” the client now dominates the first page of Google with multiple pieces of content. The guide ranks highly, and several publications that resulted from the PR work also appear on the first page. Four out of the five first positions returned when you type “solar crime” into Google belong to this client. They are now synonymous with that term.
This success required both disciplines working together. You couldn’t do it without in-depth materials from PR, and you couldn’t do it without SEO looking at that content and asking, “How is it going to be found?” The guides have even started appearing in AI Overviews on Google, which is particularly exciting for the future.
Align your PR and SEO teams and start working together. Ensure everyone plays to their strengths and make discoverability a real priority. Brand and discoverability are key areas to think about in 2025 marketing—you need to be found for the right things, and you need to be found. Hopefully, this webinar has made compelling arguments for why these two respective skill sets both play into that and can deliver something more than the sum of their parts.
Q: What do you say to leadership who insist on doing everything in-house?
A: Those who don’t think they need marketing at all probably need to try it their way and hopefully have the humility to come back when it doesn’t work—because people won’t just find you. You need to help them understand who you are and what you’re about. The options available to marketers are expanding all the time. SEO as a discipline didn’t exist many years ago, and now it’s really vital. Can you honestly hope to have all of that expertise in-house? Is it not helpful to tap into other experts, get external perspectives, and sometimes just get honest advice from outside your four walls about where it’s worth spending time and where it isn’t?
Q: At what point of a campaign should SEO be considered?
A: SEO should always be considered up front. A great time is when building a new website—that’s the ideal moment to do the research and build the foundations for a strong SEO strategy. But it can be considered at any point. If you’ve been running paid search for a long period of time, there’s lots of great data showing which keywords actually convert. It’s also about expectation and goals: is it brand awareness, generating leads, or being front of mind?
A common pattern is that people starting a new venture spend tons of money on paid search and other channels, then hit a glass ceiling and come back asking for SEO help. But SEO can take up to a year to get really good traction—it should have been considered from the beginning. The sooner the better, because the longer it runs, the more effective it becomes.
That said, SEO doesn’t always have to be a huge project with a huge budget. It can be very targeted. You don’t need to rank for everything—you can be known for one thing and base your entire SEO strategy around it. A very laser-focused approach can sometimes deliver results in as little as six months.
Q: When is an article considered old by Google?
A: Rather than asking whether content is old, ask whether it’s performing. Is it driving clicks? Are impressions very low? In Google Search Console, pull all pages that have driven zero clicks over a large period of time—say, six months. If those pages have zero clicks and less than 100 impressions, consider them dead URLs that should be actioned.
If a page has zero clicks but more than 500 or 1,000 impressions, look at what the lead query is and consider optimising that content. Having a large proportion of non-performing content on your website—content not driving clicks with very low impressions—can limit your impact or ranking for your more competitive keywords due to something called “crawl budget.”
Q: How does Google deal with copy-and-paste press releases?
A: This isn’t really anything to worry about. It’s been happening for a long time. While you hope your press release gets written about freshly by multiple publications, if there are publications literally copy-and-pasting the content, it’s not a significant problem.
Q: How can PR coverage be used to boost SEO?
A: PR coverage can absolutely boost SEO. For broadcast coverage like Sky News, the commercial rights to use footage are often quite inexpensive to acquire. Once obtained, this video content can be incorporated into your website.
For example, adding a relevant video to a page resulted in moving up nine positions within a week. Google is using click data and interactive behaviour in its ranking. A scan of competitors for a main search term showed that people on the first page had videos and lots of interactive content. Including video on a page had surprisingly positive results. If you have assets like videos, really think about incorporating them into your site where relevant.
More generally, PR coverage requires hard work to secure. When it lands in a great publication, it tends to drive very good traffic while on the main page. But as soon as it drops off the first page or the next day’s newspaper comes out, it’s still there but won’t naturally be found. There’s a lot you can do to push it out through your own channels. Many clients now have LinkedIn followings that rival some important trade publications. Making sure as many people as possible see these external endorsements of your brand is important.
Q: What impact has AI had on content production and SEO?
A: There are two aspects to this. First, some people are abusing AI by using it to automate content generation at scale—one example involved a healthcare company producing about 40 articles a week using AI. Google clamped down hard on this through its spam update. If you try to do something against Google’s guidelines, you will eventually get penalised.
Second, the way AI is being used productively is to make teams more efficient with writing content. A typical example is using AI to analyse data on the most common questions and the pages ranking on Google, then building content briefs for writers to answer all those questions. AI is saving time and enabling the creation of better content that addresses what people are actually asking.