Search engine optimisation (SEO) and public relations (PR) are often seen as separate strategies within a communications plan. SEO focuses on boosting the search engine rankings of a brand or company website by optimising the website’s technical side, while PR generates awareness and word of mouth about companies and products by placing them in relevant publications.
The reality is that we constantly operate in a multi-channel media environment and winning campaigns succeed by integrating their communications. Blending SEO and PR is the secret to ensuring healthcare brands are noticed in an increasingly digital world.
At SAY, we recently developed and launched an integrated healthcare communications campaign to make nutrition advice available to amateur athletes and exercise enthusiasts. The campaign used a mix of SEO-optimised digital content and a PR campaign via influencer, earned, paid and owned channels to reach and engage sports nutritionists in the UK.
A website hub provided a centralised location where nutritionists could find the tools they needed to impact amateur athletes’ nutrition. Aligning SEO and PR was essential during all phases of the campaign. Digital educational content was built with SEO in mind, optimised for the audience by selecting relevant keywords, while PR was central to getting the word out at launch and beyond, securing backlinks from authoritative publications that boosted the website’s domain authority. The UK sports nutritionist community is relatively small, so highly targeted outreach was needed and by engaging key influencers and stakeholders we were able to prioritise strategic link-building back to the hub.
As a result of our work on this and other award-winning campaigns, here are our top tips for successfully integrating SEO and PR when developing a marketing or communications plan in the healthcare arena.
1. Selecting the right keywords
When writing content for digital we obviously think about landing our key messages, but SEO starts with keywords. When thinking about keywords, it’s critical to begin by understanding the target audience, their needs and behaviours: for example, what do they search for? How do they search for it? Then you can use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Analytics, and Search Console to identify keywords that offer the right balance of search volume and competitiveness and identify whether there are gaps in your content. With this insight, you can pepper your copy with your own unique mix of keywords and create content that can rank for head terms – broad popular searches – or identify opportunities offered by long-tail keywords – niche searches that deliver smaller volumes of traffic but often of higher quality.
2. Writing for digital: SEO-friendly content creation
When writing content to make it rank higher in search engines like Google for relevant keywords, start by optimising the headline. In addition, include a title tag as Google uses this to understand your content’s topic and rank it. Your title tag will also attract readers to your content so keep it short and snappy.
Ensure you also write a compelling meta description: a short one- or two-sentence summary of your article to appear below the title tag. To optimise this meta description, use the active voice, address readers directly, and include action verbs like “learn more,” or “find out.”
While the body of your article also needs to be optimised for keywords, you will need to balance SEO with creativity: well written articles aren’t stuffed with keywords but incorporate them naturally, so they are easy to read and scan and not seen as spammy by Google. Well-written digital content is also more likely to attract backlinks, but more of that later.
When structuring your content for SEO use keyword-rich subheadings, bullet points, short paragraphs, and clear and simple language to help both Google and your readers understand and navigate your content. Use high-quality images and graphics and ensure you include alternative text (alt text): descriptive text to convey the imagery’s meaning and context.
For health-related digital content, references can help ensure accuracy and credibility. Provide external links (also called outbound links) to those references to make it easy for the reader to find them. Accuracy in healthcare content is especially important to Google as it sees it as a “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) topic that can have a significant impact on a reader’s well-being. Google therefore holds this type of content to a higher standard and monitors and penalises poor content in this space.
When writing on healthcare topics, it’s also critical to attribute the content to an author. This aligns with Google’s E-E-A-T principles (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness), which guide the assessment of content quality. Moreover, readers are more likely to trust information when they know who wrote it, especially if the author is recognised as an expert in their field.
3. The role of backlinks in healthcare PR
Backlinks, also called inbound links, are links back to your website from other websites. They are an important aspect of SEO because they demonstrate to search engines like Google that your website has authority. Increasing your domain authority increases your website’s ability to rank for competitive keywords, so it’s a virtuous circle.
PR is a great way to obtain backlinks. If you want to secure media coverage with impactful backlinks, best practice is to target publications that offer a balance of reach among your target audience and great domain authority of their own. A specialist healthcare PR agency will have built relationships with reputable healthcare websites – that means they are more likely to secure a backlink within any articles a journalist publishes.
However, not all digital media coverage generated by PR will include backlinks, and this type of coverage is still valuable as it increases a brand or company’s visibility and recognition. Furthermore, Google values quality backlinks over quantity, so better to target just a few key publications with high domain authority, rather than trying to be featured in many low-quality websites. For reference, domain authority is measured on a scale from 1 to 100, scores between 50-60 are strong and indicate good performance. Scores above 60 are excellent, with scores above 80 being exceptional.
If you’re planning a new campaign in the healthcare space, your comms agency needs to be well versed in both SEO and PR otherwise you are missing an opportunity to elevate your brand above the noise. As healthcare communications experts, we at SAY can work with you to build your brand’s narrative and develop PR, SEO and marketing strategies to help you build engagement and trust with your target audiences. Get in touch with our team at hello@saycomms.co.uk to learn more.
Find out more about how SAY can help your brand stand out among the crowd using integrated comms.
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