Peanut butter and jelly. Cupid and Valentine’s Day. Peas and carrots. Captain and Tennille. One doesn’t really work as well without the other. PR and SEO work together for franchise brands in a similar way.
Sure, you can have one without the other. But when you combine PR and SEO, digital magic can happen. With the two working in lockstep, these functions help enhance a brand’s visibility, credibility and its ability to reach customers or potential franchisees who are looking to buy into a system.
What Can SEO and PR do for Franchise Marketing?
At its core, SEO – short for search engine optimization – is a marketing channel to get your website or other content to rank higher in internet searches. The higher you rank, the more visibility you receive when someone is searching for particular information. Whether a franchise is seeking new customers or franchisee prospects, SEO is an essential strategy for getting seen. But it doesn’t always work in a vacuum.
That’s where PR enters the scene. PR professionals are constantly managing the image and visibility of brands through content creation – writing stories and blogs about companies, their franchisees or employees, sending out press releases, creating social media posts and other items. The information helps to tell the story of a franchise and what it offers. The content held within a website helps it rank higher in searches, and earned media placements and mentions in other publications help raise the brand’s authority on a given topic.
By aligning SEO and PR efforts, a brand can create a strategy that attracts leads, enhances brand reputation and improves overall online visibility.
Using Keywords in Franchise PR
Before PR writers begin creating their copy, SEO professionals can lay the groundwork on how a given piece can be seen on an internet search engine by researching keywords. This helps align the content with current terms and searches by real people who are interested in a brand, industry or product.
For example, an SEO professional can identify words and phrases a potential franchisee would use when searching for brands, locations and certain types of investment opportunities. SEO can also benefit franchisees at the local level when it incorporates location-specific keywords in website content, meta tags and local business listings.
After that initial research, the PR professional can then get to the work of writing the content. As they move along in the piece, whether a blog, press release or article for publication elsewhere, they can sprinkle those keywords throughout their copy to attract the targeted audience.
Crossing PR with SEO Aligns Brand Messaging
No matter how many people you have working on any given project, it’s essential to stay consistent in your brand’s messaging. SEO and PR can both help with that.
PR professionals are adept at various writing styles, voices and platforms. This can include PR materials, website content and social media. Consistency reinforces a brand’s image and message to potential investors. With help from SEO specialists, the content created by PR can be optimized to align with key brand messages, making it more likely to resonate with the target audience.
The Effects of Link Building for Franchise PR
Link building is an effective strategy used by SEO and PR professionals that contributes to search engine optimization and increases the credibility and authority of a brand through the use of other websites.
PR plays a pivotal role in this system. As PR professionals focus their pitching efforts on stories, events or press releases to gain news coverage, shared links are included in the copy published by news outlets. While the news placements generate more visibility for a brand, the inclusion and placement of the links on those sites raises a brand’s credibility and reputation digitally. When search engines recognize that the links are included on other reputable websites, like a TV station or newspaper, it bumps up how it displays links in search results.
SEO team members are able to optimize the success of those stories through the use of relevant keywords to make sure the anchor text in the backlinks reinforces the franchise’s SEO goals.
If you aren’t aligning your PR and SEO messaging, rethink your 2024 strategy and get on board. The use of these two franchise marketing elements combine to form a powerful force that raises awareness of your brand with your target audience.
