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Content strategy and digital PR each have their own benefits: a content plan that’s driven by search intent will help to increase your keyword rankings and organic traffic. Similarly, a solid PR approach will increase your brand awareness, and make your site more authoritative, which has a positive effect on overall rankings.

Whilst many agencies’ content and PR teams work in silos, that’s not the approach we take at c3. By sharing ideas and collaborating on clients, we can help take results to the next level. Here’s how…

Creating a content strategy driven by search intent

When we’re onboarding a client who has a content strategy retainer, once we’ve conducted an audit, by carrying out extensive keyword and competitor research, we can create a content roadmap that covers a variety of new landing page, blog and guide ideas that are relevant to the brand, and are driven by search intent.

When it comes to blogs specifically, our topics tend to be either driven by seasonality (Christmas/Valentine’s/Easter etc) or evergreen pieces that are relevant year-round. Whilst all of these blogs have search volumes behind them, enabling them to rank on the SERPs, our PR team can give them a further boost by building links to them from high-quality referring domains. That’s where proactive PR comes in…

Proactive PR: helping on-site content perform harder

Our PR process consists of three elements: planned, reactive and proactive. Planned campaigns are the bigger pieces, backed by surveys and data, whereas reactive refers to newsjacking, where we jump on newsworthy stories with comments from our clients.

Proactive PR is where we connect the dots with content, to achieve a collaborative approach. When content shares their roadmaps with us, we can plan ahead and see which pieces we think the media will like, and then repurpose and outreach them, to gain more targeted backlinks.

Having that split between seasonal and evergreen blogs is really helpful too; because if Halloween or Christmas is coming up, and we want to run with a specific angle on a story, we can do just that; but we also have a bank of more generic content topics that can be outreached at any point in the year.

Even if the client doesn’t have a content retainer, provided they have their own blogs on-site, we can still do proactive PR, by repurposing and outreaching their existing content.

Case study examples

Whilst we carry out proactive PR work for all of our clients, whether they have an organic retainer or are pure PR, we’ve highlighted a couple of examples below that show how we carry out our process, focusing on building high-quality backlinks from new, relevant, and authoritative media outlets.

Holiday Cottages

As a PR only client, alongside our planned campaigns, there were so many opportunities to utilise the existing content on their website. During the pandemic, staycations were hugely popular, so we repurposed their on-site blog, the UK’s best winter beach destinations, to encourage people to head outdoors and go to the beach during the winter months. We targeted regional, lifestyle, national, and travel media outlets across the UK, and gained six backlinks, including from Visit Devon, The Mirror, and Kent Live.

Another month, we repurposed and outreached their blog on where to spot wildlife on the British coast, which further helped to fuel the popularity of staycations. Alongside our link count across our planned and reactive campaigns, we built another six links, with high referring domains, including Heart and The Express.

GoodMove

GoodMove is a great example of the joint approach between the content and PR team. The content team started off by conducting an audit, which led to a huge optimisation project of the client’s existing blogs, including an article on gazumping.

The PR team then utilised this blog and turned it into a press release, to help first time buyers understand what gazumping is, and how to avoid it, and gained seven backlinks in the process from really relevant domains, including Ideal Home and What Mortgage.

Alongside this, the content team created their own roadmaps every quarter, with one blog published each week. We were able to review their roadmaps in advance, and plan them in with our own roadmaps.

One idea that stood out to us was how to sell your flat fast. It was an extremely relevant time to be talking about this, as the pandemic had caused many buyers’ preferences to change, with searches for homes with gardens increasing.

We knew that this would impact sellers of flats; so alongside the blog that would rank organically for relevant keywords, we repurposed and outreached it to the media, gaining six backlinks on relevant sites, including House Beautiful and Property Reporter.

This brings benefits for both teams: for PR, it means we can build backlinks without having to create new content; and for content – and overall SEO – it can help to increase the site’s overall authority, enabling it to rank even higher for keywords in the long-term.

 

If you have tons of content on your website and need help with understanding how to make the most of it, then get in touch with us today to speak to our PR team. Alternatively, if you know you’re lacking in new ideas and want to build out a content hub on your site that will help to increase organic traffic and conversions, then our content team will be happy to help.