At Intesa, we have the luxury of experience in a variety of media industries and we’ve been able to see firsthand how those industries are converging. Traditional PR firms are doing more and more work online, and newer digital firms are learning the public relations ropes in order to better serve their clientele.

As public relations portals like PR Newswire and Vocus move to a digital format and spawn more social media monitoring tools, they are becoming more accessible and more necessary for a broader range of businesses to monitor their efforts. This is true on the SEO side as well as Moz (formerly seoMOZ) offers a Pro membership that offers many monitoring tools similar to Vocus’s suite, and their community site and blog often suggest traditional PR tactics to expand your brand’s exposure and measure your successes.

These two channels (PR and SEO) are complementary in many ways:

•  A good public relations campaign can help you define what your brand’s message is. You’ll need this information to know what search terms your online efforts should focus on.
• Knowledge of how Google and Bing rank and index content is helpful in writing an effective online press release (or blog post, article, story, etc.) that will show up higher in search results.
• Many SEO professionals can write SEO-effective posts but these should be reviewed by a good writer to ensure they’re easy to read for real people and not just Google bots.
• A good SEO pro can help the public relations team by pointing out areas of content that could include links or keywords that will generate the most traffic, or would increase the relevancy of a press release in relation to the rest of your branding efforts.

As a client, you’re looking for the most effective way to get your message out. Having both of these skill sets at your disposal means less time your own team has to dedicate to communication efforts.