Lisa Buyer Talks PR SEO with Search Talk Live Podcast

SEO is no longer an option for businesses, it is a necessity in order to stand out in your industry. Lisa Buyer, Founder, and CEO of the Social PR Agency The Buyer Group; caught up with Search Talk Live Podcast hosts Robert O’Haver and Matt Weber all about the do’s and don’ts of SEO.

Before the “.com” boom, traditional public relations campaigns could take up to six months and press releases could take six weeks going through approval after approval. However, when the internet came along, it sped up everything in the PR industry. This is when Lisa and her agency at the time decided to leverage the powers of Google to boost PR and do what would eventually be called search engine optimization or SEO. Read her advice for leveraging SEO in your agency or business below.

Optimize Everything

SEO isn’t just Google. There are many other search engines including social platforms like Instagram. Websites and articles aren’t the only things you can optimize, you can also optimize captions, videos, and photos. Be consistent. It is key to SEO optimization. 

Press Release Optimization is Key

Press releases must be noteworthy. Sites like PR newswire will not allow you to do a paid press release if it doesn’t include news. She recommends doing a paid press release once a month. Reporters use Google for everything so the press release has to have good SEO to stand out. 

For the length of a paid press release, it should be short with 500 words or less because the more words, the more expensive it is. The longer version of the press release can be posted on your website with slightly different text and featured photos. 

The Best Way to Pitch Stories to Reporters

Lisa said monitoring trends for SEO is essential. When you see a trend that relates to your business or agency, you can show a reporter how you would be a good source for that trend based article. If you focus on finding the right publication or reporter that will match your story, you have a better chance of catching the attention of a reporter.

The wrong way to pitch a reporter is being too risky or too vanilla. You want to say something unique or out of the box.

“Get a reporter’s attention in a non-spam very approachable way where they can easily digest what you are trying to pitch to them. That is really the golden ticket.”

Incorporating SEO with Social Influencers

Influencers are not journalists. They typically have their own businesses or gigs and influencing is just a side job. So Lisa said when you are searching for influencers, research the influencers manually and gather a list.

After gathering the list, she recommends contacting them on the social platform they are most active on whether that is Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or another channel. 

Writing Tools

Below are Lisa’s writing hacks that can improve your SEO.