How to Use Your Website as a PR Tool

The public relations business is always changing and evolving.

Not that long ago, experienced PR firms focused their efforts on television and print media. Using websites to reach a broader audience was barely a thought when the Internet was in its infancy.

Things have changed dramatically. Print media is on a downward trend – although it’s still a valuable PR tool – and reaching a wider audience through social and digital media has taken off like a rocket.

Unfortunately, just having a website to promote your brand isn’t going to be enough. Across the world, there are millions of companies vying to gain online attention, and possibly thousands of companies directly competing against you in your industry or an adjacent one.

How do you turn your website into an effective PR tool?

Solving Your Website Identity Crisis

Many business owners fail to grasp that their website is a business asset. Most tend to view it as a project instead of the dominant public relations machine it should be. It should be a well-crafted piece of collateral created by expert programmers using professional development tools.

Once and for all, it’s time to solve your website identity crisis.

Stop looking at it as a project that you can get to whenever you have a spare moment. Instead, embrace the influential capabilities of your website, and use them to put your brand on the map.

When combined with social media, authoritative website content can and will be shared on multiple social channels across the web.

If your content is high-value, high-energy, and entertaining, you’ll easily expand your audience, bring in new customers, and make your brand an authority in your market.

Building a Better Blog or Website Using Social PR Secrets

1. Treat Every Page like a Homepage

With social shares and search engine optimization dominating at the moment, it’s highly unlikely your potential customers will find you on your homepage.

More often than not, they will click a link on social media pointing to one of your better blog posts. Or, they may find a specific article on your website while using the search engines.

Since content and website design will directly affect how the public views your brand, it’s necessary to organize your website so that your content, videos, images, and everything else posted on it best serves your visitors.

When your brand utilizes this type of organization, converting readers into happy customers will be much easier.

2. Use Geolocation to Reach a Wider Audience

To effectively reach a wider audience online with your blog and website, optimizing your website for geolocation will undoubtedly provide a huge boost.

For some reason, many brands do not take geolocation seriously, which is a big mistake that will hurt their overall public relations efforts.

If you genuinely want to gain social and search visibility, please consider the following tips to improve geolocation optimization on your website:

• Add your company’s contact information to the website in HTML so that search engines can index it.
•  Include your company’s physical address in the footer using schema markup.

• Add geocentric-focused content to your website to reach your target audience.

3. Create an Online Newsroom for Your Brand

When developing a content strategy for your website, creating an online newsroom and using it as your hub is a great option.

In today’s digital environment, public relations occur on your blog or website. This wasn’t possible in the past. But today, it’s best to create an online public relations newsroom where everyone can find links to your social networks, images, press releases, fact sheets, press kits, and all other public relations-related content.

Your online newsroom will not only provide a great place for journalists to learn about brand-related news, but it’s also the best place for your website visitors to read brand-focused news 24/7.

Use these tips, and you'll see that turning your website into a powerful PR machine is possible.