As Louis Armstrong once crooned:
“You like potato and I like potahto
You like tomato and I like tomahto,
Potato, potahto, tomato, tomahto!
Let’s call the whole thing off!”

Marketing departments and their PR/comms counterparts all over the country are having conversations which go (something) like this every day. And at the heart of this tug of war, is very often the battle between a marketing’s team desire to push traffic to the company
website via weblinks and search engine optimised (SEO) copy, and the PR team’s desire to make sure that any published online content underpins the company’s brand in terms of interest and quality.

It’s my ball
My answer to this playground tussle is quite simple: the two objectives are not incompatible. It is possible to write interesting, engaging copy – suitably endowed with the right search terms. The key is for the two sides to work closely together right from the start of the process. PR teams are great at creating engaging content: marketing teams have the SEO know how to make sure the content serves the SEO brief. Use good writers suitably briefed with decent content material and awareness of the SEO terms they’ll need to include.

The result is high quality content that any PR manager would be proud of which also meets the SEO brief and should keep the marketing team happy. One thing for sure, outsourcing your SEO work to a separate agency, divorced from the PR team and focused on SEO only, seems nonsensical and hardly brand enhancing. Who wants company spam littering the web?

In that happy spirit of détente then, let’s leave the last word to old Pops himself:

“So, if you go for oysters and I go for ersters
I’ll order oysters and cancel the ersters.
For we know we need each other,
So we better call the calling off off!”