Is PR the next SEO or SEO the next PR?

I’ve been asking this question since 2007 when it was apparant that social marketing was going to have an effect on the SEO industry. It wasn’t clear at the time whether it would but it sparked a change in the PR business which is accelerating – now it’s a question of how quickly the two disciplines are morphing.

So lets have a look at the respective unique selling points of each sector.

PR – exceptional at relationship forming and management combined with message refinement

SEO – exceptional technical skills and technical “link baiting” to get linkers attention

To me the technical arguments of how to make a website more search engine friendly are well over. It’s all in the public domain and I even see corporate websites “get it”. So that part of the SEO mission is becoming past tense.

The link baiting facility is a good thing. Generating inbound links is allways good, period. But, not so much control of the linking party (which could also be spun to say it’s a good thing – link diversity is important)

But I think the target seeking missile of PR has an increasingly useful part to play – identifying the target landscape and going after long term relationships has to be a big win.

But for the life of me I don’t understand why PR firms haven’t bitten the valuation bullet (for PR surely must be valued less than SEO in this climate) and started to acquire SEO companies…