Some of your points are completely right, especially “When the PR team knows something is cooking, but doesnt tell online team” – that’s a major frustration and should never happen, after all it’s just common sense to share information across depts / agencies.

But as Stuart says, you are being a bit extreme, I’m not sure if you’re being cheeky for link bait, or displaying the typical SEO personality trait of thinking your needs and opinions are the most important things in the world…? Hmmm, now I’m being a bit link-baity.

I think SEO and PR can work really well together, but there needs to be education on both sides.
SEOs need to learn it’s not just about links / ranking and sometimes the story or relationship is far more important than the SEO
PRs need to learn that optmisation is not a dirty word and that they will pick up some tips on widening their online audiences if they listen to their SEO team.

Basically, if we all play nicely, it’s to everyone’s benefit.

I would still like to see a post from the other side of the fence to help SEO improve in this relationship as well; as long as these conversations remain civil then we can all be friends and move in together.

Right?

I’ve seen a lot of SEO finger pointing in my time – ‘Team/person X fails at simple SEO task A, WTF etc etc’ and not a lot of talk about how a little more communication and a little less snarking can easily resolve these issues.

I know it’s hard to believe for a lot of people, but knocking up a ‘press release’ yourself and putting it on PR Newswire does not constitute actual PR. Sorry.

I also have not seen (and correct me by all means if there are examples) are PR agencies writing ‘Why SEO agencies fail at PR’ posts. Do we really need to perpetuate this argument?

I know you’re not a sensationalist writer; you’re a reasonable, objective guy and a talented SEO. In this instance however I believe you are doing a lot of PR professionals an injustice.

Here are a couple more

– When you find out about a new release on accident because a syndicated version of it shows up in search results.
- When you find the press release on a bunch of spammy old article marketing sites that do more harm now than good.
- When the heart of the PR is a paragraph of good content and the rest is duplicate content about the company

Anyone sharing these issues probably needs to help the PR team understand basic SEO and how it works – the added value that their work brings. But it usually needs to be positioned as helping them to deliver more value to clients than as a way for them to help the SEO team – that’s not their job. (Always happy to help on the training front, but would you expect me to say anything else?!)

I love that James has already identified some of the PR teams’ concerns, and identified that there is a lot of skills transfer to be shared. (Some of the problems listed above merit closer investigation.as they’re deliberate behaviour – like deliberately removing links’)

We (SEO PR Training) are about to launch a new package exactly because of James’ issues above – there’s a huge grey area where both SEO teams and PR people are reaching out to potentially the same bloggers.Both sides have skills to share, and, usually, shared skills that they’re already using. An understanding of each other’s disciplines can add immensely to our own value to the organizations we serve.( If anyone would like details of the new package as we announce it, do each out)