Back in the day, public relations could do well without the digital world. Traditionally, most of the brand and company coverage we needed was in print (newspapers, trade magazines) and broadcasted over the radio and television. While the previous means of communication aren't obsolete, they're now facing a giant competitor: the internet. It's safe to say that brands that aren't online will likely not be found anywhere else.

Why is that?

The digital world grew beyond all of us could have imagined. Brands and public figures can no longer get by without a reasonable online presence, and must strive to reach their target audience with relevant content that fully resonates. Otherwise, they're out of the game.

That's why many companies are (or at least should be) bringing their public relations (PR) and digital marketing departments together. Nowadays, one can't function without the other.

Here are just a few perks digital marketing has added to PR efforts.

Tracking Analytics For Better Performance

Search engine optimization (SEO) tools are jam-packed with competitive intelligence to boost any website's rankings and revenue, if used correctly. In my opinion, one of the most exciting features found in these tools is comprehensive analytics.

Analytics help users skip the guesswork and know exactly how their campaigns are performing: how many people they've reached, how many clicks they got, where viewers come from and more. For PR, these metrics are golden.

In case a brand's campaign doesn't perform as expected, they can be easily adjusted, relaunched and tested for extra precision. This strategy helps campaigns reach their perfect target audience with clickable and irresistible offers.

Storytelling-Based Content Creation

Despite the undeniable power of exact numbers, content is still king. Without an experienced content strategist by your side, your PR efforts won't see results. After all, the lack of great content often means a lack of trust or authority.

Content creation is a vital aspect of digital marketing. It skillfully blends the technical side of SEO with the creative side of writing. The result is readable, inspiring and persuasive content that slides the reader through, until they reach conversion. Overlook it, and your readers are in for bland, run-of-the-mill content that may or may not convert. Why nurture this doubt?

Plus, if a content strategist encourages storytelling, you're in luck. PR campaigns are all about connecting with readers and viewers — and storytelling is a proven method for creating engaging and relatable content for your audience.

Driving Qualified Traffic To Websites Through Powerful Links

One great quality link can do wonders for a brand's reputation. Now, imagine what several links could do.

Receiving backlinks from authoritative sites is a hard-earned privilege. Sites like Entrepreneur and Forbes wouldn't bother to link to a website unless it brought valuable content to their repertoire. By valuable content, I mean content that's similar in quality to their own.

If you want your PR campaigns to reach (and wow) high-authority sites, you must create and promote your content accordingly. A digital marketing team can help a brand stay consistent across all platforms — social media pages, websites, newsletters — while ensuring quality content.

Leveraging The Power Of Social Media

When your brand is mentioned in an article, you should use social media to expand the reach and coverage. While the media gets your brand out there to the public, social media can help you build a community around it.

While media coverage helps you to build credibility, social media helps you to build reputation and customer engagement. You can also leverage the power of paid social ads to get your article in front of the right audience.

Frame your brand image to the public via PR, and push that image down to the funnel via your Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn posts. You are creating the noise and driving the attention in ways that benefit your company.

The Takeaway

If your PR and digital marketing offices are still far apart, you're leaving money (and opportunities) on the table. Assess your current campaigns. Are they driving traffic? Are they attracting links from authoritative sites? If your brand remains on the same spot, you should rethink your strategies. Welcoming digital marketing expertise means reaching your target audience in an impactful way.

Forbes Communications Council is an invitation-only community for executives in successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies. Do I qualify?

Pirated (aka nulled) themes and plugins were the most common source of malware infections on WordPress sites in 2020, according to Wordfence, a provider of website application firewall (WAF) solutions for WordPress sites.

The security firm said its malware scanner detected more than 70 million malicious files on more than 1.2 million WordPress sites in 2020.

"Overall, the Wordfence scanner found malware originating from a nulled plugin or theme on 206,000 sites, accounting for over 17% of all infected sites," the company said on Wednesday.

Of these 206,000 sites, 154,928 were infected with a version of the WP-VCD malware, a WordPress malware strain known for its use of pirated/nulled themes for distribution.

Wordfence said this particular malware operation was so successful last year that it accounted for 13% of all infected sites in 2020.

But WordPress sites also got infected with malware via other means beyond pirated themes. Legitimate sites also got attacked and infected. Other methods through which these sites got hacked included brute-force attacks against login forms and the use of exploit code that takes advantage of unpatched vulnerabilities.

All in all, 2020 was a massive year in terms of brute-force attacks. Wordfence reported seeing more than 90 billion malicious and automated login attempts.

These attacks came from 57 million different IP addresses —most likely part of attack botnets and proxy networks— and amounted to 2,800 malicious login attempts per second against Wordfence customers.

To mitigate these attacks, Wordfence recommended that site owners either deploy a WAF or enable a two-factor authentication solution for their accounts.

On the vulnerability exploitation front, things were just as bad, with Wordfence reporting more than 4.3 billion exploitation attempts over the past year.

The most common form of vulnerability that attackers exploited last year was "directory traversals," a type of bug that threat actors try to abuse to read files from WordPress installations (such as wp-config.php) or upload malicious files on a WordPress site.

Other exploitation attempts also relied on SQL injection, remote code execution bugs, cross-site scripting issues, or authentication bypasses, Wordfence said.

As a business owner, search engine optimization plays a vital role in attracting consumers to your website. SEO can help grow your website's online visibility on the search engine results page, thus bringing more organic traffic to your website. 

As the world of technology is always evolving, so is SEO. And it can get pretty competitive, especially if you're a business owner. Let's take a look at the value of SEO plus some of the trends that we may see in 2021.

The Value Of SEO

SEO is a crucial component in creating online visibility. It holds a lot of value when creating online content. When used strategically, SEO can help businesses drive organic traffic, optimize user experience and increase revenue. Here are four trends to consider in 2021:

Mobile Website Optimization Will Continue To Be Important

Back in 2019, Google introduced mobile-first indexing. This means that instead of looking primarily at a desktop version of a site for indexing and ranking, Google considers the mobile version. This makes sense given the fact that today around 2 billion people access the internet only using their smartphones. By 2025, we may see nearly three quarters of internet users accessing the web solely via mobile.

So when considering SEO trends, a really good place to start is by optimizing the mobile version of your website. Make sure you have a user-friendly page and that Google can crawl all of your pages. 

Long-Form Content Will Continue To Rank Higher

There's a lot of bad and misleading content on the internet these days. As a business owner and someone who's marketing on the internet, consider the content that you're creating. For SEO purposes, long-form content that is quality-driven and that aims to keep people engaged will typically rank higher in search engine results, and will likely continue to do so in 2021. 

Other things to consider when creating long-form content are how it visually looks to your readers and what they're getting out of it. Make sure that the text is broken up into sections using headings and subheadings and that it's scannable. Also consider linking to other relevant and authoritative sources. 

Local SEO Will Play A Key Role In SEO Strategies

Oftentimes, people use search engines to search for quality local goods and services. Because of this, one of the SEO trends we will likely see on the rise in 2021 is local SEO playing a key role in SEO strategies. From what I've observed, this is partly due to zero-click searches. 

A zero-click search is when a user's query is addressed in the featured snippet of a search result. Have you ever noticed that when you search for something on Google that there's a box that usually contains the answer you're looking for up at the top of the SERP? That's a featured snippet. When this happens, the user doesn't have to click on the link to visit the actual website, and this results in a zero-click search. And many of these zero-click searches are likely local searches. Consider that 46% of all Google searches are related to finding local information, and one study found that 49% of all Google searches are zero-click.

SEO professionals often focus on ranking for high-traffic keywords rather than serving the search engine bots with well-written pillar content. As a small-business owner, it may be more beneficial to aim to get snippets that address honest questions or concerns for the consumer. Featured snippets are a good way to get on the first SERP. Likewise, they are also an effective way to direct traffic to your platform instead of your competitors'. 

At our agency, for example, we have noticed that consumers often ask how to get more followers on TikTok or how to use TikTok to generate more sales. We saw this opportunity and created pages that addressed those questions. As a result, we got a featured snippet, and our local website traffic increased by 40% in 2020. 

To encourage Google to reward your site by delivering a snippet, make sure that your site content is structured correctly, and factor in keywords that are relevant along with question-based queries.

Voice Searches Will Impact Search Engine Results

The power of voice recognition has come a long way. And as voice assistants like Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant have gotten increasingly better, they've also gotten more popular. According to a study done by Juniper Research, voice assistants will likely be used in roughly 55% of U.S. households by 2022. 

Because of this, we're starting to see voice searches affect search engine results. So when thinking about your SEO, consider selecting words or phrases that people use in their everyday lives as keywords. When people type, they tend to abbreviate words and phrases more compared to when they vocalize them.

Final Thoughts

As we progress as a society, things are only going to get more and more complex. And as business owners, we have to constantly stay in the loop of the ever-changing world of technology, which includes SEO trends. 

There are so many opportunities to increase your online presence. That said, there's no better time than 2021 to learn everything you can about SEO and what it can do for your business.

Forbes Agency Council is an invitation-only community for executives in successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies. Do I qualify?

These days, startups live and die by the clicks they get. If your website isn’t optimized for search, customers won’t find you, much less buy from you. 

But SEO, much like the internet it runs on, is constantly evolving. Keeping up with all the new rules, strategies and best practices can be a job in itself. If you’re not in a position to hire an SEO expert, follow these expert tips to boost your position in the rankings.

1. Realize that SEO is about more than just keywords

While SEO does focus on keywords, traffic and how well your site is ranking, it’s concerned with much more than that. SEO is about creating effective customer service funnels, sharing high-quality content and standing out among competitors.

Without a strong SEO strategy, your website will likely be lost in the lower depths of the search results. No matter how local your customer base is, or how high-quality your product, it’s irrelevant if you’re hidden from view. SEO has become a requirement for modern businesses to thrive, one that can make or break your company.

To implement a good SEO strategy, start with your site’s content. Is it easy to read, and does it answer the questions your audience is asking? Does it hold their attention? If your bounce rate and time on site metrics suggest the answer is “no,” create high-quality content that does. 

How fast does your site load? Does it contain relevant links and offer customer support? Despite the complexity of SEO algorithms, all of them focus on customer experience. A fast-loading site that answers visitors’ questions and provides needed support will encourage them to linger. 

Longer sessions and more visitors mean a higher rank in the search results. A higher rank brings in more traffic, which means more potential sales -- and the cycle continues.

2. Experiment relentlessly with SEO

Just as search ranking factors change, so do keyword values and search volumes. Early and ongoing adjustment is key. 

Some agencies focus on on-page SEO, such as optimizing conversion-oriented pages for specific keywords. Others do off-site work, such as building backlinks from third-party publications.

Start with what you can control: your site. If not enough people are filling out your contact form, try placing it somewhere else on the page. If your traffic flow isn’t going to where you want, relink your pages to make it easier. Revisit old blog posts and link them to new content. 

If you’re unsure where to begin, don’t hesitate to ask your audience. Beyond the metrics you can find in SEMrush or Google Analytics, send out surveys to current customers. You can even have employees test your user experience and take notes. 

With algorithms being updated regularly, keeping up with your website will prevent your page rank from being throttled. Not only will this result in higher SEO performance, but you’ll enjoy more sales and visibility, too.

3. Invest in rich, helpful content

The more people see your site, the more important strong content becomes. Not only is your brand image at stake, but Google ranks sites by how well they satisfy a visitor’s search intent.

When users do a web search, they’re looking for someone to solve a problem or fill a need. If your site -- their first impression of your business -- doesn’t do that, you risk losing them right away. Google will register the brief time they spent on your site and downgrade your ranking accordingly.

One way to stop users in their tracks -- in a good way -- is by using video. Pages with video retain visitors an average of 2.6 times longer than those without. When they click an eye-catching video and watch it for a minute or so, that tells Google your page satisfied their search intent. As a result, it will rank you higher in its search results. 

Even with excellent videos, though, too much of a good thing can backfire. If you add excessive videos to one page, you might confuse your customer or even slow down your website. 

Remember, be kind to your visitors. Make what they’re looking for easy to find, and create a good first impression with a great user experience. The SEO will follow.

4. Aim for the sweet spot

Some SEO strategies go after low-hanging fruit. Others play the long game, building enormous amounts of backlinks to own highly competitive terms. The sweet spot is low keyword difficulty, low competition, and high search volume.

Using tools like Google’s Keyword Planner can help you find the right keywords and identify overlooked SEO opportunities. Comparing performance every month or quarter can give you valuable insights into what’s working and what isn’t.

Short-tail keywords like “graphics cards” will have higher volume and more competition. Long-tail keywords like “best gaming computer graphics cards” will have less volume but less competition as well. You’re looking for one like “fastest graphics cards,” which has less competition than the former but more volume than the latter.

Again, ongoing experimentation is important. For example, there might be a boost in graphics card search volume around the holidays. Similarly, when a manufacturer launches a new card, a “name + graphics card” keyword might skyrocket.

With algorithms being updated regularly, keeping up with your website will prevent your page rank from being throttled. Not only will this result in higher SEO performance, but you’ll enjoy more sales and visibility, too.