Reputation: What Taylor Swift can teach us about the relationship between PR and SEO

Taylor Swift watching new partner, Travis Kelce, play in the NFL is making serious headlines – but is her PR team maximising the opportunity to obscure negative stories? Our digital account director, Caitlin Thomas, shares her views.

It’s common knowledge in the digital marketing world that PR can benefit Search Engine Optimisation.

When online publications mention your brand and link to your website, it can help you rank higher in search. These positive impacts have led to Digital PR becoming a core component of the SEO industry. 

But this isn’t a one-way relationship, and SEO is increasingly becoming a key part of the PR playbook. 

Several industry experts have theorised that publicists are carefully crafting news stories to push negative coverage to the bottom of search results. 

Here are some examples of news stories which could be leveraging this strategy: 

Taylor Swift’s Jets

All eyes were on Taylor and her celebrity pals as she watched her new boyfriend play for the Kansas Chiefs against the New York Jets. 

In the aftermath, searching ‘Taylor Swift Jets’ on social media and search engines brought up photos and stories of her enjoying the game. 

Whether intentional or not, this is a big plus for her PR.

Taylor hit the headlines last year for being number one – not in the charts, but in a list of celebrities responsible for the most emissions from their private jets. 

Algorithms tend to prioritise topics that are new and trending, so stories of Taylor’s latest romance have replaced criticisms of her jet set lifestyle. 

Boris Johnson’s Buses

When the former PM shared his unusual hobby of painting wine boxes into buses, some people had their suspicions that his team were trying to draw focus from the infamous ‘Brexit bus’. 

During the campaign to leave the EU, Boris was pictured in front of a bus which suggested leaving could allow the UK to fund the NHS with an extra £350 million a week.

The claim was widely disputed at the time, and the extra funding hasn’t materialised since – so it wouldn’t be surprising if Johnson’s team were trying to relegate the story to the bottom of search results.

Bolsonaro’s Emus

Jair Bolsonaro, president of Brazil during the COVID-19 pandemic, was strongly anti-lockdown, promoting the use of medications such as chloroquine as an alternative to national restrictions.

Unfortunately for Bolsonaro, the EMA (European Medicines Agency) published warnings that using this unproven treatment could have serious side effects, including heart problems and psychiatric disorders. 

Shortly after the EMA’s announcements, some very staged-looking photos were released of Bolsonaro brandishing chloroquine at an emu. Or, as the bird is known in Portuguese, an ema. 

This meant that if Brazilians searched “EMA chloroquine”, search results were full of the bizarre photos, displacing information about potential side effects of the medication. 

What can we learn from this? 

Using PR to manipulate search results is certainly not the most ethical approach to crisis communications. However, these examples demonstrate that the relationship between PR and SEO can be about more than building links.

As an integrated marketing agency, we advise against managing different channels in isolation. The performance of one channel can often be impacted by tactics used on another, sometimes in unexpected ways. 

Taking a holistic view of your marketing allows you to develop a coherent and complementary strategy across all channels, maximising opportunities to generate the results that matter.