{"id":11242,"date":"2026-07-08T20:34:41","date_gmt":"2026-07-08T12:34:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/?p=11242"},"modified":"2026-07-08T20:34:41","modified_gmt":"2026-07-08T12:34:41","slug":"an-easy-digital-pr-strategy-for-ai-seo-via-sejournal-martinibuster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/?p=11242","title":{"rendered":"An Easy Digital PR Strategy For AI SEO via @sejournal, @martinibuster"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p> <div id=\"narrow-cont\"> <p>I had a conversation with an old friend from my WebmasterWorld Forum days about PR marketing for AI search. The friend had contacted me to hear my thoughts about it. The discussion seemed useful, so I rewrote it into an article.<\/p> <h2>Digital PR Outreach Because Links Matter Less<\/h2> <p>I used to do PR outreach slash brand marketing for a B2B starting around 2004. But I scaled it up for another company around 2013 because I saw the writing on the wall that links were already on the decline. So my approach grew out of link building, but my intuition was that links did not matter. It was about putting the company in front of ten thousand, twenty thousand, sixty thousand potential customers and doing it in a way that makes it clear that this company solves the problem that these professionals have.<\/p> <p><iframe class=\"sej-iframe-auto-height\" id=\"in-content-iframe\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https:\/\/www.searchenginejournal.com\/wp-json\/sscats\/v2\/tk\/Middle_Post_Text\"><\/iframe><\/p> <h2>Strategy: Outreach Directly To Potential Customers<\/h2> <p>What I did was narrowly focus on a specific demographic that strictly lined up with their target customer. So, one typical customer was the head of IT and IT workers at a large corporation. Another demographic was the department manager. Two different demographics that both needed the same solution. So the campaign was split into two parts, one for each demographic.<\/p> <p>It was essentially a PR campaign that was focused on identifying associations and organizations. Virtually every industry has an association of professionals. So, what I did was first target the organizations at the national level. The reason is that once you do a project with the national level, getting similar projects done at the state level was ten times easier. You just show them the national level article that featured the company, and the state-level organizations would almost always say yes.<\/p> <p>Once you got that state-level project done, getting to yes with the individual chapters at the regional or county level became ten times easier. Each time I got a project done, it put the client in front of thousands of potential customers. Eventually, everyone knew who my client was and getting projects done became easier.<\/p> <p><strong>What were these projects?<\/strong><\/p> <ul> <li>Newsletters<\/li> <li>Organization magazines<\/li> <li>Website articles<\/li> <li>Interviews<\/li> <\/ul> <p>Every organization was different. So I would click around and see what they were up to and create the pitch to fit with what they were publishing.<\/p> <h2>Attribution Is Not Always Possible<\/h2> <p>This was not about building links, it was about building customers, making money.<\/p> <p>And that\u2019s not something that any SEO thirteen years ago would ever consider doing because there isn\u2019t a clear way to track that the client spent X this month and earned Z the next month because of that activity. An SEO would never consider it because there\u2019s no way to directly track the ROI.<\/p> <p>You can track some of it with the \u201chow did you hear about us\u201d question. But how will you know if a customer heard of the company because a colleague at a conference who saw the client\u2019s propaganda told them about it?<\/p> <p>Not everything can be tracked. That\u2019s why everyone else in SEO did not pursue these opportunities because they were like, where is the link, where is the attribution? Well, now the secret\u2019s out. It\u2019s infinitely adaptable, too.<\/p> <p>Both companies that I did this for experienced year-over-year steady growth, and both were eventually acquired and made a lot of money for the founders. And how did I know it worked? Because this is how I promoted some of my websites, by building top-of-mind awareness, the kind that makes people type a domain name into the search box.<\/p> <p>Google has algorithms that track things like branded navigation. You can\u2019t build that kind of user behavior with links. You cannot build branded navigation with SEO. And yet, these are things that have been a part of Google\u2019s algorithms since 2004 with the Navboost algorithm and in 2012 with Google\u2019s branded navigation.<\/p> <h2>Brand Marketing And PR\u2026 And SEO?<\/h2> <p>SEOs have historically been about five to ten years behind the actual algorithm developments at Google. And I get it that ideas that a five year old can understand, like \u201cadding EEAT\u201d to articles, that\u2019s easy to understand. Everyone else is doing it. But you know, everyone who did that knows now it was a grand waste of time.<\/p> <p>And it\u2019s not that I am a contrarian. It\u2019s just that most of the time SEOs chase these ephemeral tactics with an SEO hammer, going bang, bang, bang. But it\u2019s becoming clearer now that SEO for AI search is not the nail that building links used to be.<\/p> <p>Like, how are you going to encourage people to do a branded search on Google? How are you going to get people to know about your brand in the first place? How are you going to target the office manager that makes the decisions at a company? Well, I shared an idea about that, right?<\/p> <p>Those are the kinds of things that are going to trigger a positive ranking factor at Google, and yet none of those are a part of the SEO toolbox.<\/p> <p>Back in 2015 I raised the idea that content is king misses the point of being successful online.<\/p> <p><em>I wrote:<\/em><\/p> <blockquote> <p>\u201cIf content is king, how come the top Internet businesses sites are not in the content business? What about Netflix? You think that\u2019s content you are paying a monthly subscription for? Or is it convenience?<\/p> <p>Netflix is not in the content business. They are in the convenience business. Anyone can provide content but nobody delivers convenience the way Netflix does. That\u2019s because their focus is and always has been the user experience. Convenience, the user experience, is why customers pay Netflix. If Netflix had followed the Content is King strategy it would have been Blockbuster.<\/p> <p>\u2026Don\u2019t focus on cranking out content. Focus on understanding what the user wants and your content strategy follows.<\/p> <p>I cannot overstate the importance of understanding that the user experience underlies many of Google\u2019s important decisions related to its algorithm.\u201d<\/p> <\/blockquote> <p>These are not new ideas that I\u2019m presenting, but they were ahead of their time, maybe still are. Yet, they are as relevant today as they were in 2015 or 2004. Some are saying they are more relevant today because of AI Search.<\/p> <p><em>Featured Image by Shutterstock\/Mer_Studio<\/em><\/p> <\/div> <p>Generative AI,News,SEO#Easy #Digital #Strategy #SEO #sejournal #martinibuster1783514081<\/p> ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I had a conversation with an old friend from my WebmasterWorld Forum days about PR marketing for AI search. The friend had contacted me to hear my thoughts about it. The discussion seemed useful, so I rewrote it into an article. Digital PR Outreach Because Links Matter Less I used to do PR outreach slash [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11243,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[1475,12478,415,80,97,407],"class_list":["post-11242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-accessibility","tag-digital","tag-easy","tag-martinibuster","tag-sejournal","tag-seo","tag-strategy"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11242\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}