If you’re getting PR, prep your SEO first

My portfolio company just got a major TV feature, which is great news on the PR front. Everyone always gets excited about the exposure, but what they often miss is the hidden SEO jackpot.

Whenever your brand name gets mentioned somewhere big, people start typing it into Google. That flood of brand searches is the key - Google sees it and goes, “Okay, these folks are relevant.” That sudden rise in brand searches can push your site higher in overall rankings - if your SEO is ready. If you don’t have any content optimized for the keywords you want to rank for, then no matter how many people Google your name, you’ll lose out on the long-term benefit.

Back in my own startup-building era, I stumbled on this by accident. We had a big piece of PR, and after it hit, I noticed our site ranking climbed for several related keywords. The brand searches triggered it, but it only helped because we’d taken the time to optimize our pages in advance. We had pages named exactly after the services we offered - complete with proper titles, H1 tags, and meta descriptions. That “boring” SEO prep paid off for years, even after people forgot the original news story.

If you’re about to get media coverage, run down a quick checklist:

• First, does your site load quickly enough? This might need a technical expert, but typically, it's giant images or uncompressed videos.
• Second, does it work well on mobile? If viewers see you on TV or read about you, chances are they’ll do a quick Google search on their phone, so make sure your layout doesn’t require contortions just to read it. This is also something you can test by yourself and fix with a technical expert.
• Third, do you actually have dedicated pages for the products or services you want to rank for? If you’re a cleaning service, have a page called “Home Cleaning Services.” Put that phrase in the title, H1, and meta description. Don’t just vaguely mention it in a random paragraph on your homepage and hope Google figures it out. A technical expert is often needed to set up the tags on HTML, otherwise, it's building content and own pages for all the relevant search terms.

Don’t freak out if the TV show or article doesn’t link directly to your site. A link is nice, but it’s not the main point of this strategy. The real action is that spike in brand searches that tells Google you’re worth noticing. If you have your SEO basics sorted beforehand, you can ride that wave. If you don’t, you’ll watch your traffic spike for a couple of days, then fizzle out without leaving any lasting impact on your rankings.

I’ve seen startups get a one-and-done PR mention, feel great about a short-lived bump in traffic, and then sink back into digital obscurity. If they’d done minimal SEO prep (faster pages, targeted content, mobile-friendly design) they could’ve locked in a higher search ranking for months, if not longer. So if you know your company is about to be in the spotlight, take a moment to do these quick fixes. You’ll thank yourself once the hype wears off and you’re still enjoying the benefits of that traffic surge.