Ten years ago you could game Google. Buy some links, spin up some pages, watch the rankings move.

That window has closed.

What replaces it isn't a smarter hack. It's industry ownership: the slow, compounding kind of authority that no link-buying strategy can replicate. John Hall, who co-founded Calendar.com and Relevance.com and wrote Top of Mind, has spent his career arguing that PR, SEO, and content stop being separate disciplines the moment you treat topical authority as the goal. When those teams pull in the same direction, the results multiply. When they don't, you're paying three departments to undercut each other.

AI has raised the stakes twice over. When anyone can produce a thousand mediocre articles in an afternoon, authentic thought leadership and earned media are what separate you from the noise. And answer engines now decide how to describe your brand partly from what other people publish about you, not only from what you publish about yourself.

Here's how Hall thinks about building it.

Why PR Is One of the Best SEO Strategies Going Forward

Hall's position is blunt: PR is one of the best SEO assets a company has, and most companies waste it on placements instead of strategy.

The old PR playbook chased coverage for its own sake. The new one chases authority. That means using PR to earn coverage and links that drive organic traffic, rather than a one-day spike in vanity mentions.

You can still hack things occasionally. Hall just doesn't recommend building a business on it.

His preferred approach is to get the right data, be strategic, and commit to industry ownership. Practically, that looks like building a comprehensive guide on a topic you want to own, surrounding it with supporting content offsite, and getting your sales and partnership teams involved to promote and reference it. PR, SEO, and content reinforcing one another instead of operating in three silos.

The link is a byproduct of the story, not the other way around.

Journalists and editors link to sources that give them something they can't get elsewhere: original data, an expert view on a story that's already moving, a clear point of view on a contested question. Pitch that, and the coverage tends to cite you. Pitch a product announcement nobody asked for, and it doesn't.

That's why the topic you want to own should drive the pitch calendar. When PR pitches the same subjects your SEO team is building authority around, every placement points back to content that deserves the link. When PR pitches whatever is newsworthy this week, the links scatter across pages that don't need them. Prioritizing that work is the same discipline as any other digital PR and link outreach: fewer, better placements, aimed at the pages that matter.

Hall's argument predates answer engines. They make it stronger.

When a buyer asks an AI assistant about your category, the answer isn't built from your website alone. Answer engines lean on third-party signals such as media coverage, expert commentary, reviews, and analyst mentions to decide which brands to name and how to describe them. A brand that only talks about itself on its own domain gives them very little to corroborate.

Earned media fills that gap. Every credible article that quotes your experts, cites your research, or names you in the context of a topic is an independent signal connecting your brand to that topic. Over time, those mentions add up to the entity authority answer engines use to identify and trust a brand.

So PR is now an answer engine optimization channel as much as an SEO one. The same placements that earn links also shape what an AI system says when your buyers ask about your space.

How to Dominate an Industry With PR and SEO

Hall loves it when a CEO talks to their SEO director.

That's not a throwaway line. The CEO sets the vision: where the company is going and what it wants to be known for. The SEO lead, the growth marketer, and the PR team are the ones who turn that vision into rankings, coverage, and traffic.

In most companies, that conversation needs a translator, and that's usually the CMO. The loop runs like this:

  1. Your SEO and organic growth leads internalize the CEO's direction and the company's overall strategy.
  2. They use search and competitive data to map out how content and search can hit those goals: which topics to own, where the gaps are, and what the market is actually asking.
  3. Growth marketing carries those data-backed opportunities across the company, so PR knows which topics to pitch, sales knows which content to put in front of buyers, and product teams see the expertise the company is building.

The mechanics are straightforward once the alignment exists. Look at every channel you have access to. Find the ones you aren't using. Build a plan to put them to work alongside the ones already pulling their weight.

Then take the data and decide how to dominate.

How to Make Better Content Decisions

Hall is a fan of Venn diagrams. He uses them to find the overlap where the best decisions live.

His version has three buckets. The first is content intelligence data: internet data presented in a consumable way, the analytical layer that tells you what topics matter and where the gaps are. The second is content triggers: real-life data from situational experiences with stakeholders, like the objections sales hears or the questions support fields every day. The third is vision: where you see the company going.

The decisions worth making sit where all three overlap. Data without vision is busywork. Vision without data is a guess.

Software can help with the first bucket. A content intelligence platform turns raw search and competitor data into something a team can act on. The other two buckets are yours. No tool knows what a customer told your sales rep last week, or where your CEO wants the company to be in three years.

Building Topical Authority

Topical authority is not an SEO project. It's a company-wide one.

Hall puts it plainly: your sales, your recruiting, everything can play together to build your overall industry authority. That authority is what determines how well you show up in search and which competitive terms you can realistically go after.

A blog post earns a sliver of it. A company that consistently demonstrates expertise across every touchpoint earns the kind that competitors can't buy their way past. The advantage compounds, which is what makes it durable.

It also takes more content than most teams expect. Say you want to own an industry term a competitor currently holds. That isn't a handful of blog posts. Closing the gap can take 50, 70, even 80 substantial pieces, plus updates to what you've already published.

That's a long-term investment, and it needs a business case. A competitive cohort analysis gives you one: look at what the competitors holding the topic have actually built, how much of it there is, and how thoroughly it covers the subject. Competitor analysis for content strategy turns "we should own this" into a scope leadership can fund. Before you commit, review where you already stand and which content actually earns its investment.

That's the whole argument. Authority built across the business beats authority faked through link schemes, every time.

Take Away

Google rewards an aligned search strategy, and PR belongs inside it. So do answer engines, which increasingly take their cues from what credible third parties say about you.

Keep building content that tells the story of your expertise and you become a thought leader across the entire buyer journey. Source and link that content well. Tap your professional network to spread it. When SEO, content, and PR teams work in unison toward one goal, the results multiply.

Explore how Siteimprove.ai supports content, SEO, and AEO teams working toward that goal.

The companies that win the next decade won't be the ones that gamed the algorithm. They'll be the ones that earned the authority.