Why does your retail brand need a PR strategy?

The role of earned media in an organic strategy for retail brands

In today’s search landscape, PR is essential in owning the moments that matter in the customer search journey. 

Earned media not only plays an important role in whether you show up but it also shapes the narrative of your brand when you do. 

With more than a third of product searches happening on Google and SERP features becoming more user-generated, PR is key in influencing what customers see when they search, helping to support brand awareness, trust and sales – key for brands in the retail space. 

Building a consistent PR presence isn’t just key for reputation management and building trust with your customer, it tells Google and LLMs you’re a credible, trustworthy source too – helping you show up to your audiences more. 

Research reveals organic listings click through rate declines by up to 70% when an AI overview is present on the SERP,  using PR to stay visible in LLMs will also be a priority for retail brands if they want to capture audiences here. 

Read on to find out why retailers should be investing in a PR strategy and how to make it work for your organic performance needs. 

The retailer challenge

Multi-category retailers are facing a challenge – and it starts with relevancy. 

Take leading retailers such as John Lewis, The Range or Very. They all offer a range of products across various categories which means they’re competing for SERP real estate. 

Offering dresses, lingerie, men’s pyjamas, BBQ’s to furniture – how can retailers stay relevant? 

What does category relevance mean – and why does it matter?

Google’s algorithm rewards brands it views as experts in specific topics or product categories. If your brand is mentioned in third party sources and content about “women’s running shoes” it associates you with that category – helping you appear in the top results. 

For multi-category retailers, capturing this relevance for multiple categories can be a challenge. And the danger of this? Google doesn’t know who you are, causing rankings and share of search on the SERP to slip. 

The answer? A targeted PR strategy to strengthen category authority. 

Capturing category authority in the SERPs

Research from Retail Week reveals UK retailers are under‑investing in search visibility, despite it influencing 24 % of digital retail spend and trusted by 65 % of shoppers for pre‑purchase decisions. 

What are the evolving SERP features retail brands need to know to capture category authority? And how can you tap into them with PR?

Feature 1: What people are saying

What is it? 

Google’s evolving, user-centric search experience now has a What People Are Saying feature that highlights user-generated content from Reddit, YouTube, Instagram and more, directly on the search results page. 

How can your PR strategy influence it?

Strategic PR efforts can help influence this. Add product PR pitching to your strategy for the best chance of being included in ‘Best summer dresses’ roundups and offer samples for journalists to review for inclusion. 

When pushing products, consider weaving in quotes from customer reviews into the piece too. These not only help to create great headlines but influence search engines and help you appear for searches such as “[Brand] dress reviews”, targeting customers directly in their buying journey. 

Feature 2: Videos

What is it? 

The video SERP feature is a dedicated section on Google’s search results page that displays video content, relevant to the search query, pulling through relevant YouTube, TikTok or Instagram reel content. 

Many news publications now leverage video-first content to accompany articles – and these videos are indexed in the SERP. For retail brands, being visible in this section can add great visibility – and PR can help you get seen here. 

Source Unsplash

How can your PR strategy influence it?

To tap into this with PR, consider using creators or in-house brand experts to create ‘how to’ styling advice to accompany press materials. 

These can sit on branded social platforms but also be used within press material to outreach to video and social news editors, helping you rank in the video SERP feature. 

Feature 3: AI overviews

What is it? 

AI overviews now appear at the top of the SERP. Pulling in third party citations and sources, PR is a key aspect in helping brands show up here. 

AI overviews at the top of Google’s SERPs pushes traditional search listings lower down, causing click-through rates to reduce by up to 64% depending on the industry and search intent. 

LLMs particularly value listicle articles such as ‘best trainers’ or ‘best linen sheets to stay cool’ making product PR an important part of the toolkit. 

While major news outlets are cited, LLMs favour hyper relevant news outlets to your niche. For example, it prioritises a niche design magazine versus a national title, making these a key target for press outreach.

How can your PR strategy influence it?

To appear in LLM and AI overviews, PR is key. 

LLMs can’t replicate owned data, so ensuring you have credible, unique data will be key in adding value. Consider leveraging internal sales data or conducting owned surveys and research and building campaigns around this for a unique edge. 

Leveraging experts and creating a platform for these on your owned media (socials, website, etc) will also help you become a credible source.

Feature 4: Shopping listings

What is it? 

In the last 12 months, we’ve seen a shift in SERP features, including organic shopping listings. 

Traditional position 1 isn’t quite as important as it once was as it’s been pushed down below these other features – the magic is in thinking beyond position 1 and optimising for the new SERP layout. 

If your search for a target keyword e.g. “summer dresses” is returning organic shopping listings at the top of the SERP, you need to be there to compete.

How can your PR strategy influence it?

While shopping listings are powered predominantly by structured data, PR can support visibility by strengthening the product and brand signals that Google uses to rank and prioritise listings. 

Securing links and citations in relevant and authoritative publications can help to boost the credibility of your brand and product pages. And, PR campaigns that drive traffic to key product landing pages – and branded traffic – reinforces trust signals, helping Google to prioritise these listings. 

Read more about SERP features and how to show up here.

PR can help you win across the funnel

While we know the search journey is no longer linear, with users dipping in and out of stages throughout their journey, if we break PR activity down, you can see how it supports SERP impact. 

Build relevance and capture demand with cross-category experiences

While focusing on specific categories will help to build relevance, we can tap into the way customers shop by building demand for the experience each category falls into. 

To capitalise on the demand of cross-category experiences, think about how categories are used and shopped for. Thinking like the customer is key. 

For example, ahead of the seasons changing, demand for ‘Cosy night in ideas’ sees an increase YoY across Google, Tiktok, and Pinterest. Multi-category retailers can tap into this by building out experience-led categories. 

For example, leveraging ‘Cosy night in’ as a theme could pull in a range of categories, such as: 

• Pyjamas 
• Candles
• Snacks 
• Wine 
• Slippers
• Hot chocolate 

Here, we can amplify this through PR and leverage campaigns around the theme, pointing links and brand mentions back to the category to build authority and demand. 

Using targeted PR efforts to strengthen category authority

To support category relevance and push new categories, targeted PR efforts can be used to hone in on these areas. 

Here are my top tips for optimising your press materials for this: 

1. Build targeted press collateral around key organic focus areas and prioritise PLP linking destinations
2. Optimise keywords and placement of text around the brand mention to support relevance for your key focus area
3. Ensure the contextual relevance of press materials is scoring highly for your target keywords 

This approach can be applied to your rounded PR strategy, across all press materials in your toolkit.  

Utilise a holistic press office approach

To really cement your retail brand in the news, a rounded PR strategy will be key in driving organic growth alongside supporting brand awareness. This can be achieved through: 

• Pitching expert commentary and thought leadership to comment on trends or styling advice
• Reactive newsjacking, leveraging data insights (third party or internal sales data) to spot and identify new trends
• Video creation to share handy ‘How to’ advice, readily available to outreach to media
• Hero campaigns using activation-led tactics to raise brand awareness 
• Product PR tactics

Source Unsplash

Why should retail brands be investing in PR now?

PR is important more than ever for retail brands. The evolution of the SERP landscape, thanks to AI,  has caused a shift retailers shouldn’t be ignoring if they want to perform well organically. 

And, with consumers increasingly no longer following a linear search journey, PR is the touchpoint you need to fill the gaps if you want to build trust with audiences in their purchase journey. 

For a PR strategy to truly work as part of your organic strategy in the retail sector, collaboration between SEO and PR is key. Find out more about how the channels work together here. 

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