PR Is Back: Why It Matters in Healthcare Search Optimization

PR is back at the cool kids’ table

For the past few years, conversations around search have concentrated on optimizing websites for AI: restructuring pages, adding schema, and creating content that AI can –understand. At Aha Media Group, we built a whole framework for that very thing.

Public relations (PR) and earned media haven’t received nearly as much attention. But the tides are turning.

Earned media accounts for 84% of all AI citations. Thanks to AI’s affinity for third-party information, PR is now one of the most valuable levers in digital marketing. And most healthcare orgs aren’t yet fully capitalizing on it.

Friends don’t let friends miss opportunities like this. So, let’s talk about PR and SEO.

PR’s role in SEO today

Search optimization is no longer just about what you say. It’s also about what others are saying about you.

AI uses information from across the web to understand your organization, evaluate your authority, and recommend you to users. It doesn’t naively believe claims of world-class care and groundbreaking research — it looks for evidence from external sources to corroborate them. Earned media expands this body of evidence.

The impact of PR and brand mentions on search visibility goes beyond backlinks. Media coverage, expert interviews, research publications, podcast mentions, third-party video or social posts, and more all validate your expertise and build a case for AI to recommend you.

How PR builds on SEO and GEO

Search optimization used to be owned by SEO and content marketing folks at healthcare organizations. Not anymore. Now, thanks to AI and search-everywhere user behaviors, search optimization is a shared responsibility across everyone in marcom.

Different disciplines — and teams — play key roles in search visibility:

• SEO helps search engines understand your website.
• GEO helps AI understand your content.
• PR and earned media help AI engines trust your organization enough to recommend it.

Search platforms are increasingly being asked to recommend organizations, not simply retrieve information. People don’t just ask AI which hospitals treat their condition — they ask where they should go for care.

The shift might seem subtle, but it’s an entirely different type of computing task that requires complex reasoning and evidence. That’s where earned media comes in.

And it’s not only AI engines that need to verify your organization’s claims. Users do the same thing.

Validation: The new stage of the marketing funnel

Proving authority to AI is just the start. Once AI recommends your organization to a user, they still need to decide whether they’ll trust what AI said. Trust in AI is growing, but 95% of people still claim to verify recommendations. This points to a new step between consideration and conversion that marketers should account for: validation.

Where AI looks to earned media to validate trustworthiness, humans often go back to a traditional search engine, search for your brand, and check your website.

Here’s how AI and humans (patients and healthcare buyers) validate organizations in different sectors:

The second column shows the value of third-party corroboration. The third column shows why your website still matters (a hill we’ll always die on). Once someone lands there, your service pages, physician profiles, patient stories, outcomes content, and news articles need to confirm the recommendation and motivate them to act.

Remember, PR isn’t about moving the needle on an AI visibility dashboard. It’s about building trust in your brand and influencing action.

Missed opportunities we’re seeing with healthcare PR strategy

Many healthcare orgs produce plenty of news content for PR. Academic medical centers, for example, have no shortage of studies, trials, and institutional announcements to cover.

But running a digital newsroom isn’t the same as maximizing your news content and earned media as a channel.

We commonly see healthcare organizations:

• Plan PR, SEO, and content initiatives in separate silos
• Publish press releases on the website without optimizing them for search or the consumer audience
• Create news content that leads to a dead end (instead of driving readers to related services content with links and calls to action)
• Publish news stories without distributing them across channels
• Measure mentions and share of voice without evaluating how PR efforts are driving business goals

What solves these challenges? Aligned strategy and operations.

How to integrate your PR and SEO strategies

Healthcare PR-Communications, SEO, content, and web teams can’t operate in silos anymore. Yet so many still do. It isn’t their fault — they often lack workflows that enable meaningful collaboration.

Your teams need shared priorities and systems. Here are a few places to start:

• Cross-team visibility: Does each team truly know what the others are doing?
• Planning and collaboration: Where do campaigns, priority service lines, research, and media opportunities overlap?
• Efficacy: How are published news content and earned media currently driving consideration?
• Systems: Do service line content and news and blog articles use a shared taxonomy?
• Technology: Does everyone use the same project management tool, or do different teams use different tech?

Then consider how each news story can work across your content ecosystem. A media pitch can earn third-party validation, while your owned version can turn the same news into engaging brand journalism on your website for patients and other audiences. Link that content to relevant service line pages so AI and search engines can connect the dots, and humans have a clear path forward.

Cross-functional alignment also requires clear ownership. Learn how to define roles to break down silos.