For SEOs, the main reason for starting a digital PR campaign is to build their site’s trust signals by acquiring high-valued links and positive sentiments from trusted sites to optimize for E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness).
Digital PR (public relations) became a buzzword in SEO in 2024, and understanding digital PR is a must to create a lasting brand reputation and increase the quality of links your site acquires, which determines its rankings in search results.
So, what is digital PR, what are the benefits, how do digital PR links compare to SEO backlinks, and what are the key strategies for SEO experts to implement? This article answers the questions below.
What is Digital PR (Public Relations)?
Digital PR is a marketing strategy that promotes a brand’s online reputation using online platforms. SEOs can use social media, websites, and blogs to build a brand’s authority and online reputation while helping to acquire high-quality backlinks, increase media exposure, and yield positive brand sentiments.
igital PR is closely related to traditional PR because they share the same root. However, while traditional PR is concerned with increasing offline visibility, digital PR uses online tools and platforms.
How to Create an Effective Digital PR for SEO
Creating a good digital PR campaign requires specific strategies corresponding to your business goals. Let’s consider key SEO strategies for your digital PR campaigns that will increase your website’s visibility, yield positive trust signals, and help you acquire quality links.
1. Create a Strong Brand Story
A strong brand story is the first approach to determining a successful digital public relations SEO campaign. This information should match your target audience and represent your brand’s values, vision, and mission while also considering the SEO value it brings. A well-crafted PR story creates strong emotions and can be used across different platforms, including social media campaigns, press releases, and blog posts.
Below are different types of stories you can build digital PR links for SEO:
Expert Insights:
By sharing expert insights in matters related to your industry, you can position your brand as thought leadership in your niche and be the go-to source for expert insights.
Journalists love expert insights they can quote, and if you can provide them with actual insights they can use in their stories, they will reward your site with high-quality links and positive brand mentions. Finding discoveries in your industry and sharing them with journalists is an excellent way to leverage digital PR and SEO for quality link-building.
Breaking News:
We can create newsworthy content in our industry to acquire quality links by leveraging digital PR. Many SEO PR agencies use this strategy to obtain links for their clients by discovering and reporting newsbreak content online. The big question is, what type of news content can I create for SEO and digital PR in my industry? This is not a big deal.
You can set up an automation that crawls top websites in your industry and RSS feed to track news in your industry. Whenever you discover this newsworthy content, create a report, share it with journalists, and promote it on your social profiles for others to find it.
Usually, whoever breaks the news first gets more mentions and links online because whenever anyone uses your news, they will cite and quote you.
Before creating your brand story, consider the unique experience that makes your brand stand out.
- What unique insights will you provide?
- Is the content newsworthy?
- Has any company shared the same news in the past?
Answering these questions will help you create a relatable and authentic brand narrative that will be successful.
What’s the Difference Between PR Links and SEO Links?
- PR (Public Relations) links are backlinks that result in creating new-worthy content or stories and pitching to journalists to discuss, announce, and promote your story to a massive audience for brand building and increasing awareness.
- On the other hand, SEO links are contextual links we acquire naturally or links we negotiate with other sites for our site to improve our search rankings.
Beneath this page, we will compare PR links and SEO Backlinks
2. Know Your Target Audience
Identifying your target audience is crucial for effective digital PR. Conduct extensive research to identify their problems, interests, and preferred communication methods. You can also use social media analytics, market research, and surveys to gather information that will help you develop your approach. Create your posts to meet your audience’s needs and preferences; this will promote engagement and shares.
3. Share Helpful Content to Journalists
Content is an essential aspect of digital PR and SEO. Constantly create and share high-quality, informative, engaging, and newsworthy content that solves your audience’s problems with journalists who will cover the news. You should be concerned about providing unique insights and discoveries and proposing solutions to issues your audience is facing. Tools like Mucrack can help you discover and pitch to relevant journalists in your industry who will likely cover your story. When you find relevant journalists, send your pitch to them to write about your story.
4. Leverage on Social Media
Social media platforms are essential tools for implementing efficient digital PR tactics. You are required to leverage them for your benefit. Use these platforms to promote your content, share your story, and interact with your audience.
Doing so allows you to reach more potential journalists and reporters you couldn’t have contacted to cover your story. Create linkable and newsworthy content that your followers feel connected to. This inspires them to share it and tell others more about your brand.
Benefits of Digital PR for SEO
When you make good use of the strategies we have discussed above, you will get the following benefits and many more:
1. Improved Online Presence
Digital PR makes your brand visible across different platforms, including social media and blogs. By using influencer partnerships and journalists, your content can reach a wider audience, enhancing your overall digital PR efforts. This increased online presence brings you potential clients and establishes you as an authority in your brand industry. The number of mentions your brand gets is directly proportional to those who will likely remember your brand when they need your products or services.
2. Improved Website Authority and Links
Website credibility is essential for SEO; digital PR is a good way to achieve it through effective link-building and quality newsworthy content. This is important because most of these backlinks are from highly authoritative sources. When respectable sites link back to your content, it shows search engines that your site is credible and reliable, ranking it high in search engine results pages (SERP).
3. Enhanced Brand Reputation
Recognizing your brand in trusted media channels increases credibility and trust among your audience, thus enhancing your overall digital PR and SEO strategy. Clients tend to interact more with brands that have received positive reviews or are mentioned in reputable media. Of course, you should know that this trust can increase client loyalty and referrals, ultimately boosting your conversion rates through effective digital marketing. A well-crafted digital PR strategy can significantly improve your brand’s reputation.
4. Improved Referral Traffic
Digital PR improves your SEO referral traffic, increasing your site visitors. If your content is shared across different online platforms, users will likely click through to your site. When journalists and social media users share and promote your content, your referral traffic and site visitors surge. The good thing about this referral traffic is that it usually comes from users interested in your industry.
5. Long Lasting Results
Quality content stands the test of time. Creating quality content during a digital PR campaign continues to bring clients even after a long time. Backlinks obtained during PR campaigns also maintain value and improve the website’s SEO performance. Digital PR has a long-term impact, unlike traditional advertising.
Digital PR Link Building vs Traditional Link Building – What are the Differences?
The main difference between PR (Public Relations) links and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) links lies in their purpose, strategy, and impact.
SEOs generally leverage PR links to build their brand’s trust signal and acquire links from authoritative sites. This is one of the best ways of establishing your site’s E.E.A.T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) signals, which are crucial for your SEO campaign.
While PR links establish your trust signals, you can’t control your anchor texts, and this is where traditional backlinks come in. With guest posts, niche edits, and other link-building strategies, you can customize your anchor texts to a certain degree and rank your website for your target keywords.
Below is how digital PR links compare to SEO backlinks:
The Goal Behind the Strategy
- PR Links: The main goal of PR links is to build brand awareness, credibility, trust, and visibility in your industry. Google knows SEOs game the system by buying links from publishers and webmasters in their niche. However, since acquiring links from highly authoritative sites like the “New York Times, CNN, and BBC” is difficult, and you can’t directly pay to get these links, Google rewards your site more when you get these links because they value and trust these sites.
- SEO Links: Your aim in building traditional backlinks to your site is to improve a website’s rankings by acquiring links that signal authority, relevance, and trust to search engine algorithms with your desired anchor text variations. We can control how these links come to us because we can negotiate with backlink providers or webmasters and use our desired anchor texts to link to a particular page on a website (we don’t have this level of customization in PR link building).
Acquisition Strategy
- PR Links:
- You can acquire PR links through media outreach, press releases, or relationship-building with journalists and influencers.
- These links are often published on news sites, online magazines, or niche publications. They may not always include keyword-optimized anchor text or a direct backlink (e.g., a brand mention without a hyperlink).
- SEO Links:
- Traditional backlinks are obtained through targeted link-building efforts like guest blogging, broken link building, or outreach to website owners in your niche.
- They usually include keyword-optimized anchor text on relevant web pages in your niche and focus mainly on websites that pass link equity (e.g., do-follow links) or drive traffic to your site.
Both PR and SEO links are valuable but serve different goals. PR links are better for building brand awareness, trust, referral traffic from news sites, and credibility. In contrast, SEO links are focused on directly improving search engine rankings and driving organic traffic by building links with our target anchor texts to increase our search rankings.
Bottom line
It’s essential to assess and evaluate the performance of your digital SEO PR results from time to time. This will help you fully understand the efficiency of your digital PR and its effect on search engine optimization. You can use online tools to monitor your backlinks, rankings, traffic, leads, and conversions. This will tell you what SEO and content marketing strategies are working and what digital PR approach needs improvement.
In addition, you should constantly check your performance across platforms, as this helps you align your plan with your business goals in SEO and PR.
Digital PR is an effective tool for improving SEO and growing your brand. When you implement these key strategies, your business can sail through digital PR’s dynamic structure.
