Digital PR: Everything You Need To Know

Digital PR is more than just link building, it’s online brand-building. It’s leaving a trail of online, enduring signs and signals that a business is trustworthy and popular: a mention of your business in The Financial Times, a link to your product page from a widely respected trade title, an influential journalist talking about you on social. These typically have to be earned, which is why it’s so powerful (when done well). Google’s John Mueller has even said that digital PR was probably more important than technical SEO.

PR professionals have been masters in reputation-building since before the internet and search engines existed. Google judges rankings based on E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust): signals to evaluate the credibility and reputation of the author, publisher and content. In other words, Google is looking for signs that a business is trustworthy, and PR professionals are perfectly placed to give Google what its looking for.

Digital PR and SEO work brilliantly hand in hand: it’s much more difficult to succeed if one is missing, or if they’re misaligned. Both should be working towards the same overarching SEO strategy.

Digital PR typically focuses on the offsite brand building: earning mentions on high quality, relevant publications with tactics like press releases, data stories, newsjacking, thought leadership, expert comments and campaigns. Earning mentions and links from key media titles builds the overall authority of a website, which is one leg of the SEO stool.

Technical SEO on the other hand, involves the technical optimisation of a website, like site structure, page speed, mobile performance and user experience, so that it can effectively be crawled, understood and ranked by search engines.

It’s more measurable – Digital PR campaigns are typically more measurable than traditional PR. We track website traffic, SEO, engagement and much more – giving you accurate information on the success and ROI of our campaigns.

It’s more durable – Where mainstream PR (print, broadcast, radio etc.) provides an immediate impact, a digital PR strategy is more durable and accumulates in value over time. The content we create and the coverage we secure are available forever online, developing your digital footprint and futureproofing your brand.

Here at Energy, we haven’t embraced digital at the expense of mainstream or offline PR channels – we know they all form a part of how people consume news and information. The ultimate goal is brand building and reputation that’s achieved both online and offline. And we’re proud to say that we’re great at achieving this.

We use a combination of metrics to build up a holistic picture of how our Digital PR activity is performing. We look at the volume and quality of the coverage we achieve, how that translates into more visibility in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and the downstream impact of an uplift in qualified traffic to your website.

Offsite: like domain authority of coverage, brand mentions, whether a follow link has been included, the quality of the anchor text, number of pieces of coverage.

SERPs: this would also include metrics that are indicative of performance in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), like Share of Search and rankings for any targeted keywords and phrases.

Onsite: to include organic traffic, clicks from coverage, sales and conversions, content views and any other meaningful actions taken on your website like newsletter sign ups or contact us forms being filled in. This is where the business benefit can be realised – these metrics show how the offsite activity is influencing onsite outcomes.

Link building is the process of securing backlinks to your website from a diverse range of trusted, authoritative and relevant websites. It’s building a varied backlink profile using PR tactics like newsjacking, product PR, press releases, data stories and thought leadership. News outlets are highly trusted by search engines, which is why PR agencies are perfectly placed to get your business that valuable editorial coverage.

Links are still considered to be a strong signal that search engines like Google use to rank websites, as each link represents a vote of confidence: the more trusted the source, the more valuable the vote.

As the algorithms of search engines get increasingly sophisticated, and as more and more businesses deploy Digital PR as a tactic, there will be less reliance on links to boost search rankings. Link building is therefore just one part of a successful (and futureproof) digital marketing strategy.

To find out more about how we can help with your Digital PR, get in touch or read more about our Digital PR offering.