Digital public relations (“digital PR”) can improve your website’s domain authority and enhance your SEO visibility, making it a pivotal component of a strong digital marketing strategy. Done well, it will enhance your brand’s reach, credibility, and engagement among your target audiences.
Great digital PR combines online tools and platforms with creative content strategies to earn links from the most coveted media outlets in the cybersphere. Let’s dive into the art and science of digital PR—what exactly it is, why it’s essential to the success of your website, and how it boosts SEO, helps generate leads, and fuels business growth.
Digital PR is the process of building backlinks to your site by creating content that gets covered by digital media. Go Fish Digital, an Agital company and 4× US Search Award winner for Agency of the Year, explains that digital PR uses the approach of traditional PR to help earn quality backlinks and improve the SEO of your site.
Your digital PR strategy should be a powerful combination of traditional PR with content marketing, social media, and SEO to expand your brand’s online presence.
Instead of raising brand awareness through print media and offline events like traditional PR, digital PR prioritizes SEO benefits, focusing on digital channels and activities that include:
While digital PR and link building are not new concepts, the ability to master and use them effectively in a way that helps achieve your business objectives is a skill that comes from both experience and expertise. From an ROI perspective, AuthorityHacker reports that experienced link builders build 3.57× as many links as beginners, and can build links 41% cheaper.
One word: backlinks! Each backlink you earn through your digital PR efforts is viewed by Google as a vote of confidence, and just one backlink has the power to benefit your entire site through a trickle-down effect.
Thus, link building and off-site SEO are some of the most rewarding benefits of digital PR that will help drive growth for your business. It’s no surprise that 80% of SEO experts consider link building an important part of their SEO strategy (and more than 50% of digital marketers consider it the hardest part of SEO).
If you’re looking for reasons to prioritize digital PR beyond link equity and SEO, here are additional ways it can fuel your growth strategy:
Increasing Online Visibility: Digital PR helps your brand appear in more places online. By securing coverage in reputable online publications, you increase your brand’s visibility and reach a larger audience.
Enhancing Credibility: When your brand is mentioned by authoritative sources, it’s good for your street cred. Consumers are more likely to trust and engage with brands that have a strong online presence and positive media coverage.
Generating Leads: By increasing your visibility and credibility, digital PR helps ensure you are top of mind and front-and-center when your audience is ready to convert. When you are easier to find and engage with, more potential customers naturally raise their hands.
Boosting Brand Awareness & Reputation: Consistent and positive media coverage increases brand awareness and helps build and maintain your brand’s reputation, making your brand more recognizable, memorable, and trusted.
Content is the backbone of digital PR, and understanding your target audience is crucial to crafting content that moves them. Know who they are, what they care about, and where they hang out online to tailor your content appropriately.
Successful digital PR requires producing content optimized for both today’s news cycle and tomorrow’s organic search volume. Deliver timely, valuable content that addresses your audience’s needs and—just as importantly—piques their interest. Your content must be shareable, SEO-friendly, and worthy of likes, engagement, and backlinks, whether it’s a blog post, infographic, quiz, or interactive calculator.
How long does it take tech CEOs to earn your salary?
When B2B SMS marketing software brand SimpleTexting was looking for an attention-grabbing SEO campaign to increase their brand exposure, they turned to Go Fish Digital, an Agital company. The team created a personalized, interactive experience for the target audience by building an easy-to-use and hard-to-ignore online calculator.
The purpose of the calculator? Allowing users to compare their personal salary to the earnings of today’s most famous big tech CEOs.
SimpleTexting invited the world to select a well-known CEO, like Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos, and enter our own annual salary to find out with one click how quickly the chosen CEO rakes in what we make in a year. Depressing? Maybe. But more importantly, the content was captivating!
The calculator was entertaining, it sparked an irresistible sense of curiosity among users, and it appealed to the masses—including the target audience. Ultimately, the campaign achieved its purpose of significantly increasing brand exposure and organic traffic for SimpleTexting.
Track your digital PR efforts to see what’s working and what’s not, using tools like Google Analytics, social media analytics, and PR software to measure your results. Keep an eye on your link equity by tracking your backlinks, but know that measuring link-building success isn’t always cut and dry.
As our friends at Go Fish Digital put it, “The digital PR landscape changes as often as the turnaround in a newsroom.” That’s why it is important to reassess regularly. In the article, A Win Is A Win: How To Measure Success In Link-Building, there are two key indicators they recommend keeping an eye on:
According to AuthorityHacker, 93.8% of link builders say link quality is more important than link quantity. Generally, it’s smart to aim for a good balance of link quality and quantity that brings you closest to your growth goals and business objectives.
Continue to reassess and adjust your strategy based on your findings and your organization’s goals over time. Other signs that your digital PR efforts are successful include:
Most of the above results are also influenced by factors outside of digital PR, which is one of many reasons why we recommend a holistic, integrated approach to marketing.
Harnessing an integrated, cross-channel marketing strategy is the best way to drive results and strengthen your brand’s overall impact. At Agital, we track your overall marketing effectiveness across 25+ channels together in one dashboard using Agital Impact.
At the end of the day, digital PR is a long-game with a compounding effect that benefits your website and brand over time. Content that is well-developed continues to build links and generate coverage weeks, months, and even years after you’ve stopped pitching it—that is the power of passive coverage.
By balancing timeliness and evergreen content, you are more likely to secure passive coverage and further increase your site’s domain authority, another long-term benefit of digital PR.
Digital PR is a powerful tool for boosting your brand’s SEO, domain authority, link equity, visibility, and findability in the digital age. A good PR strategy will help you reach a larger share of your audience, generate more leads, and significantly strengthen your online presence.
The key to a successful digital PR strategy is to create valuable content, continuously build backlinks, and monitor how your strategy is performing against your goals, as well as how your content aligns with the news cycle. It’s not easy to master digital PR, but it is worth it.
Ready to take your brand to the next level with digital PR?
Contact us today to learn how we can help you craft a winning digital PR strategy that drives results.
