Digital PR Vs Traditional Link Building
Why Link Building?
One of the keys to improving your website’s ranking is through link generation, often referred to as the currency of SEO. Links power your website, improving your website’s domain and page authority, (which will have the effect of improving your Google rankings), increasing referral traffic and brand visibility.
As defined by MOZ, link building effectively is: ‘The process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own.’ Links are a way for internet users to navigate pages on the web, with search engines such as Google using links to crawl the web.
In order to gain links to your site, there are different avenues that can be pursued. There are two main techniques that we utilise here are WMG, namely: traditional outreach link building and PR link building, with dedicated teams working across each.
Digital PR and Traditional Outreach
So, what’s the difference between these two and how do they work? Well, despite the fact that both ultimately have the same objective, both techniques do have some significant dissimilarities.
Link building, in the traditional sense, has more of a focus on targeted outreach directed towards websites. The sort of sites that link builders will look to acquire links include: blogs, industry specific or product specific sites and local news sites.
These are targeted because they often tend to offer more direct line with your target consumers. For instance, if you’re tasked with securing links to a specific product page and you find a site that has content on this product/topic, it could be a suitable target for a link. This will then offer that direct line for potential consumers to your product page, which can then in turn improve the rankings for that specific page.
Digital PR campaigns on the other hand, ultimately have the same end goal: link acquisition, however, this is done very differently. Digital PR link building strategy is orientated towards targeting top tier national and international news sites which typically yield higher domain authorities than those of traditional link building targets.
These sites are targeted because they ultimately offer bigger SEO rewards. Links from sites such as: Business Insider, The Guardian, The Daily Mail, The Telegraph and Gizmodo, to name a few, will naturally experience greater volumes of traffic, and have DAs ranging from 70-100. Links on these sites will lead to increased traffic to your site and the link will receive greater exposure on these sites. While this may not offer the same direct line offered via traditional link building, it does have a greater overall effect on your site’s key metrics and rankings, as well as increased brand awareness for your firm. See some examples of our campaigns here.
Digital PR Risk and Reward
Digital PR campaigns usually require a greater investment of time than traditional link building. Campaigns are formulated in advance, often running over a number of months. The campaigns require research to help prise out and identify news angles, with a press release prepared for the targets to summarise the story that has been compiled, as well as a purpose-built landing page. This is the linkable asset and is used to house the campaign on-site, along with additional assets such as graphics and even video content to supplement them.
There’s also some limitations; campaigns for PR link acquisition often don’t offer the direct line to consumer and it’s more risk and reward.
So, while Digital PR may not always necessarily offer that direct line between potential consumers and some of your key product pages, it’s somewhat of a longer- term investment in your SEO objectives. It allows for the opportunity to have a greater positive effect on ranking and traffic, which naturally will positively affect your site’s domain authority, and thus your rankings.
To conclude, both techniques are very different, but if successfully employed can help achieve your SEO goals. Ultimately by acquiring good backlinks, your site will gain benefits in the shape of improved domain authority, increased traffic, brand visibility, which will then have the crucial effect of improving your rankings, which then in turn will drive potential customers to your site.
To find out more about the link acquisition services that we offer, please contact us today!