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Why Should You Use Digital PR in Your SEO Strategy?

digital pr

Over the years, PR has changed massively. Churning out press releases and focusing solely on media relations is no more. With the evolvement of digital PR, news can be spread further and faster to a targeted audience, allowing you to maximise news like never before.

If you’re interested in finding out how digital PR can work hand-in-hand with SEO to achieve your wider objectives, then you’re in the right place! Our Digital PR Senior Account Manager, James Olliver, shed some light on this for us. Keep reading to learn how you can place your brand centre stage with a relevant, engaged audience and cut through the noise of the online world.

What is Digital PR all about anyway?

Digital PR is about getting your brand noticed online. Most effective as part of the ‘bigger picture’, digital PR combines traditional PR tactics with content marketing, social media, outreach and SEO to achieve your business goals. Done effectively, it has the power to transform static news into thoughtful conversations, creating a meaningful connection with your online target audience.

Ultimately, digital PR positively impacts a website’s search engine visibility and ranking, sharing your brand’s offering with a larger audience. So, how does this differ from traditional PR?

Digital PR vs Traditional PR

Fundamentally, the goal of traditional PR and digital PR is the same. Core objectives often centre around building brand awareness and engaging highly relevant audiences. Prior to the digital revolution, traditional PR tactics centred around offline outlets, promoting brand awareness via a network of media contacts built over many years. Print-based publications, TV and radio were the outlets of choice. But, the growth of digital marketing has refocused tactics to online publications including articles, press releases and working alongside bloggers and influencers.

Effective PR – whether online or offline – engages key influencers, drawing attention to your brand by obtaining high-quality coverage from websites and online publications. This tactic can reach your target audience by placing your business in the same place as your audience ‘hangs out’. Whether that be their favourite news source, the social media accounts they love or the podcasts they listen to on their daily commute.

Digital PR is designed to align your PR efforts with your wider digital marketing strategy. These campaigns allow your business to distribute shareable content that will engage the national, regional and trade digital media and target audiences. As a result, you can gain not only coverage but quality backlinks from higher authority domains, build a flowing sales funnel with your content output, increase the value of PPC campaigns and leverage engagement opportunities.

How do Digital PR and SEO work together?

When it comes to digital PR and SEO, these services go together like fish and chips! Content marketing, SEO, social media and digital PR can work together, combined to bolster organic rankings, boost brand awareness and increase traffic. Although content marketing has been around for some time now, its importance continues to grow as shown by Google placing increasing value on high quality content. SEO and digital PR have very similar objectives, allowing brands who are fighting for online visibility to be discovered. Here’s how they can work together:

  • Increase your Domain Authority (DA): In a nutshell, digital PR can help build your website’s DA. This is scored on a 100-point logarithmic scale that predicts how well a website will rank on search engines. The closer you are to 100, the more likely you are to earn a higher search engine ranking to receive more and better web traffic.
  • Improve brand authority: Publishing content on high-authority websites and gaining backlinks to your website helps bolster rankings for targeted keywords. The higher your position in the SERPs, the more traffic is likely to visit your website. We know that Google rewards those that gain links in a natural way and although they continuously update their algorithms, one thing remains clear: publishing valuable, relevant and high-quality content will continue to be favoured.
  • Build Brand Authority: When high DA sites reference you as a source, users see you as a credible brand, and so too does Google. This will work in your favour when it comes to ranking because, as we know, authority is a key ranking factor in Google’s E-A-T update.
  • Optimise keyword visibility through earned coverage: Leverage SEO best practise to get the most from your earned digital PR coverage. Keyword research identifies relevant phrases and links to fully optimise your PR pieces. Integrating search keywords exposes your news to those searching for similar content driving your press releases, articles and blog posts even further.

Creating a Digital PR approach just for you

Working in conjunction with our SEO experts and talented copywriters, we devise a tailored strategy to generate high-quality, organic backlinks and brand citations from authoritative digital publications for your business.

Considering journalistic niche markets alongside SEO, we take our ‘objective first’ approach to find the hook that will work for you, closely monitoring results and refining your campaign to make sure targets are met.

PR is an important part of creating a digital footprint within your industry and one of the most effective methods of gaining organic brand coverage. A digital PR campaign is likely to be more effective if it’s engaging to the media, has a relevant link to your brand and will support your wider SEO objectives. Here’s a little taster of how we’ve used Digital PR for our clients:

Bolsover Cruise Club: Innovative PR campaign helped us secure ‘Red Top’ media coverage for and increase their brand growth by 844%.

Peter Vardy: Blending technical SEO and creative PR, we successfully bolstered online visibility, rankings and domain authority for this established car dealership, increasing organic traffic by 39%.

Burton Roofing: Two-pronged PR approach surpassed link objectives, improved SEO and accelerated digital performance to acquire 24 links from high DA publications including The Mirror and Yahoo.

Interested to find out how our Digital PR can help you cut through the noise of the online world? Contact us today.