Why Digital PR Is Important for SEO and Link Building

Building a great online presence has become the need of the hour for businesses of all shapes and sizes. No serious business or brand can afford to miss out on jumping on the digital marketing bandwagon in a growing digital economy.

It’s crucial to create a favorable perception among the target audience to guarantee the success of a given brand. The arm of marketing that deals with building a positive perception about a business is called public relations (PR). PR relies on content to disseminate and manage information about a brand to craft an image that attracts more people on board.

In digital marketing, the task of crafting and propagating this positive image about a brand lies with digital PR. Digital PR is an inseparable part of content marketing. It plays a vital role in influencing the visibility of a business or brand among internet users.

Want to know more about digital PR and its impact on a brand’s online presence? Keep reading.

This article will closely define the meaning of digital PR and draw on its direct impacts on search engine optimization (SEO) and link building. Furthermore, we will discuss some prerequisites to build a winning digital PR strategy. We will close with some examples of digital PR that are guaranteed to offer excellent results.

Without further ado, let’s dive in!

Defining Digital PR

As mentioned above, digital PR is a digital marketing discipline that involves creating high-quality digital content. The idea is to present your brand as a thought leader and a valuable source of information. If you are sure that your brand and its digital content can add value to the target audience, you can pitch it to influential online publishers.

It is an extension of content marketing endeavors. It aims to generate publicity around a particular product, service, topic or brand as a whole in the digital realm. The prerequisite to having a successful digital PR campaign is to present your content as a creative asset for relevant digital publishers.

Digital PR builds on traditional PR strategies. It differs from the latter in terms of the media it targets. Instead of magazines, newspapers, TV, etc., it focuses on content creators, digital media platforms, influencers, bloggers and other affiliates (websites, podcasts, etc.).

It focuses on building lasting relationships with online editors, publishers and writers. It seeks to leverage these connections to build a favorable reputation for a given business or brand. But more importantly, digital PR focuses on using linkable creative assets to earn quality backlinks. The search for inbound links directly impacts SEO.

Digital PR and Link Building

Digital PR seeks to create content that the target audience can instantly relate to. Content that attracts people is perfect for link building from authoritative sources on the web.

Digital PR’s focus on creating and promoting interactive content to online publishers is an excellent way to earn brand mentions and relevant inbound links. Link building is one of the key focus areas for digital PR, in contrast to traditional PR.

Whenever your content gets published on an authoritative digital platform, you earn quality backlinks for your website. It helps create a strong base for attracting more traffic and strengthening your overall SEO efforts.

Digital PR should be on your agenda, whether it’s for?building backlinks for a new website ?or an established one.

Digital PR and SEO?

To make it clear, digital PR is not an SEO tactic in any way. Regardless, it is an essential digital marketing practice to boost the SEO efforts of any business. It acts as a solid partner for a brand’s SEO efforts and helps in putting the brand on the digital map.

The link building prowess of digital PR strongly ties it to SEO and helps to take your website to the top results on the search engine results pages (SERPs). The combination of inbound links and brand mentions directly translates to a significant SEO boost.

In addition to bringing more traffic and improving SERP rankings, it helps with keyword optimization, improving the domain authority, building brand reputation and much more. Digital PR is deeply connected to SEO despite it not being a core SEO element.

Positive Impacts of Digital PR on Link Building and SEO

By now, it is clear that digital PR is a crucial practice for link building and SEO. A strong digital PR strategy has the power to impact your link building and SEO efforts positively. Some of these positive impacts of digital PR on link building and SEO are:

1. It Helps Improve Long-Term Domain Authority

The Domain Authority (DA) of a website measures its relevance for a given industry or subject area. The greater the relevance of a given piece of content, the higher is its visibility in the search results.

DA is a search engine ranking score developed by?Moz . It is measured on a 1-100 logarithmic scale. It predicts the visibility of a website on the SERPs. Higher domain authority is a sign of a site’s reputation and trustworthiness.

A brand must seek to increase its domain authority value to be in the good books of the search engines. When a website enjoys high domain authority, it can rank better in the search results for relevant user queries. Digital PR can help in improving a website’s domain authority by helping it gain inbound links from trusted publishers.

Digital PR campaigns target publications with high domain authority. When your website’s content earns backlinks from these top-tier sources, its DA value gets a much-required boost.

2. It Helps Generate Better-Quality and Diverse Backlinks

We know quality backlinks can improve the DA of your website. Digital PR tactics publicize your content assets. These tactics help in getting it picked up by well-known digital publishers. Your website earns trustworthy and high-quality inbound links from sources of authority when they cite your content on their platform.

Your digital PR strategy should use a combination of graphic elements, infographics and easy-to-read text. When your digital PR content is interesting and unique, more bloggers, influencers and publications would want their audience to view it. Thus, creating better content earns you authority links.

Getting links from high-authority sources also helps earn extra backlinks from diverse sources. Top-tier links on sites with superb DA values give your content a higher reach through their syndication networks. You earn backlinks from sources you didn’t even target initially. The process is called natural syndication.

In this way, you can diversify your backlink portfolio. A diversified backlink profile further strengthens your website authority and visibility on the SERPs. Thus, digital PR tactics boost your SEO.

Note that you should use 301 redirects whenever you shift your content from one page to another. Use a?301 redirect checker ?on your website and prevent your inbound links from losing their value (broken URLs make backlinks useless).

3. It Helps Build Trust and Credibility

Digital PR tactics help publish your website’s content on top-tier platforms in your industry. Such publications provide authoritative backlinks. These backlinks act as a vote of confidence for your website and its content.

Quality backlinks play a crucial role in establishing your business as an expert in your niche. It’s vital to build a positive perception around your expertise because it counts towards the E-A-T principle. E-A-T stands for expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, a concept used by Google to evaluate a website’s quality.

E-A-T has become an inseparable part of SEO in recent years. We have already discussed how digital PR tactics help improve the authoritativeness of your website. When you combine it with expertise in your niche, you can ensure trustworthiness for your website.

When your website meets the E-A-T standards, it becomes a quality source in search results. Users view higher-ranked websites as trustworthy and credible sources of information. Therefore, digital PR helps your business in building trust and credibility among your target audience.

4. It Helps Build Brand Awareness

Digital PR helps create brand awareness among the target audience. Publication of user-centric content fetches the attention of a greater audience from high-DA sites. If your content is newsworthy and contains original research, it will be more likely to be syndicated.

Natural syndication further increases the reach of your brand among internet users. Your campaign introduces your brand to new readers through your content. Regardless of whether they know your brand, more coverage means more awareness at the top of the sales funnel.

Furthermore, content cited, published or referenced by authoritative sources bolsters your backlink profile. Search engine algorithms see it as a positive sign. It improves your SEO and increases the visibility of your business in search results.?

5. It Can Lead to an Increase in Website Traffic

We know that a successful digital PR campaign improves a website’s backlink profile and improves its domain authority. These factors directly impact SEO and help increase the traffic on your website.

An effective digital PR campaign helps your secure backlinks from high authority sources. Google’s algorithms get a positive signal from your website when it contains high-quality inbound links. It establishes the trustworthiness of your website.

When a website is trustworthy, it becomes favorable among search engine bots for relevant user queries. Your web pages start ranking higher on the SERPs, and there’s an increased influx of visitors to your website.

6. It Helps Strengthen Keyword Visibility

When you create content for the internet, it needs to optimize for the most relevant keywords. Keyword optimization is one of the SEO best practices you can’t ignore. Keyword optimization makes it easier for search engine bots to understand your content and its structure.

A digital PR campaign also requires keyword optimization to be successful. Your campaign will only reach your target audience when you use the right keywords to optimize its content. Thus, a digital PR campaign requires you to conduct keyword research.

The success of a digital PR campaign is also contingent on the location of the target audience. For instance, if your target audience resides in a specific locale, you must optimize your PR content for local keywords. You must aim to publish your PR content on local sources of authority.

Similarly, if your business targets a national or international audience, you should optimize for more general keywords and phrases.

The keyword optimization requirement helps to increase the keyword visibility for all your content. It strengthens your SEO and improves your SERP rankings and overall visibility.

Points To Remember To Craft a Successful Digital PR Strategy

1. Define the Goals

Any successful strategy always begins by defining the end goal. The clarity of thought concerning what you need to achieve should be a good starting point. In the case of a digital PR campaign, the general goal is to reach the maximum target audience.

You also need to clearly understand who your target audience is. The other aspects of the strategy could be aimed at increasing your domain authority, driving more website traffic, creating brand awareness, etc.

You should also clearly outline the message you want to disseminate. Single out the products or services you want to focus on. While you are at it, establish a budget and the boundaries of your strategy.

2. Keep in Mind Your Target Audience

Once you have defined your target audience, you need to identify their specific needs. You should start the research keeping in mind these needs. Try to find solutions for problems you need to address or the pain points you want to target.

Your end goal should be in sync with what your target audience wants. Refer to the most relevant sources for your research accordingly. Ideate the strategies of disseminating this information in ways that suit your target audience the most.

For example, if your target audience prefers reading lifestyle magazines, your PR content should be published in a popular digital lifestyle magazine.

3. Create Content

Once you have conducted your research, it’s time to create content. First of all, identify the digital mediums that will sync with your goals and the target audience. You will have the option to choose from blogs, press releases, videos, research papers, data-driven analysis and much more.

Pick the best options and start building on your initial ideas. Follow the relevant best practices to turn your research into engaging content. You must optimize the content for relevant keywords and phrases.

Keep your focus on the idea and goal behind your digital PR campaign. Edit until you see no errors or scope for improvement. The final draft must be self-sustaining and hard-hitting.

4. Plan and Publish

The next step is to identify the publications, platforms, journalists, websites or influencers to publish and promote your PR content. Make a list of the sources that command high domain authority or a good hold on your target audience. Then, plan your pitch and reach out to these sources.

Ensure that your pitch is impactful and projects your content is worthy of being featured. You must personalize the pitch for each source. Work closely with those that accept your pitch and publish your content.

5. Tracking

The final step in a digital PR strategy is to measure its success. Keep an eye out for numbers. Take into account the referral traffic from each source, number of backlinks and various other metrics through an analytics platform.

Analyze the said data and judge the efficiency of your PR campaign. Identify the areas for improvement and work on them to increase efficiency. You can get the most favorable results by keeping a constant track record of the featured content.

Examples of some Digital PR Strategies that work

? Writing Guest Blogs

Guest blogging is one of the most effective digital PR strategies. All you need to do is identify the websites that complement your business’s product or services and get them to accept your pitch for a guest blog. You need to zero in on topics that work for both the target source and your brand.

? Research Based on Proven Data

Publishers like the idea of research-based studies based on verified data. These are some of the most common PR strategies of all time. Publishers can reference these studies whenever they want to add weight to a point. Additionally, if data is used correctly, it can tell a story with more conviction.

? Benefit from Newsjacking

One of the easiest and comparatively low-effort digital PR strategies is newsjacking. It means providing valuable insights, explanations and discussions on the latest news in a given industry. You can create practical and popular linking assets by carefully monitoring and analyzing the news cycle.

? Good Old-Fashioned Product PR

It involves offering deals and creating stories around your products. Product PR is known to generate a considerable amount of revenue through product link placements. You only need to write content around a product and place links to the product in question within it.