What You’ll Learn
- What is Digital PR?
- Digital PR vs. Traditional PR
- How Digital PR & SEO Work Together
- Digital PR & SEO in the News
What is Digital PR?
Digital PR, or digital public relations, is the practice of using digital channels and online platforms to improve your brand’s reputation, build brand awareness, and foster trust between the brand and the public. Through digital PR, brands can target different audiences, influencers, journalists, and potential consumers while also directing the narrative.
The goal of digital PR is to increase authority and exposure by actively building up a brand’s backlink portfolio. There are various components of this strategy, including online media outreach, content creation, such as press releases or linkable assets, online reputation management, social media outreach and engagement, online crisis management, influencer engagement, and more.
Digital PR is beneficial for anyone who wants to maintain or manage a positive online presence, promote their brand, or reach a broader audience. Everyone from businesses and corporations to non-profits and influencers can benefit from a solid digital PR campaign.
You should consider incorporating digital PR into your strategy whenever your online reputation needs a boost, when you’re launching a new product or service, or when you want to expand into a new audience.
Digital PR vs. Traditional PR: What Digital PR Isn’t
While digital PR and traditional PR do have some similarities, they are not the same thing. The goal of digital PR is to increase backlinks, generate UGC links, and organically boost a brand’s SEO and visibility results. While there is some focus on building brand awareness, it is only a small piece of the puzzle. On the other hand, traditional PR is focused entirely on brand awareness.
Traditional PR comes into play mostly when a brand needs to repair its reputation or do crisis management. It focuses on a variety of offline media, such as printed magazines, television, and radio. Through these channels, traditional PR aims to craft a positive reputation for a brand or business.
Digital PR, however, focuses more on outlets such as social media, blogs, or other business websites. It aims to build up engagement and authority, which in turn, boosts a brand’s SEO strategy. Digital PR works to promote the brand with readers and consumers but also with search engine crawlers.
How Do Digital PR & SEO Work Together?
When it comes to strengthening an SEO strategy and boosting your SERP ranking, a solid digital PR plan has a ton of benefits. Other benefits include boosting referral traffic, building domain authority, growing brand awareness, and driving social engagements.
1. Increase Page Rank
A higher page rank is important for visibility purposes. Digital PR is a great way to accomplish this goal. Since digital PR helps to increase your brand awareness with consumers, it adds value to your authority. When Google’s crawlers start to see consumers trusting in your brand, they will start trusting you more, too. When Google’s crawlers trust you, your SERP rank rises.
To build that authority and trust, start reaching out to influencers, bloggers, or journalists in an attempt to build backlinks. Have them cover something in your brand, such as a new launch or product, and ask them to link back to your website. This shows Google that other reputable brands are trusting you, so it’s okay if they do, too.
A great digital PR strategy to help increase your page rank is producing industry studies. Journalists, bloggers, and other personalities love data-driven studies. Besides supplying concrete data to support your cause, they also demonstrate your brand’s ability to conduct research, analyze data, and report the results.
The data found in industry studies often lead to brand mentions–both linked and unlinked–in news stories, articles, social media infographics, and other content. Conducting and producing industry studies is a great way to get your name out there and into some of this written content.
Having more content out there connected to your brand, especially data-driven content, is a great way to increase your visibility, boost your credibility, and strengthen your brand’s reputation.
2. Boost Referral Traffic
The more people you get to mention you on their site or social media, the more traffic you’ll drum up. Reaching out to other brands, influencers, or bloggers to set up a collaboration or campaign is a great way to work on increasing your referral traffic. They also expose your brand to a potentially brand-new audience.
Referrals also help drive conversions, too. When a consumer sees someone that they know and trust, mention your product or service, they are more likely to convert than someone who stumbles upon your brand by luck. Even if they don’t convert immediately, you can add them to a retargeting campaign to give them more chances to convert.
3. Build Domain Authority
The more outside websites that trust you and your brand, the higher your domain authority will be. When other websites mention you or link back to your site, Google knows that they can trust your content.
Guest posting on someone else’s site, doing collaborations with influencers, or getting backlinks are all great ways to use digital PR to build your domain authority and show everyone that your brand can be trusted.
Don’t forget about one of the cornerstones of digital PR: unlinked brand mentions. While anyone can pay for backlinks or mentions, not everyone has enough authority to capture organic mentions.
While they won’t give you the referral traffic that a hyperlink might, simply being worth mentioning by another brand can go a long way in terms of credibility and reputation. Increase your brand’s unlinked mentions through solid engagement with other brands, creators, influencers, journalists, and consumers.
4. Brand Awareness
Self-promotion is great, but it only goes so far. Raising your brand awareness through others is a great way to boost your authority but also to expose you to new audiences that you might not have had access to before. One way to do this is by positioning yourself as an industry expert through quotes and guest articles.
If you’re looking to add this to your digital PR toolbox, get familiar with a tactic called newsjacking, where you monitor current events and breaking news and find a way to add your expertise to it. Places like Response Source, Qwoted, and Help a Reporter are great platforms that connect journalists and bloggers with subject experts.
You are an expert in your field, so tell people about it! As you respond to these calls for quotes, work to establish relationships with the journalists, podcasters, bloggers, and influencers in your area of expertise so that when they need expert assistance, they will turn to you for it.
Building relationships through social media, offering to be on podcasts, or responding to HARO requests are all great ways to make yourself the go-to expert in your field. When others see you as an expert, it will consistently open you up to new opportunities and audiences.
5. Drive Social Engagements
If you’ve been in digital marketing for any stretch of time, you know how important social media is. You also know that social media engagement is one of the best ways to build your audience and generate trust and respect.
Things like press releases, industry awards mentions on other sites, or links can easily be repurposed into social media content and used to increase your social engagements. Don’t miss the chance to engage with your audience–old and new–whenever a new piece of digital PR is posted!
Digital PR works both ways, too. You don’t always have to be the one being mentioned or tagged. Especially with social media, if you’re talking about another brand or business, don’t be afraid to tag them. This will put you on their radar but also their audience’s radar. It will also start to form that connection in the algorithm that if someone likes their brand, they would probably be interested in yours’ too.
When executed correctly, online PR could provide a huge ROI and increase your exposure like never before. The more exposure for your brand, the better your brand awareness. As your brand’s awareness increases, so does your authority and your SERP ranking.
Digital PR and SEO in the News
Lately, digital PR has been in the news a bit. Some outlets were reporting that Google said links are no longer a top 3 ranking signal. However, what actually happened was that Gary Illyes, a Google analyst, casually mentioned at Pubcon Pro that he wouldn’t put them in the top 3 ranking factors.
While they may not matter in how we have traditionally thought of them, it doesn’t mean we should throw them out completely. There is a little more to the story.
Links are still a big part of SEO and work hard to build a solid online presence. Even if links were not a Google ranking factor, expanding your online presence on other websites would still be part of a good digital marketing program.
Let’s go through this piece by piece.
- Links are still a top signal for SEO.
- Being mentioned on other sites improves your opportunity to show up in SERP features.
- Regardless, real press and referring traffic will always be valuable.
- It’s important to be listed in the top places people look for you online, to win awards, to be mentioned on other sites, to have your information cited, to have your branded mentions linked to your website, and to have the right name, address, and phone number on all of your online listings.
- When it comes down to a page with no references online and one that does, the second brand will always win.
When you think of links in the context of digital PR and online presence, think of it this way: having a good presence on the top sites in your industry by showing you are contributing to that online community and people reference you is an indication you have great content and are a trustworthy brand.
Think of the web like a grid and ask yourself these questions:
- When it comes to the most important places online for the topic, is your business referenced?
- If a customer were on another site and trying to find an answer to their problem, would you show up as an option?
For success on the web, a presence on other websites referencing your own is a win for more reasons than one.
Digital PR & SEO: A Match Made in Marketing Heaven
If your SEO strategy has been struggling or you simply want to increase your exposure, it’s time to look into your digital PR strategy. Going beyond the print world of traditional PR, digital PR is an extremely effective way to connect with your current audience, new potential audiences, and other experts and brands in your industry.
If PR and SEO strategies are still making your head spin, reach out to the experts at Ignite Visibility. Our team has everything you need to create an online PR strategy that will get you the organic traffic and recognition you deserve!
