It’s often perceived that great SEO is all about keywords, paid Google ads and content creation volume – these are useful aspects of a cohesive approach! However, skipping past digital PR activity will limit the outcomes you can achieve.
Effective, well-deployed digital PR is fundamental to digital marketing and SEO success, reinforcing everything you do by creating a baseline to build your brand image, credibility, social proof, and expertise.
Digital PR has evolved with the rest of the online marketing and digital world, and is no longer solely about producing press releases. It allows you to spread your news and announcements to target audiences faster and achieve maximum exposure.
What Is Digital PR?
Digital PR refers to a range of approaches that help get your brand noticed and is particularly important in competitive or over-subscribed sectors where customer engagement can make a big difference to revenues.
The basics of digital PR (or digital public relations) is that it manages how your business is seen by the outside world – but it also circulates key messages, your brand story, and is a tool to generate backlinks.
Think of the SEO bigger picture as building blocks:
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- Successful digital PR campaigns create a solid foundation and exposes your brand to new, and your target audience.
- Technical SEO, such as keywords and quality content, take you up a level.
- Blended techniques, including backlink formation to improve domain authority, boosts you further up the SEO food chain.
Google bots look at multiple aspects and parameters when deciding how much importance to place on your content and where to feature your landing pages on the SERP – even though PPC and carefully researched keywords matter, they can’t produce the best results without digital PR tactics.
For example, if you a publish a press release through a respected media channel, work with industry influencers to endorse your products, or add customer testimonials to your website, the search engine will factor these attributes in.
A brand with a distinct network of supporting content, third-party affiliate authoritative links and excellent social proof will fare far better in the organic ranking wars than a company that relies on keywords alone!
Which Digital PR Strategies Help With SEO?
One of the easiest examples is target keywords since they form a large part of the focus most businesses concentrate on within their SEO strategies. Keyword research can be powerful, but if you have a random backlink profile, it will be less than effective – and sometimes, your website will rank for irrelevant search terms.
Suppose you use those same keywords but feature them on target publications disseminated through high-readership media outlets. In that case, you choose the anchor text they sit behind, transforming the information funnelled through to the search engine bots.
Rather than making contextless assumptions, the crawlers understand what your content is about, know where it is relevant, and rank you higher for those terms that are more specific to your audience. That same third-party piece of content can also boost referral traffic, increase brand awareness, increase visibility across new demographics, and drive higher conversions and generate leads.
Google E-A-T: SEO vs Digital PR Campaign
It is important to remember that digital PR and SEO exist in the same digital ecosystem – they are codependent, and both work better when supported by the other!
Google published an update to its E-A-T guidance (expertise, authority, and trust) in August 2022, doubling down on the value that digital PR campaigns bring to your SEO endeavours. Here’s how digital PR can help meet those standards and increase the value Google ascribes to each piece of content you publish:
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- Expertise: digital PR is all about brand presence and reputation. By creating a strong PR base, adding backlinks to a credible source, and publishing linkable assets, you show that your business is a respected expert in your field.
- Authority: well-optimised, great high quality articles and relevant content establishes your brand as a thought leader and authority in your sector – another positive tick in your organic rankings position.
- Trust: when you publish reviews or add third-party review systems (such as Trustpilot) to your website, you improve your ranking position and increase click-through metrics because this carries significant weight.
Backlink profiles are often misunderstood and assumed to be spammy – but as part of a digital PR campaign, the approach can be highly effective and very credible.
Search engines study your backlinks as a ranking signal, so mentions, reviews and content pieces linking back to your website from trusted third-party sites add to your outreach content strategy – while also attracting organic website traffic!
Integrating a Digital PR Strategy Into SEO
The great thing about digital PR is that you don’t need to completely reconfigure your SEO strategy to hit all the right touch points.
SEO comprises multiple disciplines, including digital PR, social media, and content marketing, all working simultaneously to increase organic search traffic, build brand awareness and get you further up the organic search rankings:
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- Domain authority – digital PR helps you score higher on the algorithmic 100-point scale, meaning you are assigned a higher ranking and get better traffic.
- Brand reputation – posting content on third-party sites with high authority and building credible backlinks help to boost your rankings against your targeted keywords. Natural relevant links are the gold standard, but even paid-for links with relevant, valuable content score well.
- Company credibility – when a site with excellent domain authority references your site as the source for a piece of content or a product feature, this trickles down to Google and contributes to your EAT assessment.
If you are already publishing keyword-optimised content and adhering to SEO best practice guidelines, a few tweaks, cross-posts, or third-party features could positively affect the visibility of your landing pages.
Keyword research remains important, but by blending this with an online PR approach, you can drive brand awareness further and reach new audience demographics by showcasing your content, online publications and articles to large readerships via popular digital platforms.
For more advice about digital PR and improving your SEO performance, please contact Brand News. We will be happy to provide further information about any of the objectives and outcomes discussed here and how to leverage them to benefit your brand!