Ultimate Guide to Digital PR

Digital PR has surged in popularity in recent years as more and more businesses begin to recognise the importance of maintaining a strong off-page SEO profile.

Whilst there’s been a huge uptick in the adoption of Digital PR campaigns as part of marketing strategies, there are still many businesses that are completely unaware of the power Digital PR possesses when it comes to driving more conversions on your website.

Our resident Digital PR expert, Matt Hartley, takes a closer look at why Digital PR is so important for any marketing strategy and gives us some of his top tips on gaining coverage and backlinks for your brand, even if you work in that especially tricky B2B space!

What is Digital PR & Why is it so important?

Digital PR bridges the gap between more traditional means of marketing such as brand building, and the overall SEO performance of a website. By creating genuinely useful short and long-form content, you can gain traction by seeing your articles placed on various media outlets on the web, including industry-specific publications and even top-tier national press.

Digital PR is often referred to as the missing part of the SEO puzzle, as it is notoriously difficult to master and can have a significant impact on rankings when you have optimised all other aspects of your website.

Building relevant and strong backlinks is a great way to separate your website from your competitors, as it’s extremely difficult to replicate great backlinks. This means that several backlinks gained from a single campaign can have the power to catapult your products and services above your competitors.

What are some of the main Digital PR tactics?

There are several great ways to gain traction from a Digital PR perspective and gain backlinks for your website. Here are just a few examples that we see work on a day-to-day basis:

Thought Leadership Content

Casting your business as a genuine authority within the sector you work in is a great way to gain backlinks and Digital PR coverage for your brand. This can be done by simply offering genuine insights in the form of great content that answers key questions and addresses current affairs currently affecting the industry you work within.

By offering genuinely useful information to journalists, you will find your content can be placed in key publications within your sector. This not only leads to great backlinks for your website’s SEO, but it also ensures you are placed in relevant publications where your key audiences are likely to find their information.

Data-Led Campaigns

If you are looking to go after raw brand exposure to a larger audience, data-led campaigns are a great place to start as they can gain coverage on a national and even international scale.

By simply gaining your own unique data sets from your existing customer base or using social media to carry out some surveys, you can begin the process of curating your very own data-led campaigns that can gain wide-scale coverage.

Reactive Commentary

Reactive PR is an extremely useful tactic to employ, no matter what sector you work within. You can find journalist enquiries by using Social Media platforms such as X, alongside specific journalist enquiry tools, and quickly reply to these enquiries to gain coverage in top-tier media outlets.

The key to being successful in the reactive space is having readily available, genuinely useful commentary that is in a position to go out directly to journalists when they require the information.

What metrics should you focus on for Digital PR?

Several metrics are essential for Digital PR, from more traditional PR metrics such as brand awareness right through to more technical aspects like the types of links you are earning from your campaigns.

Ranking and brand visibility

One of the biggest reasons that any company carries out Digital PR is to gain exposure and website ranking increases.

It’s also worth noting that you’ll also gain plenty of brand exposure as part of any successful Digital PR Campaign.

Pairing improvements in rankings and brand visibility means that you’ll be able to see genuine benefits for your website and products.

Total coverage gained/number of backlinks

Another really important metric to consider is the amount of coverage and backlinks your campaigns have received. The more backlinks your campaigns get from reputable sources, the more SEO value your website will receive.

There will be instances where publications won’t link back to your website in their coverageof your story. This can be for multiple reasons, such as the website having no reason to link back to your website or even house rules on a publication’s website about linking out to external websites.

Whilst it’s really important to focus on backlinks for SEO value, ‘coverage that hasn’t resulted in a backlink is still essential for overall brand visibility and shouldn’t be discounted!

Domain Authority

This metric is referred to by many different names depending on what SEO software you’re using. Domain authority, domain rating or authority score – no matter what you refer to it as it’s an important metric to consider.

The higher the domain authority of the websites you are receiving links from, the better the chances are that your website’s domain rating is increasing. Although it’s important to note that many factors go into your website’s domain authority, and backlinks gained are just a small piece of the puzzle.

We would recommend keeping an eye on the domain authority of the websites that link back to you, as it’s a good indicator of the quality of the content you are distributing to press.

Relevancy

Relevancy isn’t so easy to measure as an exact science, but it’s still important to make sure you are receiving coverage from publications that are relevant to the sector you work within, your products and your clients.

For example, if you work in financial services and receive a link from a top financial publication, this is great! But if you worked in the same sector and received a backlink from a publication focusing on interior design, the relevancy score of this link would be much lower unless there is an obvious reason for your business to be published here.

Follow vs no-follow links

Something a lot of businesses and agencies will track is whether a link is marked with a follow or no-follow attribute in the publishing website’s code. There are some subtle differences between each type of link, but it’s important to have a good mix of both types of these backlinks as they contribute to a healthy, varied backlink profile in search engines’ eyes.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the two types of backlinks and what they mean:

Follow Links – pass on all of the available SEO benefits from the publication’s website back to the linked website. Along with this, the linked website will benefit from any direct traffic gained from this backlink.

No-follow Links – this type of backlink won’t pass on any of the SEO value from the publication to the linked website (or if it does, it will be minimal). However, it will still benefit the linked website by giving it referral traffic gained from the backlink.

It’s worth noting that you will have very little control over what type of link is included in a publication, so the best piece of advice we can give you is to not get too caught up over this. Whilst it’s good to keep an eye on the types of links you are gaining, it’s not the end of the world if you are getting some no-follow links, as they all contribute to a varied and healthy backlink profile.

Does Digital PR work in B2B businesses?

One of the biggest misconceptions around Digital PR is that you have to be in a favourable sector or have massive, impressive campaigns to gain any traction. This simply isn’t the case.

Don’t get us wrong, having a really strong hook is essential to any campaign land, but that doesn’t mean it has to be a massive, expensively assembled campaign focusing on some really small part of your business.

We find that those in more ‘challenging’ and niche industries fare better when it comes to gaining coverage, as there are often fewer competitors to fend off with your campaigns.

To ensure that you can maximise your chances of receiving coverage as a B2B business by using Digital PR, follow our simple tips:

Focus on becoming a go-to expert in your sector. Offer genuinely useful insights to readers and don’t be afraid to send your thoughts over to editors at key publications within your sectors.

Be available to comment on the ongoings within your sector at short notice. If you can react quickly to news breaking that affects your customers, you will greatly enhance your chances of being featured in breaking news updates in press.

Focus on incredibly strong and targeted content marketing campaigns. This will act as the cornerstone of your Digital PR efforts as a B2B business. Focusing on brand building by being a thought leader in your sector, and utilising this content to show your authority is a great way to cement yourself as a front-runner for the services you provide.

What do businesses need to provide for Digital PR agencies to work effectively?

If you are looking to employ a Digital PR agency to carry out campaigns on your behalf, you must equip your newly appointed agency with the right tools to go out to press and secure placements. There’s no denying that gaining coverage can be tricky, no matter what sector you work within, so you must do everything you can to stand out from your competitors where possible.

Here are a few of our top tips on what you should do to give your Digital PR agency the best chances of securing coverage and those much-desired backlinks:

Be readily available for expert commentary. It’s best to have several people within your business you feel comfortable with being quoted in press, so you are always ready to give your business insight on the latest trends within your sector. The quicker you can turn commentary around, the better the chances of seeing them featured.

Digital PR might not always focus solely on your products and services directly, so be adaptable! You may find that your Digital PR agency recommends a campaign that is more loosely based on what your key products or services provide, this is normal and a key part of appealing to a wider audience, especially on a large-scale national campaign. Be ready to loosen the reigns a little and see where the campaign takes you, it’s really important to remember that the traffic and awareness gains from the campaign will naturally bring your products and services front and centre later down the line!

Share interesting insights with your marketing team. This might sound obvious, but you must share all insights with those who are marketing your brand. What might seem like a pretty standard set of statistics gained from your latest social media poll, may just be hiding some Digital PR gold. So don’t be shy in sharing what unique statistics your business has accumulated over the years, you might just be sat on the next big PR story!