Digital PR and SEO: How they work together

18th September 2024

In a previous blog, we took a deep dive into all things digital PR, covering what the term means, its benefits, and how to apply digital PR strategies to your own business.

In this blog, we delve deeper into the connection between digital PR and SEO, exploring how the two strategies can work together to boost your site’s relevancy, drive traffic and generate conversions.

What is digital PR?

Digital PR is a marketing strategy designed to boost a company’s online presence and brand visibility. By working with and enhancing digital marketing tactics like SEO, content marketing and social media, digital PR can help businesses to better engage with their target audience across various platforms.

Learn more about what digital PR is and why your company should be using it.

The importance of digital PR for SEO

Digital PR and SEO are not just complementary, they are often interdependent. Together, they can help create a powerful strategy that not only elevates your brands online presence but drives traffic and generates conversions.

How does digital PR help SEO?

Builds high-quality backlinks: This is the main reason many people carry out digital PR. By securing coverage on reputable websites, blogs and online publications, digital PR boosts your site’s authority and credibility in the eyes of search engines like Google as you gain backlinks from such sites.

Increases brand awareness: Simply put, the more people that know about your brand, the more they are going to search for you, click on any pages that are ranking or engage with your content. All these could help you perform better in SERPs.

Target high value pages: By controlling the content through digital PR, you can direct links and traffic to high value pages instead of just your home page. This will also boost the importance of this page in the eyes of Google.

Control of anchor text: If you can control the anchor text used in your digital PR stories to target key terms you can help your high value pages rank better for those terms. It’s also important to note that Google considers the surrounding copy of a link, so make sure your digital PR piece include relevant content around your link. For example, don’t just say …’reports Edge45’. Expand the content to say ‘…reports digital PR experts, Edge45.’

Drives targeted traffic: By appearing in publications that your target audience reads, you will be driving traffic to your site that is already engaged. This can lead to higher engagement rates and faster conversions.

Improves content visibility: If you target publications with high readerships and an engaged audience, your content is more likely to reach a wider audience, be shared through social or email channels, linked to by other publications and ranked higher by search engines.

Establishes industry authority: Digital PR can help position your brand as a thought leader. The more you become consider the go-to source of information, the more likely you are to attract future organic backlinks and citations from other reputable sources.

Build brand mentions: Google can now use unlinked brand mentions to build a picture of your company. So even if you don’t gain that backlink, Google will still be able to put two and two together to realise that when a magazine is talking about Edge45, they are referring to the company Edge45 at edge45.co.uk.

Boosting your EEAT Credentials: Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust can be hard to prove yourself. Google very much relies on third parties when working out whether someone can be trusted or is an expert. PR can help you to prove yourself.

Control the narrative: Many businesses struggle with negative press. By launching digital PR campaigns, you can help control the narrative with positive news, helping both users and Google to see you in a different light.

How to spot opportunities for digital PR to boost your SEO

Understanding the relationship between digital PR and SEO is great, but if you can’t recognize the right opportunities to apply it, your efforts may go to waste.

Identifying these opportunities involves staying alert to trends, analysing competition and creating strategic content.

To help identify digital PR opportunities that could boost your SEO:

Analyse competitor backlinks: Identify where your competitors are earning backlinks and explore similar opportunities for your brand.
Leverage trending topics: Create timely, relevant content around industry trends or events to attract media coverage and backlinks. Be ready with a quote or angle on upcoming events or breaking news.
Build relationships with journalists: Connect with journalists and influencers in your industry who regularly cover topics related to your company.
Audit existing content: Identify high-performing content that could be repurposed or pitched to media outlets for exposure or backlinks.
Create shareable visual content: Develop infographics, graphs, images, videos or interactive content like calculators that can be shared and linked to by other websites.
Develop a single source piece: Become the source for facts and statistics on a single topic. Find a gap in the market and fill it with a regularly updated piece.
Local focus: If you’re focusing on local PR, you can jump on local new stories or look at local data from national studies to help boost your local visibility.
Use tools: Tools like Connectively, BuzzSumo and Ahrefs can help you to spot PR ideas through competitor analysis, content ideas and backlink audits.

Summary

Digital PR and SEO are like two sides of the same coin, both working to enhance your website. It’s important to view them as interdependent and to align your digital PR goals with your SEO objectives. That way, your company is likely to generate increased engagement, brand credibility and – of course – sales.