A Guide to Digital PR

While digital PR shares some similarities with traditional offline PR but also has some key differences. Unlike offline methods, digital PR offers the opportunity to reach a much broader audience.

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Here’s some frequently asked questions about digital PR:

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What is digital PR ?

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Digital PR is a strategy used by businesses to increase visibility (of course) and drive organic search performance, both of which lead to more traffic and ultimately sales and revenue, though at different speeds.

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How does digital PR do that?

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Digital PR builds connections between your brand and publishers, and people. It does this by creating content that people or publishers want to share or link to. When people or publishers link to your content Google takes this as a sign of authority and increases your ranking for related keywords. The more authoritative the person/publisher linking to your content, the better the visibility and the better the search impact.

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Digital PR Vs. Traditional PR

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The goal of traditional PR is to network with journalists and get their clients featured in newspapers, magazines, radio, and television. However, most traditional PR experts are now shifting their focus to include digital PR.

Digital PR includes a variety of marketing opportunities which includes interviews & featured articles on higher viewership online publications and also establishing social media presence for engagement, interaction, further growth and recognition.

What does Digital PR involve?

Along with traditional PR, digital PR involves elements of SEO, content marketing, influencer marketing and social media marketing. Digital PR includes a wide change of tactics to improve a business’s online presence, including but not limited to:

• Online press releases
• Business profiling
• Online reviews and interviews
• Link building through press releases, guest articles, interviews, etc/
• Influencer marketing and blogger outreach.

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How can digital PR help your business?

Here are some of the ways digital PR can help your business:

• Increased website traffic – As different high viewership online publications mention your brand on a more frequent basis, your website traffic will also increase steadily..
• Improve search engine optimization – When high authority sites link to your website either through guest posts or back links, your SEO ranking target keywords will improve.
• Establish authority– High-quality articles published on relevant high DR online journals will not only prove your authority to search crawlers but also users improve trust in your brand.
• Generate sales – When your brand is mentioned frequently on relevant websites to an interested target audience, it will drive traffic to your site. Ultimately, leading to more sales.
• Improve brand image – Through sponsored posts, positive reviews and featured interviews, you will improve brand image and increasingly earn trust amongst your target audience.

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What does a digital PR expert do?

Link building is often a cornerstone of digital PR. This is a systematic programme of trading content for links. Link building experts will approach publishers and offer to provide content in return for a link back. The site gets their content created for free and the brand gets exposure as well as the SEO benefit of improved domain authority. Most of this ‘link trading’ happens with zero transaction cost.

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Digital PR experts will provide ‘re-active’ PR. They will often use data to inform this. They will review search or social insights regularly to find trending topics for PR opportunities that your brand can legitimately contribute to.

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As well as re-active PR they will put a programme of more ‘pro-active’ PR. Scheduling a calendar of stories and content across the year to make sure that your brand is front of mind in publications.

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This combination of link building, re-active PR and pro-active PR forms the cornerstone of digitalPR.

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What to look for when hiring a digital PR expert ?

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The best digital PR experts will understand traditional PR techniques e.g press releases and journalist / influencer outreach, as well as content marketing, social media, and SEO.

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The good ones are a rare breed: creative, data driven, agile and technical, outcome focused.

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If you would like to speak with one of our Digital PR experts like Alex, you can submit a short brief in under two minutes on Traktion here.

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