What is digital PR?

Digital PR is the use of online trusted, independent, unbiased third parties to positively influence a brand’s reputation. And it enhances EEAT signals. More on this later.

We often get asked the question: What is digital PR?

In a nutshell, digital PR is the use of online, trusted, independent, unbiased third parties to positively influence a brand’s target audience.

But in truth, there’s more to it than that.

Before digital, there was just PR. And PR was all about negotiating with journalists to generate media coverage in print and on radio and television.

Then the internet came and disrupted all of that. People started spending less time reading newspapers and magazines or watching TV and more time online, so it became harder to reach them through those traditional PR channels. That’s when we saw digital PR emerge.

For most traditional PR agencies that simply meant they could generate coverage on websites instead of in print publications, and they could promote stories on social media.

But, as any good PR agency will tell you, digital PR is actually much bigger than that.

In fact, it’s about carefully managing your entire digital footprint.

Digital PR and social media

Social media plays a huge role in modern digital PR strategies. It allows you to directly engage with your target audiences, share content and amplify your messaging. A well-executed social media strategy can help build brand awareness, get your company’s thought leadership seen by relevant audiences, and drive traffic to your website and other online properties.

For B2B companies, LinkedIn is arguably the biggest publishing channel. It’s almost like a tier one publication in itself. A key advantage of using LinkedIn for digital PR is the transparency – you can clearly see the individuals and companies engaging with your content, which isn’t possible with the traditional PR method of securing coverage in a publication and hoping it gets seen by the right people.

You can also use social media platforms as powerful distribution channels for your digital PR content. By tapping into influencers, industry experts, your employee network and online communities, you can extend the reach of your digital PR efforts and get in front of new audiences. You can also monitor brand sentiment, respond directly to customer enquiries and manage your online reputation.

Ultimately, digital PR and social media are inseparable. Your comprehensive digital PR strategy must seamlessly integrate social media tactics to maximise visibility, engagement and impact online.

Digital PR and search engine optimisation (SEO)

While PR agencies were increasingly targeting online and social media, search engine optimisation (SEO) companies also laid their claim to the term ‘digital PR’. An SEO agency considers digital PR to involve everything from citation building (posting instances of a business’s name, address and phone number around the internet), to generating back links from press release distribution, to ‘outreach’ activities (traditionally known as media pitching).

But quite a few SEO agencies broke Google’s rules with their approach to ‘outreach’. Semrush, for example, launched a new service offering ‘guest blog posts’ (or byliners/op-eds as they’re more commonly known in the PR world). This was a manual outreach service delivering guaranteed links.

Google was all over this and Semrush instantly shut the service down. But why was this not allowed?

Semrush asked for the target URL and anchor text – if you can stipulate this then it indicates a degree of control over the coverage – and this screams spam. PR professionals work very hard just to get basic messaging included in coverage when dealing with journalists, let alone getting links to certain landing pages included (almost impossible unless you’ve got great content on your domain that the journalist is referencing).
They refer to the service as ‘guest post outreach’ – Google isn’t a fan of ‘guest posting’ due to its association with link spam. Buying or selling links for ranking purposes is included as part of this.
It promises post publication in 16 days or less. Again, PR professionals often have to wait weeks or months for coverage depending on the editorial opportunity. If you can control publication time, you control the opportunity. If you control the opportunity, then you’re essentially paying for an advert. Google does not permit followed links in adverts (since you’re gaming the PageRank system).

So, should you use digital PR for link building?

Outreach is essential to generate back links the right way – from digital PR, for instance from linked mentions of your brand name in opinion pieces and news associated with your company. This is not the aforementioned ‘guest blogging’; this is traditional PR with the happy by-product of authoritative links from editorial sites.

Just remember that links aren’t everything when it comes to SEO. In fact, Google has recently downplayed the importance of links as a ranking factor. However, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t continue to use digital PR to secure brand mentions (either linked or unlinked).

Other than link building, there are three other main reasons you should use digital PR to support SEO:

1. Improving click through rate

Google’s former chief of search quality Udi Manber testified: “The ranking itself is affected by the click data. If we discover that, for a particular query, hypothetically, 80 percent of people click on Result No. 2 and only 10 percent click on Result No. 1, after a while we figure out, well, probably Result 2 is the one people want. So we’ll switch it.”

So, if everyone performing a search has been subject to brand B’s digital PR efforts (i.e. they’ve read about brand B in horizontal and vertical online titles) and they associate the brand with a particular search term/topic, then even though brand B ranks below brand A in the organic search results, it picks up the majority of the clicks because searchers recognise it. Before long, it moves into position one.

2. Increasing branded search

Digital PR activities can significantly boost the branded search traffic coming your way. When your brand gets positive coverage and mentions across authoritative online publications, industry blogs, and influential websites, it raises awareness and familiarity among potential customers.

As more people get exposed to your brand through digital PR, they’re way more likely to directly search for your company, products or services to learn more. This increased brand recognition and curiosity translates into a nice uptick in branded search queries.

Plus, digital PR efforts focused on creating high-quality, informative content can drive branded searches too. When you establish your brand as a thought leader or subject matter expert through compelling articles, whitepapers, and other online resources, you encourage people to search for your brand to access that valuable content.

3. Building experience, expertise, authority and trust (EEAT) signals

In August 2019, Google set the SEO world alight with a blog on expertise, authority and trust. Then in December 2022, it announced the arrival of a new E: Experience.

Building experience, expertise, authority and trust (EEAT) signals is huge for where your website ranks in search results. These signals help Google determine the quality and trustworthiness of your brand and its website.

Ultimately, it’s about the quality of content on your site and various other on and offsite signals. One of which (we think!) is brand mentions in authoritative editorial publications (not linked mentions necessarily, just brand mentions, otherwise known as implied links).

Why do we suspect implied links are important? Because at Pubcon 2017 in Las Vegas, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes was subjected to a detailed interview on developments in SEO. He referenced the search quality raters – the team of people Google uses to manually review search results according to the Google search quality rating guidelines. Illyes suggested that the quality raters would know a brand was ‘quality’ if it had been featured in an authoritative media publication, with the The Wall Street Journal being the example given.

He went on to confirm: “…the context in which you engage online, and how people talk about you online, actually can impact what you rank for.”

So we think that being featured in contextually relevant publications is key to EEAT and important for organic search engine rankings. We also suspect simple brand mentions are now becoming more important and acting as ‘mini votes’.

How do you get these brand mentions? The answer is of course: digital PR.

As we’ve seen in this section, then, digital PR positively impacts:

Trusted inbound links
Valuable unlinked brand mentions
Click through rate
Branded search
Experience, expertise, authority and trust (EEAT)

What activities are included in digital PR?

Well, if digital PR is all about building your brand’s reputation online, and all PR, online and offline, has to involve the use of a trusted, independent, unbiased third party, then digital PR would usually cover:

Social media influencer relations
Social media advertising
SEO
Online article placement
Blogging
PPC
Video production
Inbound marketing
Review generation
Email marketing

Most marketers would agree that social media influencer relations and online article placement both sit squarely in the digital PR camp. But you might well hear this argument: ‘How can you include SEO if all PR, online and offline, has to involve the use of a trusted, independent, unbiased third party?’

As a leading B2B SEO agency, our answer to that is: from the target audience’s viewpoint, organic search results and online media coverage share one thing in common, they’re both published on independent, unbiased portals.

No, Google isn’t independent and unbiased, but neither is a newspaper. And there’s very little difference today between being featured on the front page of a newspaper versus the first page of Google’s search engine results pages for a particular keyword.

Simply put, both are effective ways of publicising your brand to a target audience. The only difference is that we can directly measure the impact of the page one Google ranking, whereas it’s much harder to measure the impact of the print coverage.

What are good digital PR KPIs?

A good digital PR result is anything that positively influences a brand’s social media or organic search profiles, or any positive online media coverage. They can be split into outputs and outcomes – and this is important. After all, outcomes are what will positively impact your bottom line and what your FD cares about.

Here are example digital PR KPIs:

Social media influencer relations

Have you increased your target audience community size? (output)
Are you increasing traffic from your social channels to your website? (outcome)
Have you created new brand advocates? (outcome)
Are your posts being shared by relevant social communities/influencers? (outcome)

SEO

How many links have you built? (output)
How many unlinked brand mentions have you secured? (output)
Are your keyword rankings improving? (outcome)
Are you seeing an increase in branded search? (outcome)
Have you managed to increase traffic from search engines to your website? (outcome)
Is increased organic traffic resulting in more leads? (outcome)

Online article placement (including reviews)

Have you got more positive coverage than your competitors? (output)
Have you increased implied links (brand mentions)? (output)
Have you secured coverage in tier one online media targets? (output)
Have their key messages been pulled through into media coverage? (output)
Have you secured good reviews on sites that rank highly for the keywords the target audience will be searching for? (output)
Have you seen an increase in referral traffic from online article placement? (outcome)

How do you measure the success of digital PR?

It’s historically been hard to measure the PR contribution to a company’s bottom line. But fortunately, digital PR doesn’t suffer the same problem. Anything that’s directly responsible for increasing website traffic and conversions is very valuable to a business and worth paying for.

That’s not to say traditional PR doesn’t contribute to sales, but it does so in more indirect ways, such as by making it easier for telesales teams to get through to prospects, for instance, or increasing a company’s credibility. All very valuable, but harder to put a number on.

Traditional agencies confident enough to leave outdated PR metrics in the past will often suggest the greatest measure of success is how well their clients’ businesses are performing. If business performance is good and business objectives have been met – and PR has visibly supported that process – then the PR campaign has been successful. This is the fundamental logic of the Barcelona Principles pulled together by AMEC, designed to help the PR industry prove its worth.

But by the same logic, if revenue and profit is down, PR has failed. And that isn’t always the case.

As an example, the PR campaign may have been excellent at raising awareness with a target demographic but that demographic may have not been the right target audience for the brand. Or perhaps it was the right target audience but that audience wasn’t ready to buy, or maybe they were put off by something else.

The point being, there are a million variables that may obscure the effectiveness of a traditional PR campaign.

By contrast, measuring the effectiveness of digital PR is pretty straightforward, especially if you have access to the following tools:

Google Analytics (GA) – the staple software you’ll need to measure digital PR success. Using GA enables you to measure (among other things):

organic traffic levels
referral traffic from media websites
referral traffic from social networks
source and medium of client website goal completions
type of user the client’s website is attracting.

Along with Google Analytics, you can use Google Search Console to track increases in branded search queries (resulting in more organic impressions and clicks for the website). And you can track CTR from branded searches – a higher CTR indicates better brand awareness.

Keyword tracking software – at the high end of the SEO spectrum there are tools like Moz that will help you track keywords and give you access to a wide range of SEO tools, like Link Explorer, that come in very handy when running SEO campaigns. On the other hand, if you’re primarily interested in plain old keyword tracking then you won’t go far wrong with a product like SE Ranking.

Social media tracking software – To effectively measure the impact of your digital PR efforts on social media, you’ll want to use analytics tools provided by the major platforms like Meta, X, and LinkedIn. These native analytics solutions allow you to track metrics like follower growth over time, reach and impressions of your posts, engagement levels (likes, comments, shares), click through rates to your website, and demographic data about your audience.

Additionally, you can use third-party social media management platforms like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, or Buffer which provide unified analytics across multiple social channels. These tools tend to have more robust reporting capabilities to analyse your overall social performance.

What is the difference between traditional and digital PR?

Going back to our definition of what digital PR is:

Digital PR is the use of online, trusted, independent, unbiased third parties to positively influence a brand’s target audience.

So there’s no fundamental difference between offline and online PR, just the channels through which they’re delivered. Whether online or offline, a good story is still a good story and if it’s carried by a ‘trusted, independent third-party outlet’ then traditional and digital PR are similar. The difference is in the channels used to promote the brand and the way the online and offline versions are measured.

How does digital PR fit into a marketing strategy?

To answer this you need to ask another question: what is your digital strategy?

If your audience is mainly made up of millennials and your strategy is ‘Be where they are’, you’ll want to use social media, and engage brand ambassadors to promote products.

But if your strategy is ‘Get them when they’re ready to spend’, SEO will be key, along with PPC and other point-of-purchase marketing disciplines.

How do you pick a good digital PR agency?

Now the tricky bit; how to pick a digital PR agency.

If you’re leaning towards hiring a PR-led SEO agency for digital PR support (and you should!) then watch Google’s video on hiring SEO support – a lot of the lessons apply.

Armed with the knowledge from this blog you should be able to have a fairly informed conversation with any digital PR agency. After all, you now know the answer to the question: what is digital PR?

And if you’d like more information on digital PR, or advice specific to your business, drop us a line. We’d be happy to help!

Written by Luke Budka, AI Director (formerly Director of Digital PR and SEO).

Reviewed and updated by Matthew Robinson, Senior PR and Digital Strategist, on 15th May 2024.

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