The Difference Between Digital PR & Link Building

Digital PR Article

Creating an online presence for your business takes time. Search engines continue to display results that meet the needs of users more accurately than ever before.

One such SEO strategy involves gaining backlinks to your website in order to improve your domain authority and boost your brand’s online visibility.

Backlinks are an essential part of your SEO strategy and one of the best ways to ensure your website shows up in the rankings when searching online. But how do you earn these all-important links?

Digital PR

Digital PR is one of the most essential elements of any successful link building strategy. There are very few marketing strategies that can earn you high-quality links on a large scale, but Digital PR can achieve this – as well as a whole host of other benefits, including:

Authority links from top-tier publications
A competitive advantage
Links that drive traffic
Increased brand awareness
Positioning as an industry expert
An opportunity to build trust
Increased social engagement

What is digital PR?

Digital PR is all about utilising PR strategies to gain quality backlinks to your website to support your SEO strategy. It involves creating linkable assets, such as reports, articles, infographics, and videos, and promoting these to journalists and industry publications.

People skills are a must in Digital PR. It’s all about building valuable relationships with journalists, bloggers and influencers in order to gain high-quality coverage and authoritative backlinks from reputable websites.

Different Digital PR tactics

When it comes to Digital PR, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. Every publication is looking for something different/unique. Not every tactic will be best for your business, so it’s important to take the time to understand the types of content that are right for your industry. Your digital PR strategy needs to be relevant to your industry, your business, your keywords and the journalists you plan to outreach to.

Data Reports and Research: Data reports and original research studies are a unique and effective way to achieve backlinks. Journalists and publications are always looking for data that showcases a story and provides them with a new story to publish.

Creative Campaigns: Creative campaigns are ideal for brands who like to do things differently. They often play on the audience’s emotions, encourage them to take action and are easily recognisable. Creative campaigns are a great way to stand out in the competitive world of link building, typically allowing you to achieve a high level of backlinks from one campaign.

Newsjacking: It is an effective link building strategy that can help your brand get noticed. It involves monitoring the news and reacting to breaking stories with your own expert insights and unique thoughts. With 47% of British adults accessing news daily, newsjacking is an effective way to get your brand noticed within trending topics.

Media Requests: By showcasing your brand as an industry expert, you can share your knowledge and expertise with your audience. Arguably now more than ever before, journalists are searching for industry experts who can offer guidance and advice to their readers.

Product PR: Your products or rather the deals or stories around your products can help you earn links. If product links are clicked on in an article, it is likely that the user’s intent will see them go on to buy your product, providing the website is optimised to achieve this.

Link building

Expert link building is at the centre of many successful SEO strategies. Whilst link building plays an important role in driving organic traffic to your website, its main function is to provide authority and topical relevance to assist with rankings.

Backlinks are a major factor in how Google ranks websites and can increase your website’s visibility online. It is understood a large portion of Google’s ranking factors considers the number of quality links your website has, making quality link building a great investment.

The benefits of link building

65% of digital marketers state that link building is the hardest part of SEO. Despite this, the benefits cannot be ignored:

Increased website trust and authority
Increased organic traffic to your site
Lower bounce rates
Greater opportunities to convert customers
Increased visibility
Improved relationships within your industry
A loyal following
Higher site metrics and SEO scores

Simple link building strategies

Link builders work with keyword researchers to discover weak areas of a website where performance, conversions, and engagement could use a boost. Earning high quality backlinks to your website is one of the best ways to grow your business. A high quality backlink from an authoritative/reputable website will provide exceptional value to your business.

Link builders will earn high quality links by working with bloggers, targeting industry relevant sites, creating interesting content and more. If you want to link build effectively, there are a few different strategies you can use that will increase chances of success in gaining relevant links. These include:

Passive Link Building: If you want other sites to link to yours, you need to create unique and engaging content that high quality domains won’t be able to resist linking to. This content can include assets such as unique tools, independent research, industry updates and more that journalists and bloggers use as sources in their articles.

Attribution Link Building: Providing journalists and bloggers with royalty free imagery can create links to your website due to crediting the original owner. Hosting an image bank online, with a website that holds a creative commons license will gain topical links from relevant domains.

Partnership Link Building: Take the time to reach out to your business connections and create a strategy that involves acquiring links to your website from them. But don’t forget,there needs to be a reason for the link, and the website(s) you are gaining links from need to be relevant to your company..

Affiliate Link Building: The more reviews your website has, the more your audience will come to trust you. One strategy you can use to increase your reviews and mentions is to put your product, service, or site in front of influencers within your industry who will look to share their thoughts with followers.