What is digital PR?
Digital PR is basically just about building awareness and popularity. The short description of this strategy could be formulated as follows: Create something worth linking to and tell others about it.
Why digital PR?
This strategy is often used to build links to B2B company websites. Back then, you couldn’t use desperate link strategies, such as reciprocal linking to a B2B company page.
So they had to come up with other strategies for building popularity that would not be noticed at the company headquarters. This is basically link building with one arm behind your back.
Link strategies that are good enough for an affiliate site are inappropriate for a corporate website. So what remains is what some call digital PR.
There is no clear definition of what digital PR actually is. That’s why some definitions found on the internet include everything an affiliate website would do to build links – including guest posts.
Obviously, some definitions of digital PR are just another description of low-level link building. But it’s not necessarily a re-branding of low-level link building, as John Mueller reflected in a discussion on Twitter.
John Mueller about digital PR
The discussion in question began with a tweet about the difficulties of recruiting for digital PR.
“So, recruitment for digital PR/link building is pretty crazy at the moment; but one good thing I think will come is that digital PR salaries will go up. Tech SEO was traditionally much better paid (still is), but it’s nice to see digital PR talent being valued.”
John Mueller then spoke about digital PR:
“I love some of the things I see from Digital PR. It’s a shame that it’s often lumped in with spamming links. It’s just as important as technical SEO, in many cases probably even more important.”
Bill Slawski (@bill_slawski) commented in the Twitter discussion on how Digital PR can be a part of a well thought out SEO strategy:
“Digital PR and SEO can work very well together. I marvel at people who insist that digital PR is a separate thing and SEO works on its own; because I know how effective they can be when used together.
A campaign that uses both can be very effective.”
One person in the discussion wondered whether relevance should be taken into account. My thoughts on this question are that, in general, only relevant sites will link content that is useful to them.
Is digital PR just a buzzword?
One Yoast developer expressed skepticism about the concept of Digital PR, noting that in some cases it could be a term for buying links. He also suggested that a company spending money on PR might be able to unfairly influence Google.
Jono was not the only person who was skeptical about this. The discussion spilled over onto Facebook. There, some people commented in their feeds that link builders were springing up and renaming themselves Digital PR.
Nonetheless, it is good to see that some corners of the search marketing industry are starting to open up to a type of marketing that is not directly tied to rankings, but rather addresses website growth through activity. This can help a website to gain popularity.
It may seem strange to suggest that one way to get a better ranking is to become popular. But Google tries to rank websites that people trust and like. This is also partly what expertise, authority and trustworthiness(E-A-T) is all about.
So why not step out of the SEO box for a moment and at least think about non-SEO ways to make a website popular?
