Digital PR for SEO: Backlinks, authority, and rankings
Discover how digital PR boosts your SEO by earning high-quality backlinks, increasing brand visibility, and building authority.
Digital PR involves earning online media coverage to drive brand awareness, generate links, and support search engine optimization (SEO).
Let’s use a fictional brand, NoPod Coffee, as an example. Their sustainable coffee machine doesn’t use pods and generates no plastic waste. If they were able to get the machine featured in Wired, they’d have the potential to reach upwards of 30 million people every month. That’s a lot of visibility, which means more people would know about the brand, they’d get more website visitors, and ultimately, they’d sell more coffee machines.
Appearing in Wired also demonstrates the brand’s experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). And if there’s a link back to the site, that has SEO value in itself. It could help NoPod Coffee rank for terms like “eco-friendly coffee machine,” generating more organic search traffic, and, again, improving sales.
However, digital PR strategy is also a subject that many SEOs shy away from. They’re unsure what types of campaigns are likely to earn media coverage, how to build a media list, how to pitch journalists, or how to measure the results. We’re here to fix all that.
In this article, we’ll dig deeper into what digital PR is, why it matters for modern SEO, how to run a digital PR campaign, and common issues you might face.
What is digital PR?
Digital PR is a process designed to win online media coverage, whether that be articles on newspaper, magazine, or blog websites, in podcasts, or on social media.
It’s a powerful SEO tool, building brand citations, backlinks, and E-E-A-T. But it can also directly drive awareness, referral traffic, and sales. Through well-executed digital PR tactics, you can increase your online visibility and reach your target audience.
The stages of a campaign
There are four steps in every digital PR campaign:
- Ideation: Come up with an idea that’s compelling, unique, and newsworthy
- Creation: Turn that idea into a reality by producing a piece of content, a dataset, or a product
- Outreach: Pitch journalists, work with influencers, or engage with customers
- Evaluation: Measure the results, assess what worked and what didn’t, and prepare for the next campaign
For example:
- Bob Beanz of NoPod Coffee decides to research the environmental impact of non-recyclable coffee pods.
- He turns the data into a story and pitches it to journalists.
- It gets picked up on some national news sites as well as trade press and on social media.
- He works out that the campaign has increased searches for the NoPod brand by 10%, and several important keyword rankings have improved. But a lot of his pitches were ignored, so he decides to refine his outreach process for next time.
Growing interest
Interest in the term “digital PR” has increased significantly over the last five years, with a significant upward trend in the first half of 2025.
So why is it so popular?
The media landscape is increasingly fragmented, with brand discovery split across traditional search engines, social media, AI, and more. Digital PR is a great way of generating visibility across multiple platforms at once.
And when it comes to your SEO strategy, digital PR is one of the most effective, non-spammy ways of generating backlinks.
Google’s John Mueller has even praised it, saying: “[Digital PR is] just as critical as technical SEO.”
Owned, earned and paid media
Although owned media, like your own blog or email newsletter, could be seen as digital PR, the term usually refers to earned media—mentions and articles on third-party sites. And earned media is distinct from paid media (i.e. ads) in that it’s editorial in nature.
For example:
- NoPod’s “Coffee Break” blog would be owned media
- If they paid for a banner ad on a relevant site, that would be paid media
- But if their digital PR efforts landed them an editorial article in Wired, that would be earned media
The SEO toolkit you know, plus the AI visibility data you need.
Digital PR vs. traditional PR
The distinction between digital PR and traditional is pretty clear; digital PR is online and traditional PR is offline.
While digital PR focuses on websites and social media outlets, traditional PR involves print media such as newspapers and magazines, as well as TV and radio.
Both are valid PR goals that can drive awareness and sales, but only digital PR has a direct impact on SEO. Indirectly, however, traditional PR can also have an impact on SEO—by driving more brand search and improving click-through rates due to better brand recognition.
For example, if NoPod Coffee were to get featured in a major newspaper, more people will then have heard of them. If those people later search for “sustainable coffee machines” online, they might be more likely to click on NoPod, because it’s a brand they’ve heard of. Google records that click-through data, and may choose to rank NoPod higher up in future.
Measurability
Digital PR tends to be more measurable than traditional PR, because there are analytics and tracking tools that work with website data.
Traditional PR uses metrics like “column inches” as a gauge for visibility. But it’s hard to tell how many people saw a particular print article and went on to purchase something.
Online, we can see that impact more directly because we can measure it with data from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, backlink tools, and brand monitoring platforms.
Pro tip: Print and online media needn’t be completely separate. For example, QR codes are a great way of getting users from a print publication to your website. Finding creative ways of combining the two methods can be a useful strategy.
Is digital PR link building?
Digital PR can—and should—be used as a form of link building. Backlinks are probably the most valuable SEO outcome of online media attention.
Mentions of your brand are important, too, but relevant and high-quality backlinks from authoritative sites are SEO gold. NoPod Coffee doesn’t just want a mention in Wired, they want a hyperlink that Wired’s audience can click to reach their site. And the authority that comes with it.
It’s possible to do digital PR without earning any links, but only if:
- The media outlets you outreached to have a policy that prevents links from being added
- The journalists didn’t add them, and you didn’t follow up
Either way, not earning any links from a digital PR campaign would be a missed opportunity.
Pro tip: It’s useful to view digital PR as a link building activity—if only to ensure you’re getting the most out of it. But don’t forget that it has other benefits as well.
Why digital PR matters for SEO
Digital PR matters for SEO because there’s no other marketing strategy you can utilize that hits so many important SEO factors at once: backlinks, brand mentions, citations, E-E-A-T, and more.
For example, you could add your brand to a directory site like Yelp or Hotfrog, and that gives you a citation and possibly a link. But because those listings are so easy to get, they don’t help to differentiate you from your competitors—who likely have them too. And there isn’t much context with the link to help with E-E-A-T.
Digital PR is often neglected as it’s seen as difficult, costly, and time consuming. And it can be resource intensive, but not every campaign needs hours of market research and an interactive map. You might be surprised what you can do with data you have already.
Overall, digital PR is a powerful tool for SEOs wanting to get one up on the competition. In this section, we’ll look at why digital PR is great for earning backlinks, brand mentions, visibility in AI Overviews and Google News, and as a way of future-proofing your results.
Backlinks
A backlink is a hyperlink to your website from another website.
The number, quality, and relevance of the links are all important. And Digital PR is a great way of earning the kinds of links that search engines like without violating Google’s guidelines or relying on spammy tactics.
There have been lots of spammy link-building strategies over the years:
- Submitting articles to article directory sites
- Paying to have thousands of spammy links built on low-quality sites
- Low-quality infographics
- Guest blog posts on sites whose only purpose is to host guest blog posts
- Link exchange networks, where lots of sites agree to link to each other
Bob Beanz at NoPod Coffee isn’t going to touch those tactics—not just because they’re morally dubious, but because he knows they’re ineffective.
In contrast, digital PR is a legitimate tactic that builds links naturally on high-quality, relevant websites.
Backlinks are still important
In the past, the importance of backlinks for ranking higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) is what helped Google differentiate itself from competitors. These days, however, it’s a metric they’ve moved past in many ways, but backlinks are still important. Most people wouldn’t link to a site they thought was low quality or unhelpful, so backlinks are seen as a kind of endorsement.
Google talks about this on their Philosophy page:
Google search works because it relies on the millions of individuals posting links on websites to help determine which other sites offer content of value. We assess the importance of every web page using more than 200 signals and a variety of techniques, including our patented PageRank™ algorithm, which analyzes which sites have been “voted” to be the best sources of information by other pages across the web.
There’s a correlation between the number of backlinks a website has (or the number of linking domains) and its position in the search results.
For example, a study from Internet Marketing Ninjas showed that 96.3% of websites in the top ten positions in the search results had more than 1,000 linking domains. If you earn more links from more sites, it’s likely your site will appear higher in the search results, generating more organic search traffic.
PageRank and authority
PageRank was originally a score out of 10 that Google utilized to measure the number and quality of backlinks pointing at a webpage or domain. It’s evolved over time, with the original formula being updated and refined, but it’s still an important part of the system.
PageRank scores were visible to users at one time, but they’ve been hidden from view since 2016. People were using the scores to try to game the system. That’s left companies like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Moz to develop their own metrics—often called authority—to do a similar job.
These authority scores are useful for digital PR, because they allow you to measure your progress and assess which sites it would be best to get a link from.
It’s often said that high-authority sites are those with a domain authority of 70 or more. But in reality, any site with an authority that’s higher than your own can be of value for SEO—particularly if it’s highly relevant.
Note: The “page” in PageRank isn’t just a reference to webpages, it’s also a reference to Larry Page, who co-founded Google with Sergey Brin in 1998. It was during their time at Stanford University that they developed the PageRank algorithm.
Digital PR is great for building authority
High-quality and relevant backlinks can improve the authority of pages they link to and the website domain as a whole.
For example, the fictitious nopodcoffee.com domain might have an authority score of 35 (out of 100). And the product page for their coffee machine, nopodcoffee.com/coffee-machine, might have a score of 25.
Earning links that point directly at the product page, as well as at the home page, means both scores can be improved at once. And that’s likely to correlate with better rankings and more organic traffic.
High-profile blog, newspaper, or magazine sites will often have high authority themselves, making them great sources of backlinks. Digital PR is a great way to earn links from those sites, because it’s natural for editors to include them when writing about your brand.
Brand mentions and semantic relevance
Mentions of your brand have value, even if they aren’t accompanied by a link. As the point of digital PR is to generate media interest in your brand, those mentions will happen naturally as a result.
So, why are brand mentions important?
Brand mentions, also known as citations, help build up Google’s overall picture of your organization. And that picture can help you rank for the keyword themes that are relevant to your goals.
The Knowledge Graph
Google isn’t just looking at keywords anymore. It has a huge database known as the Knowledge Graph, which stores information on millions of “entities”: people, companies, products, and more. This underpins Google’s ability to understand the intent behind a user’s search.
That means your brand is an entity, and so are your products, and the public-facing people who work in your organization. Online mentions feed into the Knowledge Graph and help Google get a better understanding of who you are and what you do.
That also means signals like these can be important:
- How frequently you’re mentioned
- Where you’re mentioned
- The context in which you’re mentioned
This context is what we’d call “semantic relevance.”
Let’s say Bob Beanz, founder of NoPod Coffee, is quoted in a number of articles about sustainable coffee farming. Google can see that there are semantic links between mentions of Bob with themes such as sustainability and the coffee industry.
That’s a clear signal to Google that both Bob and NoPod Coffee are experts in that field. Which in turn feeds into E-E-A-T, helping NoPod rank for keywords in the sustainable coffee niche.
Digital PR allows you to build up brand mentions and gives you some control over the context in which those mentions appear. That way, you can maximize semantic relevance and improve your SEO.
AI Overviews and generative AI
When it comes to generative AI, mentions are more important than backlinks. Google started with other ranking factors and added machine learning to its system later. But the large language models (LLMs) generative AI systems are based on were designed to spot semantic relationships from the beginning.
In fact, studies have shown that brand mentions are the most important ranking factor for generative AI. And content generated by digital PR will naturally have those mentions included.
If NoPod Coffee were to put together some data on the most popular coffees across the country, for example, it would be difficult to cite that research without saying where it came from.
Brand mentions are a ranking factor for Google’s AI Overviews, which are sections of AI-generated content increasingly appearing at the top of Google’s search results. But they’re also a ranking factor for other AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot.
Visibility online in general means more visibility on AI platforms in particular.
As usage of these platforms grows, digital PR’s ability to increase the visibility of your brand will likely grow as well.
Visibility in Google News
Another factor in the overall visibility of your brand is the ability of stories from media outlets to appear in Google News.
Google News items appear across a number of surfaces:
- The Google News site
- The Google News app
- The News tab in Google search results
- Top Stories in the Google search results
Because people who visit the News site and app aren’t necessarily searching for anything, it’s a form of discoverability that goes beyond search. You can increase awareness amongst an audience who didn’t know they needed you.
With digital PR, you get access to the audience of the media outlets that publish your piece. But thanks to Google News, you get extra visibility from Google, too.
Note: Technically, it isn’t just news outlets that can have content appear in Google News. For example, blogs that have journalistic content published regularly could also appear. But news sites tend to dominate Google News results due to the amount of relevant and timely content they produce.
As we’ve seen above, extra visibility is good for brand awareness and can improve your rankings on generative AI platforms.
Further reading: The future of SEO is now: Growth & visibility
Trust signals and SEO resilience
By building your online presence across a range of high-authority media outlets, digital PR gives your brand more credibility—both for users and for Google.
Think about it. Would you be more likely to trust NoPod Coffee if you stumbled across their website without having ever heard of them or if you’d already read about them in Wired, in The Wall Street Journal, and in Food & Wine?
In the age of E-E-A-T and helpful content, this extra credibility helps protect from penalties and algorithm changes.
It’s future-proofing your SEO.
How to run a digital PR campaign
So, how do you actually run a digital PR campaign? It’s a process of content ideation and production, outreach, and evaluation.
Content ideation
Coming up with a great idea is half the battle. To get media traction, you need a story or piece of content that’s truly newsworthy.
A press release about how NoPod Coffee is 10 years old isn’t going to cut it. But a story about where the bitterness in coffee comes from and how to make the perfect cup just might. Let’s look at why.
To give your story traction, it needs to have a headline. A hook.
It needs to be:
- Emotive
- Entertaining
- Informative
- Original
- Quotable
- Relevant
Most of all, it needs to fit your brand identity and appeal to your audience.
Let’s look at some examples of types of digital PR content you could create.
Data-driven studies
Data can tell a story, and that’s compelling if it tells us something we didn’t know or confirms something we’ve long suspected.
Statistics are quotable, give the piece credibility, and position your brand as an expert source of information. They can even be shocking. Or at least, surprising.
For example, a Semrush study looked at the impact of AI Search on SEO traffic. One of the findings was a prediction that AI search visitors would trump traditional search by 2028.
That prediction makes for an interesting quote, and it’s been repeated in several other places: blogs, Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube, and more.
A good place to start is to leverage the data you already have.
Working in the coffee industry, NoPod Coffee would probably have data on their customer’s habits:
- Are people ordering more macchiatos than they used to?
- Are plant-based milks getting more popular?
- Do people like dark roast or light?
- Do preferences differ in different parts of the country?
If the data can be visualized with a chart, graph or map, so much the better.
Alternatively, survey your customers or partner with a market research company to put together some original research.
Expert insights
You can demonstrate your expertise in your field by getting one of your company’s experts to speak authoritatively on a relevant topic. Perhaps in the form of a white paper or thought-leadership piece.
This works particularly well if there’s a lot of misinformation on a particular subject, or there’s an information gap where something important isn’t being spoken about at all.
People may have heard about the environmental concerns surrounding coffee pods, but not the health concerns. The folks at NoPod Coffee are a perfect position to enlighten us.
“I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself.” — Marlene Dietrich
People can quote your piece, but also, you can include quotes in an image format with embedded links, ready for people to share. That way, there’s a link back to your site built in.
Pro tip: Remember to include bylines and author bios on your own content for E-E-A-T, and send out similar information when reaching out to media outlets to demonstrate your expertise. For example, NoPod Coffee’s press releases should have a bio for Bob Beanz, emphasizing his passion, his years of industry experience, and his qualifications.
Trend hooks and newsjacking
Make your content timely, relevant, and newsworthy by tapping into existing industry trends and news stories.
Is something happening in the news that you have a unique perspective on? You’ll need a new spin on the subject to stand out. Or something creative. Or funny.
You’ll need to be fast, too. There’s no point in being late to the party.
A classic example of a timely intervention is an Oreo tweet put out during the 2013 Super Bowl. When there was a power outage and the lights went out, they tweeted an image of a dimly-lit Oreo with the text “You can still dunk in the dark.”
It’s telling that it happened in 2013 and people are still talking about it. Oreo knew a lot of their audience would be watching the Super Bowl, seamlessly linked the powercut and their brand with a relevant message, put the tweet out quickly, and kept it tongue-in-cheek.
Another option is to have a story or product ready to go that ties in with an event you know will happen in the future. An anniversary or birthday, sporting events, music festivals, elections, holidays, pride, black history month, etc.
There are a huge number of possibilities. NoPod Coffee could plan an event around Earth Day, for example, centring their sustainability angle.
Be cautious about emotive or culturally sensitive events, though. Be sincere and think everything through. If the Super Bowl blackout had been caused by a hurricane that had left hundreds of people homeless, Oreo’s tweet would have landed very differently.
If in doubt, don’t go ahead.
“Unusual” products
A fun, but risky, approach is to market an “unusual” product. That’s because, in this internet age when newscycles are constantly changing at breakneck speed, products that are a little “out there” will often get more coverage.
Liquid Death sounds like a metal band. And when you see its drink cans, you’d assume it’s alcoholic or an energy drink. But their main product, in fact, is water. Spring water.
The brand’s unique aesthetic and anti-plastic marketing generated a lot of interest.
And it doesn’t even have to be a real product. Stick it on your website, mark it as “sold out,” and send out a story about how popular it is. Just make sure it’s obvious that it’s a joke.
Pro Tip: You could do a simple social media post “announcing” the product, but having a sold-out product page is useful as it gives media outlets a clear target for backlinks.
Brands often do this for April Fool’s Day, which is safer, but might make it harder to get attention—as there will be a lot of similar pranks around.
For example, Wheat Thins announced the launch of Wheat Thiccs in 2024.
Take care, because you don’t necessarily want your product to look like a PR stunt. The phrase “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” isn’t always true.
Interactive content
If you want to maximize the impact of digital PR for SEO, give people a clear reason to link to and visit your website. Quotes, graphs and graphics are great, but they’re easy to reproduce without the need to send people to your site.
That’s why interactive content is so useful. You can easily share a screenshot, but not the content itself.
For example, this interactive map from Stuff allows residents of New Zealand to see the rate of sea level rise in their area. It’s visual. It’s powerful. And the interactivity only exists on the Stuff site—you have to go there to experience it.
In a similar vein, our friends at NoPod Coffee could make an interactive map of the most popular coffees in each state.
Outreach strategy
Most digital PR campaigns will involve some form of outreach to help build traction. Ralph Waldo Emerson may have said “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door,” but it doesn’t mean that he was entirely correct.
That’s because you need to make sure the world knows about your mousetrap in the first place. Let’s take a deeper look at how to build an outreach strategy that will do just that for your brand.
Media list building
Before pitching your content or story, you need a list of places to send it. For NoPod Coffee, that might be food and drink industry magazines, national and local press, outlets centred around sustainability, and so on.
There are PR tools you might find helpful, such as Prowly and Cision. These are dedicated platforms designed to help you manage digital PR campaigns, including outreach and analytics tools, as well as a media database that lets you look up journalists and websites to pitch to.
However, you can also put a media list together using a simple spreadsheet. There are a number of templates available for free online, like this one from Prowly.
Include information on each journalist or influencer you’d like to work with, including:
- Name
- Job title
- Contact details (email address, social media links, etc.)
- What media outlet(s) they work with
- The niche or industry they usually write about
- Anything else you think might be useful
If your digital PR efforts are in support of SEO, you might want to record metrics for the web domains where each person’s work appears. That will help you prioritize where you’d like to get backlinks from.
The metrics available will depend upon which SEO tools you have access to. For example, you could record the website’s authority, spam or trust score, or reach (as listed in the site’s media pack). Prioritize sites with higher authority and trust scores, that reach a wide audience, and that are unlikely to be spam—all things that could improve the SEO impact of the campaign.
Having or developing relationships with individual journalists and influencers will also help. And you can relax knowing that you’ll develop those relationships as time goes by, working with the same people time and time again. That will allow you to know what sorts of pieces they’re most likely to publish, and they’ll begin to trust that you’ll always send them something worth their time.
Personalized pitching
Relevance is the name of the game. Sending generic emails far and wide is unlikely to be successful.
First off, segment your media list for each campaign. Make sure you’re only sending it to the most relevant people.
For NoPod Coffee, a piece centring sustainability might go to journalists who often cover environmental topics. Whereas, a piece on coffee bitterness might be better suited to food writers.
In your pitch email, address the writer by name. Explain why the idea is newsworthy and of relevance to them. You could also refer to similar pieces they’ve written in the past to show you’ve done your research.
Direct them to your press release or content, perhaps with a pack of images and assets to make the process easier.
Help a reporter out
Sometimes, when journalists need help with something, they’ll ask.
Searching the #journorequest hashtag on X, formerly Twitter, is often a great place to start. For example, a journalist might need a coffee expert to fact check something or provide a quote. If NoPod Coffee are keeping an eye on #journorequest posts, they can help out and likely get a link or mention in return.
You can also sign up to the newly relaunched Help a Reporter Out (HARO) service, which sends out a daily email of requests from journalists. These are similar to the #journorequest messages, but in an easy-to-digest email format.
Link acquisition
As link acquisition is one of the main aims of digital PR, it’s important not to neglect this part of the process. Some journalists will put links in naturally, but some will need a little nudge. And we need those links to help drive referral traffic and improve website authority.
Technical considerations
Not all backlinks are created equal. Getting a link from a relevant, high-authority media outlet is great, but its value will depend on how it’s been implemented. The technical details matter.
In simple terms, where a link is placed on the page and how it’s coded can have an impact.
- Contextual links in the body copy of a page are given more weight by Google than links in the header or footer
- Including keywords in the anchor text (wording that is visible to the user) can be useful, but if overdone, will quickly look like spam
- Links to deeper pages on your site in addition to the homepage can be helpful
- Followed links have direct SEO value, while nofollow links have less direct impact
Further reading: Find out more about follow vs. nofollow links and see examples of how links are coded with An SEO guide to nofollow, UGC and sponsored links.
Editorial placement
Ideally, you’d love for the editor to naturally add links to the piece in places where it makes sense. However, there’s no harm in helping them along.
Make sure the first mention of your brand in your pitch email and press release has a hyperlink to the homepage of your site. And include a deeper link to the content, research, or product the piece is about.
If there’s an author bio appearing in the piece, include a hyperlink there as well.
The hope is that, if the journalist copies and pastes the text, they’ll leave the links in place.
Unlinked brand mentions
After your piece has gone out and some articles have started to appear, it’s a good idea to go back and check that the links are actually there.
You’re probably keeping track of what articles have gone live. But you may want to check older pieces. And, if you’ve done a good job, you might find that people are talking about you that you aren’t even aware of.
Go to Google and use the following search (replacing the domain and brand name with your own):
-site:nopodcoffee.com “NoPod Coffee”
This is telling Google to “look for mentions of my brand that aren’t on my website.”
You’ll see your social media accounts and so on, but if you look through the results, you’ll also find articles based on your press releases, clients that mention you, and more.
Check if those mentions are accompanied by a link. If not, and the post is recent, feel free to reach out to the author and request that one is added. If you’re polite and point out the benefit to their readers of being able to easily visit your site, you’re likely to have some success.
If NoPod Coffee are mentioned in Hipster Coffee Magazine and there’s no link, a simple email should do the trick:
“Hi, Thanks for mentioning NoPod Coffee on your page here. We’re big fans of the magazine. I was wondering if you’d mind adding a hyperlink to this page where you mention the product? That would be a big help so your users can find us more easily.”
There may even be quotes from your research findings or mentions of your products that don’t include your brand at all! Try searching for those as well. And if you find unlinked mentions, request that links are added.
Note: Some media outlets have a policy of not adding links to pieces at all. It’s worth checking for examples when building your media list—and whether they’re follow or nofollow.
Performance measurement
It’s important to measure the impact of your digital PR efforts so you know what worked, what didn’t, and what to change next time.
The number and quality of the links you’ve earned is a good starting point. But the links are a means to an end. You want those links to do one or both of these jobs:
- Drive referral traffic to your website
- Improve SEO performance
Let’s take a look at how to measure traffic, authority, rankings, and other metrics.
Google Analytics
Visits from backlinks will usually appear as referral traffic in Google Analytics. To view that, go to “Reports” > “Acquisition” > “Traffic acquisition.”
Scroll down to the chart. You’ll see “Session primary channel group” in a dropdown box. Select “Session source/medium” instead.
You can then type “referral” in the search box to filter only referral traffic. Set a date range that includes the period after your campaign launched to see if there’s significant traffic generated by it.
You can also see what conversions or sales revenue those visits generated.
It isn’t only referral traffic that’s important though. A good campaign may also drive brand awareness, which can impact the number of direct and branded organic visits too. The more people who have heard of you, the more will type in your web address or search for you by name.
And if the links have improved SEO, other organic sessions will be affected—although it may take a while to see that impact filter through.
Website authority
If you’re building high-quality and relevant links to your website, you’d expect your authority score—both for the domain as a whole and the pages being linked to—to go up.
There’s a number of tools that report some form of authority. With Semrush, for example, you can check for free here, simply by entering your web domain.
Since it can take the tools that report these metrics a while to discover the links, you’d expect to see a gradual increase in website authority over time.
Keyword rankings
Look at the keyword rankings of terms related to the campaign, and to the pages the backlinks are pointing at. You would hope to see improvements in position or visibility, or extra search features like sitelinks and AI overviews.
For example, in Semrush, go to “SEO” > “Keyword Research” > “Position Tracking.”
Go to the “Overview” tab, and you can review position and visibility changes both in the graph and in the chart below.
You can also filter for a particular tags or words aligned with the digital PR campaign in question, or visit the “Pages” tab to see if keywords linked to your landing page have improved.
Google Search Console Data
If you aren’t tracking keywords using an SEO tool, you could look at Google Search Console data for the pages concerned and see if organic traffic has improved.
To do that, log into Google and go to the “Performance” section. Then click the “Pages” tab, and use the filter icon on the right to “FIlter by Top Pages.” Type in part of the URL of the landing page you’re using for the campaign.
Click on a page in the table to see data for that page.
If you turn on the “Average CTR” and “Average position” metrics, you’ll see those on both the chart and graph. Do that by simply clicking their blocks above the graph.
Looking at Average position on the graph will give you an idea whether the digital PR campaign made a difference to the keyword rankings tied to that particular page. And you can also see the specific keywords driving traffic to it in the chart below.
Keep your objectives in mind
When analyzing the results of your digital PR efforts, it’s important to keep the objectives of the campaign in mind.
A few examples of what your objectives might be:
- Build top-of-funnel awareness ahead of a new product launch
- Build high-quality backlinks to improve the SEO of an important page on your website
- Mitigate bad press by getting a positive story into the media
- Drive engaged traffic and website sales
Let’s say NoPod Coffee are launching a new improved 2.0 model. It isn’t on the market yet, so the objective isn’t to generate sales just now. They want to prime the market and raise awareness and excitement ahead of launch.
They might be most interested in:
- The number of mentions of the product name online
- The reach/audience size of the media outlets where articles appeared
- The amount of overlap between the audiences of the media outlets and who might be interested in the product
- Increases in organic brand search or searches for the new product name after the campaign (using Google Search Console, as described above)
NoPod Coffee could also set up Google Alerts for their brand and product name. This would allow them to receive near-real-time alert emails each time Google finds a new page that mentions those things.
Sentiment analysis is another useful tool. This involves analyzing coverage and deciding whether each piece is positive, negative, or neutral with regards to your brand–to build up an overall picture of how your brand is perceived.
UK retailer M&S launched a strawberry sandwich recently—a huge digital PR success with massive media and social media interest. Those positive stories have helped the brand move more negative ones from earlier in the year, like an April 2025 cyber-attack, further down the SERPs and, hopefully, further from their customers’ minds.
At the time of the hacking incident, sentiment analysis of the media coverage for M&S would likely have been mostly negative. But the Strawberry Sando has reversed their fortunes.
While it’s possible to do this analysis manually, it’s more efficient to use a brand monitoring tool that includes sentiment analysis as a feature.
Common challenges and how to overcome them
Digital PR is a powerful SEO tool, but it’s often perceived as extensive, time consuming, or difficult. Let’s address some common problems and give you the best chance to succeed.
Campaign scalability
Because it’s resource-intensive, relies on building relationships with journalists, and involves a fair chunk of creativity, digital PR isn’t as easy to scale as some other marketing activities. Online ads via platforms like Google and Meta are reasonably easy to scale, for example, by creating new campaigns or increasing budgets (albeit with diminishing returns).
The good news is that digital PR is scalable, but it’s best to approach this gradually. If you can prove it works once, it will be much easier to ask for more resources to ramp things up. Ensure your content creation allows room to test different ideas.
For example, if NoPod Coffee’s map of the coffee preferences in each state takes off and generates a lot of coverage, it will be much easier for the marketing team to go to the CEO and say, “This campaign did really well. Brand search is up 10%. Let’s do something similar once per quarter.”
Focus on quality over quantity. Pitching one incredible piece of content to a journalist is going to do a lot more good than pitching 10 mediocre pieces.
By scaling slowly, you can nurture those relationships and achieve better return on investment.
Pro tip: Remember, outsourcing is an option too—there are specialist digital PR companies who can help.
Journalist fatigue
Journalists—particularly those working at high-profile media outlets—receive a lot of pitches every day. It can be hard to cut through the noise.
Do your research and remember that journalists are human beings. If you send them the occasional finely-crafted pitch that’s super relevant, they’ll start to open your emails expecting something good that they can use.
An example: NoPod Coffee sends journalist Hector Verde some data on fair trade coffee production. He loves it, and writes a piece for Coffee Paradise magazine. The piece does well and gets a lot of attention. When NoPod unearths some data on why the most popular coffee bean varieties aren’t actually the tastiest, Hector opens the email with enthusiasm.
This relies on the initial pitch email being clear and helpful. Even though Hector is the right journalist for the piece, a pitch email with a vague, uninspiring subject line and rambling message that never gets to the point might have put him off publishing the first piece. And he’d be unlikely to even read the second.
Anything you can do to make the lives of journalists easier will help you in the long run!
Limited internal buy-in
Buy-in can be an issue because the results of digital PR aren’t guaranteed. You’re relying on third-parties, to some extent. Although, of course, the higher the quality of your content and your pitch, the better your chances.
Make it an easier sell by clearly explaining the potential benefits to stakeholders—not just for SEO, but for brand awareness and credibility.
For a manager, you may need to put together a business case of estimated costs in terms of time, money, and resources, and the potential upsides in terms of coverage, traffic, and other outcomes.
It helps if you’re pitching a cool idea, as well. We bet M&S had little problem getting their creative teams excited about producing marketing materials for a Japanese-inspired strawberry sandwich just ahead of Wimbledon. And of course, if you’re excited about it, it will be easier to get other people excited.
If a competitor is doing it successfully, that may help with buy-in, too. Explain what they did and what the outcomes were (as far as you can tell).
You can also get people across the business involved in the ideation process. Brainstorming ideas as a team can be a great way to give people a sense of ownership and understanding.
And of course, once you have a successful campaign under your belt, that makes it easier going forward—provided you can communicate the results effectively.
Attribution difficulty
Since digital PR is earned media, rather than owned, you have less control over the results. Which can, in turn, make it more difficult to track the results.
UTM tags
Adding UTM tags to hyperlinks in your content before you send it out can help. These are small pieces of code added to the end of URLs that tell Google Analytics where the traffic came from in more detail.
Google Analytics will classify visits from people clicking on links from other sites as “referral traffic” by default. But with UTM tags, you can tag more details about the exact campaign you’re running. This is useful if you have multiple pieces in the same media outlet over time. UTM can help you tell which piece each visit came from.
There are some simple tools that can help you add UTM tags to your URLs like this one from Google Analytics
Take a look at the Performance Measurement section above for how to analyze your Google Analytics and Google Search Console data.
Consider the timing of the campaign
There’s a concept in science where, during an experiment, you should only change one variable at a time. That way, you can be sure what caused the observed effect.
In marketing, we rarely have that luxury. But we do have some control. To be able to properly attribute improvements in SEO performance to a digital marketing campaign, it can be useful to plan it for a time when there isn’t much else going on.
For example, all of these can have a drastic impact on performance:
- Major website changes
- Marketing campaigns
- Seasonal, sporting, or political events
If NoPod Coffee put out a Christmas story, it might be difficult to judge whether an increase in traffic is due to the story or simply seasonal growth because of Christmas. You can get around this, to some extent, by looking at year-on-year data, but there can be changes in consumer behavior from year to year as well.
Track, optimize, and win in Google and AI search from one platform.
So, it can be useful to plan campaigns for a time when nothing else is planned. On the other hand, you might prefer to get the halo effect from running a holistic marketing campaign across several channels at once. Or you might have an idea that ties in with an event that wouldn’t work otherwise.
Attribution can be a process of elimination. If the trend you’re seeing coincides with the dates of a campaign, and the results can’t be explained by other factors, you can be pretty sure it’s due to the digital PR activity.
Get started with digital PR
If your SEO needs a boost or you’ve been neglecting your backlinks, digital PR could be a good fit. You’ll need time and resources, but it’s a powerful strategy that can drive long-term SEO performance and power brand visibility that converts.
Start by considering what resources you have already.
- Do you have a dataset you can draw from?
- Creatives who can create compelling, interactive content?
- Budget to outsource the process?
- A team who are great at coming up with ideas?
For your first campaign, make things easy on yourself. Use the resources you already have, and approach the decision-maker(s) with a few ideas already in your mind.
Still worried about buy-in? Find out How to get more of what you want in SEO.
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