Beginners Guide to Digital PR

Are you embarking on a new career within digital PR or looking to sharpen those old trustee skills? Whether you are a convert from traditional PR, old school link building tactics or want to learn the benefits and techniques a digital PR skill set can offer, this guide aims to be the most comprehensive and digestible resource around. We’ll run through everything we do as a digital PR team, and all that we know to help you build brand authority and links from the world’s biggest online publications.

Our Beginner’s Guide to Digital PR discusses content creation and ideation through to digital PR strategy and how it impacts Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). We’ll also look at how we outreach and provide tips throughout on what you could be doing to expand your own practises.

We’ve called this a ‘Beginner’s Guide’ because we walk through concepts that will be new to people starting in the industry or people who have worked in traditional PR previously. However, there are concepts in here that traditional SEOs will be very familiar with and also portions of the guide we hope even experienced digital PR professionals will find useful.

Digital PR In a Nutshell

Digital PR is the evolution of link building and traditional PR practises, often tying back to SEO KPIs and improving a website’s organic performance. It is an essential process for becoming an authority online by focusing on building brand mentions and links from highly relevant and powerful digital publications.

There are a wide-range of tactics that experts use to achieve placements and links, such as producing creative campaigns from scratch, to newsjacking and providing expert commentary to journalists.

Historically, links have been a core ranking signal to search engines. In fact, it’s one of the fundamental signals that Google based its entire search engines on from the start – something other search engines (at the time) weren’t doing. Today, it remains a critical metric and key factor to determine why some websites rank higher up the search engine results pages (SERPs) than others. 

Search engines, like Google and Bing, learn a lot about a website by looking at their link profile i.e. which websites link to it. Using their crawlers and algorithms, they know the core topics a website focuses on and can then build a picture of authority and relevance from here.

Achieving links from websites that search engines view as having a lot of authority and a large degree of relevancy cross-over with your domain can have a huge impact on ranking potential. Of course, you still need to produce high quality content relevant to the keywords you are targeting, and ensure your website has a solid technical foundation, but digital PR can be the springboard to launching a brand online or be the competitive edge in highly aggressive SERPs. 

Feel free to skip ahead using the chapters below or run-through from top to bottom for the full Beginner’s Guide to Digital PR experience: