Digital PR Strategies & SEO - How They Work Together

Welcome to a new and very different edition of Crawling Mondays. In today's edition, I'm going to talk about digital PR strategies beyond the typical ones of link building. I believe that in SEO, in the last few years, we have started to learn more about digital PR, but sometimes we think that digital PR is link building, that can be a way to gain links, but it's Definitely way more than that. And to cover about what is actually digital PR and what we can expect, how to leverage it, and the possibilities of digital PR, even beyond in-building, I have invited today a couple of people who are experts who can share with us a lot of insights and real life case studies. On one hand, I have Jasmine Granton. She's digital PR team lead at Evolve Search. Hello, Jasmine. How are you?

Hello. Good. Thank you. How are you?

Thanks for coming. On the other hand, I have Alex Hughson, digital PR lead at Rise at 7. Hello, Alex. How are you?

Hey, I'm good. Thanks.

Thank you very much for joining today. And before starting the conversation, I want to thank Holly Monday's today's sponsor, Content King. Content King is the real-time SEO crawler. It's pretty much an alerting tool that will let you know whenever an important configuration is changed on your website. So if the canonical tag is badly configured at some point, or a new release goes live without you being aware of it, which sadly happens a lot of times, take a look at Content King. You can see the link below so you can start testing it and avoid those SEO horror stories. And now we're ready to start our today's conversation. I am very looking forward for today's episode because I am an SEO who are much more focused on the technical, strategical, overall SEO process rather than purely focused on link building. And I know that in SEO, link builders lately have started to leverage a lot of digital PR tactics. But digital PR is much more than that. So I want to start today's conversation with that. Digital PR, how is it different from traditional PR and how is it different from link building?

I actually started my PR career with traditional in-house PR. So for me, that's very much protecting the brand. It's thinking about pushing out any internal messages, good news, kind of batting away bad news. It's kind of the, yeah, the more traditional approach for me is very much about making sure a brand's messaging is on point. I would say the biggest difference between traditional and digital is the way we measure success. So whilst traditional PRs now use digital and they do look at things like brand search, they look at kind of tone and that sort of thing. For us as digital PRs, whilst we focus on a lot of different metrics, links are the key indicator of success and not just volume of links, but relevancy of links as well. So for me, that's the key thing, but I think there's quite a lot of differences between the two. And it is something that I'm agency side. So with clients, it's something we have to kind of deal with because a lot of our clients will have internal PRs. So you've got to make sure you're not stepping on each other's toes.

Yeah, I'd agree. I think it relates back to that measurability. I think the difference for me between digital and traditional is that I can, if my client or my company is creating a campaign that's based around a product, for example, and it's a product PR campaign, I can attribute a set amount of revenue that one link we've built has driven to the site, which is something that usually like traditional PR techniques, if we'd put a billboard out, or even if we'd run a TV ad or something like that, it's a lot harder to measure in that kind of granular detail. And then to compare it to like, I guess what you consider traditional link building, whilst links are the goal, because getting links in relevant publications or websites that are relevant to your brand's audience can help drive things like traffic and revenue, ultimately the SEO benefit from getting those links in relevant high-tier publications has that SEO impact as well. So I feel like digital PR kind of sits in the middle of link building and traditional PR, really.

I can definitely see how from a digital PR perspective, also sometimes beyond SEO, some of the goals will be to get even mentions in certain types of publications and from certain influencers even. And this type of mentions or visibility won't have necessarily an SEO value. or a real traffic value, but a reputational value or a branding value that is not necessarily highly connected to an SEO conversion that we can consider valuable. Do you think that nowadays the clients that you work, even if they are not purely SEO clients, they are always looking at the link or direct conversion such as traffic?

I think it vastly depends on the product or service that that brand is selling. Obviously for like, if you were using like an e-commerce example, it's very easy and kind of straightforward to say that we've managed to get a link to that product page, which has driven traffic there. People have bought this and we can attribute X amount of revenue. But on that more sort of, I guess, like softer brand building side, there's clients I've worked with where like an ongoing digital PR strategy has meant that there's certain top tier publications, which they've been sort of desperate to get placements in. The journalists working there now regard that brand as an expert in that topic. So a lot of what I've done over my career is like financial clients and working in like the financial PR space. So having that brand sort of viewed as an expert by not just the publications, but obviously the readership of that publication has a positive impact on that brand's positioning in the marketplace. And then kind of trickles that down to signups or whatever it is that kind of is like the primary goal really, which kind of, I think is. More than just getting the link, it's kind of positioning that client or that brand as an expert in that space by like an ongoing strategy.

The way that we work at Evolve Search is that we're very— so the digital PR team is part of the SEO team. We're completely integrated. So for me, I think it's the kind of easiest conversations are the ones where the client is the SEO in that company and you can talk about the impact of links and they understand. It's slightly more challenging when you're potentially talking to the owner of the business and you You really have to look at the measurables and look at it as a bigger picture. And that's what we try to do. So writing on your report or going into a weekly meeting saying, right, we've got you 50 links. What does that mean? It doesn't really mean anything, especially if you don't— even as someone who understands links, 50 links could be vastly different. You know, 50 high authority relevant links or 50 spammy pointless links are very different. So for us, we try to look at it as a full big picture. So. We're working on technical, we're working on content, we're building links, and how do all of these techniques together impact the business in terms of traffic, conversions, et cetera? So we try not to look at link building as like one siloed effort, but as part of the wider SEO strategy. But as Alex said, a really positive knock-on effect of that SEO work is that it does improve the way the brand looks. It does improve their visibility. And as you said, Alex, you sometimes get journalists coming to you and going, oh, I know you work with X client. They're an expert in finance. You know, something's just been announced by the government. What's their opinion? And that's kind of where you've hit the jackpot when you've got journalists coming to you and you're getting links just by being an expert.

When you are already established, that is great. So I would like to ask you about that because you just commented on something that for me is fundamental. How do you measure success and how do you align your efforts with The things that decision makers or your boss or the business owners actually care about. And at the end of the day, they will use to consider the project a success or not. And you mentioned one of the top mistakes, like the misalignment of what you come with versus how they assess the actual success of the project on one hand. I can imagine that you have seen a lot of dos and don'ts. Can you please go through a few of those don'ts that you see again and again, the same type of mistakes where they fall into?

I think the situation in Ukraine is obviously a very extreme example, but I think it all ties into the often lack of relevancy and lack of context and understanding as to why that brand should be getting involved in that conversation. I think this kind of, from my perspective, is where link building and digital PR are very vastly becoming 2 different things. If you said to a client, oh, we've got you 50 links this week, they've all got in top tier. Media. It's all in the— say they had a hit list of publications they wanted to get in. We've managed to get in loads of these. On the surface, that client or brand might be thinking, oh brilliant, that's exactly what we've paid this agency to do, that's exactly what our primary goal is, is X number of links. But I think there's a massive consideration now, and I think a lot of brands are kind of becoming more intricate in the way they understand your PR. And a big part of that is what what does that mean for our brand if we're building links off the back of something like the situation in Ukraine? Does that brand have a right to be involved in that conversation? Is it something that they have an expert opinion on that could back up what's being said or the campaign that's being pushed? And obviously, like I said, that is, I guess, more of an extreme example, but often there's brands I see that are commenting on things that you would sort of never expect them to comment on. And whilst it might have got a link in The Guardian or Cosmopolitan magazine, which from an SEO perspective, like, cool, they might be really relevant for that brand. They might be really high authority. That relevancy is kind of lost. And whilst they're getting a link there, what I always try and do is sort of tell my team is like, we want to look for links that are being clicked on and engaged with by the audience of that brand. So for example, if I was working with a financial company, a sort of B2B financial company. Company and we've got them on Glamour magazine and Elle. Okay, great. From the surface, that might seem really good, but is that where their audience is? Is that who they're trying to target? If they're wanting to convert or they're wanting like traffic from their intended audience, it's probably not going to come from there. So I think it's about being wiser about the content that you're creating and making sure that it is going to publications or or websites that the audience is going to engage with, really.

Yeah, I completely agree. That's something that I see quite a lot, is that I'll see a digital PR campaign that has on the surface done really well. It's got really high authority links, it looks great, you know, it's, it's telling a message. But I look at the brand and I'm like, oh, what on earth are they talking about? You know, could be a fashion brand talking about tech, or, you know, I don't know, scamming or something. And I'm like, where, where's the connection? Where's the relevancy connection? And it's— I think it's so important because whilst I definitely look at it as link building and I definitely see myself as more of an SEO than a PR these days, you still have to think about how that brand is coming across. And we still need to consider the, the end user no matter what. So I think it's important from a business perspective, but I think more importantly, just from an ethical view if you're trying to engage in conversations that you've got no authority or voice in. And as we said with Ukraine, that's a really extreme example. And there isn't a digital PR or a PR for any brand, really. I would say 97% of us should keep our mouths shut at the moment because it's not a situation to monopolize on. But even when it comes to International Women's Days, and I dread these things because I'm just waiting for these big brands that have got full boards of straight white men to talk about how important women are. And it's just, it's transparent, it, you know, it's inauthentic. And so I think from a, from an SEO, from a link building perspective, it can cause problems because if you think from Google's point of view, they're seeing all of these, as you said, let's say a financial client, all these links from Elle and Cosmo and PopSugar, and Google's like, what, what do you sell? What do you do? So I think it's confusing from an SEO point of view. It's bad from an ethical point of view and it can just get you into a whole world of trouble. And these kinds of events like International Women's Day, we see people calling brands out every year and they just don't seem to learn.

I imagine that you as a specialist, when you are going through all of the opportunities that you can leverage for the brand, you go through a certain type of validation, basic validation. Like, is this really connected to not only what you do, but your actual values? Do you actually walk the talk already, right? So are you already implementing all of this internally before preaching about it?

Definitely. And that's why it's so important to have these transparent conversations with the clients you're working with or with your stakeholders if you're in-house. You know, if you're talking publicly about something, you need to make sure your ducks are in a row and that it is coming from a good place, it's authentic. I think that is a mistake that a lot of a lot of brands make because it does seem like a really easy thing to jump on all of these events and there are tons of awareness days. There's one every single day and look, if you're a fashion brand and you want to talk about International Pizza Day, go for it, you know, no one's going to be offended by that. You're not going to do too much damage. It might feel a bit odd but fine, you know, do it. But when it comes to these more poignant and sensitive days, it's definitely deserves a little bit more thought. And I think for me, that validation process is, what's the worst thing that could happen out of this? Does this align with our internal messaging? Does it align with, you know, the kind of brand we are? Is it authentic? And if I send this to a journalist, what could be the worst thing they could send back? Because you do see journalists slating these campaigns, and even then you're probably building loads of links. You know, I've had a situation where I launched a campaign where it got, I think, 300, 400 links, but a good chunk of those were from the right-wing press, and it wasn't very good for the brand. And actually messaging-wise and tone-wise, it was awful, but it was 300, 400 links, you know. And it's where, it's where you look at the success on that. For me, that was a big failure, and it was a mistake I made and something I really learned from. And if I could go back now, I would not launch that campaign. But you know, it was, and that was, that was a really lighthearted piece. But the press managed to turn it into something very different and you've just always got to be ready for that worst case situation.

That's where a lot of the kind of debate of traditional PR versus link building versus digital PR. I think that's where I think digital PR is literally now a mixture of all because they're like the traditional PR skills of, of like crisis comms, of understanding the brand messaging and all that kind of stuff, brand strategy, brand identity that need to be in your everyday. Like, I think having a really good stringent onboarding process if you're working in an agency with the brands that you're working with is so, so important. Just because, like Jasmine said, there's countless examples of where journalists can sort of take maybe something from a campaign which maybe wasn't the intention at all. And then before you know it, it's been syndicated around with multiple places. And from a link building perspective, like, wow, 300 links. However, What is the knock-on effect of that brand? And ultimately like your relationship with the client. And it is understanding those, I guess, more like brand communications and that corporate side of it, I think, which should definitely, definitely never be undersold, I think.

Which are the criteria? Which are the building blocks, the minimum steps that you think any sound digital PR process should follow?

I think starting out, kind of going back to what we were talking about before, is I think if you are agency side, like a really good onboarding process with that brand, or if you are in-house, like really understanding the fundamental reasons of why, why are we choosing to do digital PR. I think if it is solely very like SEO goal focused and links is kind of the main goal, then that doesn't mean it kind of has to stop there. I think, I think If you can understand the goals, say if obviously links are one and driving traffic and maybe, maybe getting a new demographic of audience that other marketing channels have potentially struggled with. I think understanding that is crucial. And then the second bit would actually to understand the audience maybe that the brand already has or the audience that you say wants to target and wants to acquire. I think having those in the beginning ultimately makes it easier to maintain that relevancy through the different types of campaigns you do, whether they're huge, you know, like content marketing, interactive stuff, or it is like a fast reactive PR strategy. I think it's really, really important to do that because kind of again, going back to what Jasmine was saying, if you don't have that, you might pick a topic that is relevant to that brand. It kind of makes sense for them to be talking about it and it might get 300 links from loads of UK and US national papers, for example. But if you are actually hoping to see some conversions out of it and see an increase in revenue, for example, if it's like a product focus, that's not happening. But if you actually understood your audience aren't reading those publications, 5 well-targeted links could drive you tens of thousands of dollars or something like that. So I think it's definitely understanding your primary and secondary goals, whether it is very SEO focused or It's, you know, traffic, revenue, brand building, like share a voice in the market or whatever. And then also like really understanding or striving to understand the audience that you want to target as well to start off with.

I think the why is the really key thing. Digital PR has, you know, increased in interest a lot over the last few years. And that's great for us because we get, you know, lots of opportunities coming in and we get to work with really amazing brands, but Sometimes it feels as though they want to build links, they want to do digital PR because their competitor are, or their competitor is, or, or they've heard about it, or they've, they've seen someone at a conference talk about it. But realistically, I think it— the, the biggest thing to do is to educate on why we're doing it. And, and that why, as you say, Alex, can be different from one client to another. So it's really important to establish their own personal goals and You know, normally we're going to be working towards making companies more money. That's usually the end goal. But, you know, to what degree do you, do you need that? So for me, it's that, as you said, that onboarding is so important. And then the next stage for me would be a competitor analysis. You know, what are their strategies? Where are they getting backlinks? Do a gap analysis and see, is volume important right now, or can we really hone in and think about the relevant links? What are their golden publications? Because they're going to have a really good idea of the kind of publications, especially if they're a niche company. And then build out a strategy based, for me, based on a mixture of proactive and reactive work, depending on the client, of course. But for me, a strategy that brings in those top tier links and, and that's different for everyone, but nationals lifestyle, as well as really being able to build niche specific links. And, you know, potentially international depending on what their goals are. All of that is like a step-by-step process and there's so much work that happens before you even launch anything because then the ideation phase that you go into to come up with the ideas for me should be at least a 2-stage kind of phase too and as we said before that validation there is so, so important of is it relevant to the brand? What kind of publications could we target with this? Is the data solid? Is it ethical? You know, has it been done before? Because journalists isn't going to cover something that they've covered 2, 3 months previously. So there's quite a lot of things to consider before you even get to some of the other potential problems that you can face in terms of actually making something succeed.

Which are the top digital PR strategies that you have seen from your experience that tend to work really well, especially When there is also an SEO aspect connected to the campaign or goal connected to the campaign?

I think everyone kind of has a different favorite technique, but for me, working a variation of techniques into one strategy for a client is the ideal. And that might be that it's one content marketing piece that's, you know, fit for email and social and everything else per quarter, but then you've got 4 or 5 reactive pieces in the month or proactive. So the type of content that I think really works from an SEO perspective is you can reamplify an old blog or something that already sits on the site for a lower budget client, or if you're just testing this out, that's absolutely perfect because you're basically, there's no risk. You're taking something that is already existing. It might be tip-based. It's helpful for the end user. And because it is going to be based on what's already on your site, it's going to be relevant. So sending that to a couple of journalists within that space, you've got quite a safe bet of building some links there and you're not really I guess, risking too much. I love a reactive style. So again, you've got to be really careful what you're reacting to, but if you're an authoritative voice within a space, you know, there's nothing better for me than the feeling of when a story breaks and you know that you've got space to talk on that. So an example is the Brits, and I work with a diamond brand, and Adele had a huge rock on her finger And it was 9 o'clock at night and I don't, you know, it's not, I'm not big for working in the evenings or hustle culture or anything like that, but that was an opportunity that I just had to jump on. So me and the team kind of rallied around. We spoke to the client, got their expert view on what the ring could be worth and a little bit of detail about the cut, all of this information that journalists are going to want. So then firing that out to a few journalists who were starting to cover it or who were very likely to cover the story. That's a really great way to get your clients backlinks and again, helps their brand authority as well because you're making them experts in this space. But yeah, I mean, the way that we do brainstorms, we brainstorm for a few bigger ideas, the kind of content marketing pieces that we can use elsewhere or hero campaigns, depends on what you call it. But then we also look at smaller campaigns that Again, might be based on some tips, might be based on some advice that you can use. You can kind of hook onto international days or awareness days, but are also evergreen and you can kind of keep building links all year round. I think for me, a combination of the bigger glossier campaigns and those quicker turnaround ones is what means that you've got consistent links because it's all well and good having the budget for 3 big campaigns a year and getting 100 links 3 times a year, you know, every couple of quarters. But I prefer to be consistently building links over a period of time and across the full year.

I think the beauty of most reactive strategies as well is that there's elements that you can plan. So for example, if, if you work for a fashion client and it's just been like London Fashion Week, you know that there'll be things that you potentially could comment on and react to within that certain time period. But the nature of when I think it works the best is literally when You are well prepared for it at speed. And usually that's low budget because all you're providing is maybe a quick comment, some internal data from the client or something like that. You're not producing anything necessarily content-wise, and it can be sent out quickly. But I think to kind of add on to what Jasmine said as well, a massive focus and like a hill that I will die on, like through and through, is basically just making sure that campaigns that you push content-led are data-led as well.

Yeah.

Even the big creative ideas, if we're in an ideation session and someone has an amazing creative idea that's really high budget or a stunt or something like that, it can be amazing. But I'll always try and get them to think about, okay, well, is there any data we can put behind this? Is there more of a story that we can tell based on research or based on insight? Because ultimately, I think the way that you get content and campaigns to be successful and kind of develop naturally— and I hate using the phrase go viral because I think people latch on to that— but I think In order to create that almost virality around them, you need to evoke an emotion with what you're pushing out. And that's why people want to share it and want to engage with it. And often by having research or data that might be funny, it could be survey data that's really lighthearted and it's just something funny, or it could actually be something really shocking. So we did a campaign that was data-led that did really well, which looked at basically the information that the most popular apps are tracking on you, for example. And it's something that really resonated with most people because Most people use them every day. And it was actually quite shocking data that was verified, backed up, and quite new at the time. So whatever emotion it is, and it can be like on the entire spectrum, I think if you can manage to kind of tap into an emotion that you wanna evoke, it has some decent data behind it. And if it does have a bigger, glossier creative hook, then that kind of adds additional to it. But I'd always just—

Mm-hmm.

Steer away from a strategy that maybe is just one on its own, because if that doesn't work, and there'll be countless examples where it won't, you don't really have anything else to fall back on or re-angle it with. So I'd always try and have multiple angles and multiple strategies for the one client or one brand that you can use in conjunction together.

That is a great idea. As a user myself, I have seen like the same type of story being covered in different ways. And I have gone through a certain story and I have said, okay, it's interesting, whatever. And then a few weeks later, that story going like mental over Twitter because another publication had published it, but highlighting a crazy stat. Sometimes the crazy stat was not necessarily 100% accurate, unfortunately, which is, I will say, another of the mistakes or don'ts that I see many times. Amazing. Well, thank you. Thank you both very much.

Thank you.

You have shared so much. My mind is blowing with many ideas already of things that I can definitely leverage with my own projects and also clients. Thank you for sharing so many insights. I really appreciate it. And of course, if you have liked today's episode, follow Jasmine, follow Alex. As you can see, they are quite, quite, quite savvy about digital PR. And of course, like the video, subscribe to the channel so you don't miss any other Crawling Mondays editions. And thank you again, Jasmine and Alex. Hopefully I will be able to see you speak again soon and continue learning more about digital PR opportunities.

Thank you so much.

Bye-bye.