PR link building is one of the best approaches to building your brand’s online presence. Public relations techniques are a great way to attract attention and boost your website’s traffic through links from publishers or social media platforms.
Using digital PR for link building makes a difference in the quality of links acquired as publications can refer to your brand as reputable and credible. In fact, 93.8% of link builders prioritize quality links instead of simply getting a high volume of generic links.
Read on to learn how you can leverage PR link-building for your business and establish your brand as a trusted industry leader.
What is PR link building?
PR link-building is an SEO backlink-building approach that is one of the key components of any digital PR strategy. It combines the best of digital PR and SEO to enhance a website’s online visibility and domain authority.
This approach focuses on creating compelling stories and content that is interesting to journalists and influencers. In turn, this gets published on high-authority websites that mention your brand and provide valuable links back to your website.
Using PR link-building can ultimately position your brand as a credible industry leader that your target audience can trust and continue to return to.
PR links vs standard backlinks
PR links and standard backlinks both direct users from one site to another and are crucial for SEO and getting your brand recognized in search pages. However, they differ significantly in acquisition methods, sources, and impact on your site’s SEO and overall brand reputation. Let’s examine their differences.
PR links
PR links are typically earned through media outreach, content marketing, and public relations efforts.
Content type: Newsworthy or appealing stories.
Partners: Journalists, bloggers, and influencers, who find relevance in your information and link back to your site in their published pieces.
How it works: The process involves conducting a significant amount of research on audience and topics. Once the content direction is established, link builders build relationships with potential publishers and pitch ideas.
Standard backlinks
Standard backlinks can be acquired through a broader range of methods that take less time than acquiring PR links.
Content type: Guest blogs, forum posts, comments, and more.
Partners: Competitor pages, bloggers, community forums, and social media pages that allow you to mention your brand.
How it works: Link builders can contact websites to pitch guest blogs or post directly in forum posts to initiate conversation around the brand’s topic of authority.
The bottom line is that PR links are high-quality links that stand as proof of credibility while your standard backlinks are competitors’ and relevant publications’ way of passively mentioning or acknowledging your brand. While some standard backlinks, like guest blogging, also require quality content to be effective, others can be obtained with less effort but might not carry the same weight in SEO value.
Getting started with PR link-building
Before getting started, it’s crucial to strategize your execution. Successful PR link-building campaigns deliver valuable content to your audiences, ensuring you acquire high-quality backlinks.
Here are some key stages to strengthen your PR link-building efforts.
Establish your target audience
Your target audience has the power to determine the success of your PR link-building campaign and business as a whole. Understanding who would be interested in your business, products, or services is the first step to creating a recognizable and relevant brand.
You can develop a direction and strategy for building your brand’s value and presence by identifying your target audiences. Once you know who you want to tap, you can dive deeper by fleshing out their buyer personas. This will help you better identify their pain points and how your knowledge of the topic can solve them so you can later offer your product or service.
When looking into your buyer personas, take note of some of these valuable details:
- Interests and behavior when interacting with the content they like
- Terms or keywords they use in conversations and search engines
- News platforms and social media channels they might frequent
- Groups and forums they usually participate in
Create shareable content
Securing high-quality links is all about creating irresistible, citeable content. This is where your press release and content marketing initiatives come in as part of your digital PR campaign.
Motivating media outlets and influencers to share your content needs a catchy headline or premise that your target audience will surely be interested in. Building on topics under your domain authority or industry expertise can very well give consumers and prospective buyers a reason to return to your website based on their trust in your industry knowledge.
Here are some factors you can bake into your content to keep it valuable and worth sharing.
- Keep it well-researched and factual with credible sources cited
- Share original research, data, or use cases initiated by your brand
- Offer a unique perspective on a topic that will make you a go-to reference
- Write with readability and accessibility in mind using clear, concise language
- Ensure your articles are well-structured with subheadings, bullets, and short paragraphs
Remember to keep your content rich in media too as this can help keep your audiences engaged. Aside from crafting articles and press releases, it’s also worth producing and including videos and images in a variety of formats for different platforms to keep it shareable.
Conduct outreach
One of the most crucial steps to link building strategies is outreach. It’s a proactive approach to promoting your content and boosting your website traffic.
This does mean it’s important to reach out to the right publishers, journalists, and influencers to share your content. When you have rich and relevant content that aligns with them, you get a better chance of earning high-quality PR backlinks.
Consider these factors when choosing websites to reach out to:
- Fresh, high-quality content is regularly published
- Ahrefs domain authority and domain rating are at a minimum of 65+
- Monthly organic traffic stays relatively high
- Links are embedded naturally into articles
Each of the above are indicators of whether the website is worth tapping and can provide positive results. If you’re not sure where to start, work with tools that can connect you to reporters and publications for your PR.
One good example for seeking the right publications is by using Help a Reporter Out (HARO). This platform helps journalists find experts in various fields to provide insight on articles they’re working on in exchange for authoritative backlinks.
HARO queries provide ample information around the reporter’s subject of interest. You can respond to the query by emailing the shared address with an answer that can fulfill their question.
What makes a PR link-building campaign a success?
Evaluating the success of your PR link-building campaign requires proper tracking and clear metrics that indicate your brand’s reputation and visibility improved.
Here are some metrics that matter when measuring your campaign’s success.
- Quality backlinks from high-authoritative sites
- Search engine rankings for targeted keywords
- Rankings for new keywords
- Organic traffic uptick
- Traffic from referring domains
- Domain authority and domain rating increase via platfrms like Ahrefs and Moz
- Site engagements from backlinks
- Social activity and engagement on your content
Recently, the Ethical SEO team worked on a PR link-building campaign for Messente. One strategy we employed was utilizing HARO for our outreach efforts. Here, we provided valuable insight from the CEO to establish the level of knowledge and expertise of a business owner.
Below are some of the posts sharing Messente’s insight.
Digital PR strategies to acquire high-quality links
By implementing these digital PR strategies, you can effectively increase your brand’s online visibility, enhance brand reputation, and improve website SEO through high-quality backlinks.
Data-backed content
Data-backed research or case studies allow your audience to see that you have real insight into your topic of authority. It can build credibility and create the opportunity for journalists and well-known publications to cite you as the resource.
Campaigns
Take cues from traditional PR strategies that utilize campaign stunts. It doesn’t have to be big, however creating a show-stopping campaign whether it’s online or outside can be beneficial since people these days can share it easily online.
Relationship building
Build relationships with journalists, bloggers, and content creators who cover your industry. A strong network can lead to more frequent mentions and higher-quality backlinks.
Press releases
Write and distribute press releases about your company’s newsworthy events, product launches, or significant achievements. Target to share this type of content with online news outlets, blogs, and industry-specific publications. Traffic that comes from these can convert your visitors into customers, too.
Guest blogging
Write articles for reputable websites or blogs in your industry. This will not only earn you a backlink but also help build up your website’s domain authority.
The benefits of PR link-building
Still on the fence on whether PR link building is right for your brand? Here are some of the benefits of utilizing digital PR.
Improved search rankings
One of the most direct benefits of PR link building is improving search engine rankings. High-quality backlinks from reputable, high-authority sites signal to search engines that your content is valuable and authoritative, leading to better rankings in search results for relevant keywords.
Boost website traffic
As your site gains more visibility through higher search engine rankings and mentions on other websites, you’ll likely see an increase in organic traffic. This traffic is particularly valuable as it comes from users actively searching for information or solutions related to your content or services.
Enhanced brand recognition
Successfully placing stories or content on prominent media outlets and websites can significantly boost your brand’s visibility. This increased exposure can lead to greater brand recognition, helping to establish your brand as a leader in its field.
Established topical authority
Links from authoritative and trusted websites contribute to your site’s perceived authority. Over time, as your site accumulates a portfolio of high-quality backlinks, it can become recognized as a go-to source of information or services in your industry.
Increased credibility
Being featured or mentioned on well-known and respected websites can increase potential customers’ trust in your brand. People are more likely to trust and engage with a brand that has been endorsed or recognized by authoritative sources.
Secure long-term value
Unlike paid advertising, the benefits of PR link-building can provide long-term value. A high-quality backlink can continue to drive traffic and improve SEO for years after the initial effort to secure it.
Creating a truly valuable and visible brand
PR link-building is a clever way to elevate your brand’s value and visibility. By utilizing the best digital PR techniques with link building, you can capture the attention of both high-authority publishers and your target audiences.
While the process may seem daunting, it can be done successfully with strategic planning and a thorough understanding of your target audiences. All of these can help you position your brand as the industry go-to for information, insight, products, or services.
Ethical SEO prioritizes white-hat link-building to help businesses grow their online visibility without skipping any crucial steps. If you’re keen to get started on PR link-building efforts but don’t know where to start, chat with us to reach your goals.
