Why digital PR is important for every business
Stupidly competitive at everything. Sport, leisure and fitness PR and marketing background. International racqueteer. Ponderer.
Most businesses today rely on how high they rank in search engine results. The top of the results page for each industry’s most relevant terms is a battleground that needs to be constantly worked for and refined.
Digital PR is one of the most effective ways to improve your business’s organic visibility – its ranking on search pages. One of the key measures that affect its standing is the number of links pointing to your site from different, credible sources. News websites, either general or industry-specific, are among the best.
As experts in all types of news, we work with journalists to create the stories and articles they want to publish, with those precious links to your site. However, digital PR isn’t about that alone.
Five ways in which digital PR is crucial for every business
i. Your SEO visibility is boosted
The key ability that digital PR has over its longer-established namesake is the power to measurably improve your website’s search rankings.
As the lovechild of traditional PR and SEO, it is the most effective way to secure links to your website from authoritative sources. Not only do they drive traffic to your pages but, more crucially, they enhance its value in search engine results, boosting you further up the rankings.
When your digital PR agency creates a campaign that reveals something fresh about your particular field, and publishes a dedicated page on your site, that page is then referenced by online media outlets for further reading with a link – if it’s interesting enough for them to recommend it to their readers – whilst they just pick out and discuss elements relevant to their articles.
In the eyes of Google, this backlink passes trust down to your page and overall domain. You can share that trust with one of the main pages you want to rank higher.
This is an ongoing process. One, or even a few, good articles and links won’t keep you in a good place forever. As news evolves, so must your contribution to it.
ii. It builds your brand voice
The internet is, of course, indispensable in finding out about businesses in every sector, from vast mass-market manufacturers to the service providers for the tiniest niche.
So fierce is the competition that making a brand stand out entails building a level of trust with its audience.
Regular campaigns, news stories and features will help to make your brand name synonymous with your sector. Highlighting the knowledge of individuals within the business will help them become thought leaders in your industry, being recognised as authoritative experts for its issues and to guide others.
This isn’t just about highlighting products and services, but about being a mouthpiece for your sector. This, in the eyes of potential customers, is what will place you ahead of your competitors.
iii. It looks after your business’s reputation
Reputations are fragile things. A good name takes time and work to carefully build with the right expertise, products and services, but it can be easily shattered in just a day.
The ease with which your customers can express their admiration through today’s review sites and social media is a double-edged sword, because they can just as easily vent their disapproval.
Digital PR is what allows you to stay in control of the direction in which your reputation is heading, with the ability to react fast. Whether it’s to quickly take advantage of an opportunity on a developing news event or to deploy crisis management, our knowledge has allowed us to steer our clients’ reputations to safer places.
iv. It drives high quality and relevant referral traffic
The nature of all good PR is a specifically-targeted approach. Rather than carpet-bombing an entire region or sector’s media, a well-thought-through campaign will engage the individual titles with a readership that your business wants to be seen by.
The added benefit that digital PR brings to this is that, when an article on a relevant website covers the story and links to the data on your website, a certain number of interested readers will click through to your page.
If even just one of these visitors is interested in or looking for a product or service you offer, they’re then directly in the mouth of your sales funnel, giving you the opportunity to help them and generate sales.
v. Reusable digital assets are born from campaigns
As the landing pages created for campaigns gradually attract relevant links from digital PR activity, they don’t have to be discarded and used as tomorrow’s chip wrapper. They can be reused.
A campaign can be refreshed 12 months later, building on the strong reception of the original and providing updated information. In doing so, you can build more backlinks to the same page, increasing its power further. Because this influence then flows into the service pages you’re aiming to boost search rankings for, the long-term cumulative effect is one of continual improvement.
The content from previous campaigns’ landing pages can also be transformed into downloadable assets, to be used on social media as part of a brand awareness or lead generation campaign, or share it with existing contacts on your mailing lists.
This can spread those same insights to a new audience, who may not have seen the original campaign but find the information just as interesting. Even if they did see your coverage from the first campaign, reinforcing its points in a different setting is a powerful marketing technique.
Intrigued? Visit our digital PR agency page or continue reading the following articles to learn more about digital PR: