Is PR The Missing Link to Increased Rankings?

Before the internet, businesses would heavily rely on their striking branding and signage, and printed marketing materials (including advertisements) to attract new customers. With the digital age came a new platform to explore - one which is now accessible to 5.45 billion users worldwide.

This has brought about a new type of competition: battling for that coveted first position in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Statistics show that the top three Google search results get 54.4% clicks, which makes total sense - no-one wants to be scrolling and scrolling to find what they’re looking for.

SEO professionals come into the spotlight here. Unless a business is super lucky, they need to be investing in some level of search engine optimisation (SEO) in order to get more eyeballs on their products and/or services, and therefore increase their turnover and profitability. Data suggests that moving up one position in Google improves your click-through-rate (CTR) by 32.3%, on average.

And while even SEO professionals don’t know the full extent of the Google algorithm and how it works, we are more knowledgeable than ever before when it comes to what’s needed to rank higher. A few months ago, Google faced a massive leak of internal documentation. The leak was a surprise to many as it revealed that there are more than 14,000 ranking factors - way more than any of us anticipated, though of course, we still don’t know the weighting of these.

Links hold a lot of power - but only when they’re legitimate

What the documentation does confirm is that the acquisition of backlinks is still extremely valuable. Backlinks take a user from one site to another, and are seen as a ‘vote of confidence’ (afterall, why would you link to a low-quality, spammy website?). Google rewards websites with a good, diversified ‘backlink profile’ with an increase in rankings - though I will stress it’s much more about quality than it is quantity.

The leak also suggests that Google is probably ignoring links that don’t come from a relevant source, which has become a hot topic in digital PR over the past few years. The search engine also favours content that is fresh.

The issue here is that, despite the evidence, many link builders and businesses are trying to exploit the system by taking the ‘quick and easy route’ and either paying for links or gaining links from low-quality, irrelevant websites. This is explicitly against Google guidelines. If the search engine becomes aware that a company is using these underhand tactics, it has a number of penalties that it can enact which will negatively impact a website’s rankings and visibility.

In severe cases, Google may even completely remove a site from its search index, making it impossible for users to find!

How can I gain links through ethical means?

This is where digital PR comes into play, where experts will create and distribute content in order to achieve earned media (as opposed to paid-for).

PRs have a number of tactics and techniques at their disposal, including:

• Press releases: a common format to send to the media. Press releases can be used to convey everything from business news to campaign data.
• Reactive PR: monitoring and responding to relevant news and/or journalist requests.
• Proactive PR: planning ahead and making the news.
• Thought leadership: creating expert comment pieces for key industry publications.
• Content marketing: think long-form content pieces such as guides, reports, and whitepapers.
• ‘Hero’ campaigns: larger, more complex campaigns that require more time, or investment. These are typically data, visual, or interactive led.

Unfortunately, as much as we’d like to put a number on it, there isn’t a clear cut correlation between building X number of links and achieving a certain increase in keyword movement. Experts reckon that it takes a few months to see the effect of a valuable backlink, which is why digital PR is always recommended as a long-term strategy, alongside SEO. This ensures that businesses are achieving a steady stream of links and demonstrating to Google that they have Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust (E-E-A-T) - a set of signals used by the search engine to determine which sites to rank in those top positions.

In addition, it’s best to employ more than one tactic at any one time, through a ‘layered approach’. This means that you may be working on reactive PR, thought leadership, and content marketing at the same time, for example. The benefit of this is that it helps to minimise the peaks and troughs in media coverage and link acquisition, ensuring a more consistent and sustained PR impact.

Where should the links point to?

While it’s the dream to have journalists link directly to your product or service pages, the media is becoming increasingly savvy to SEO practices and what link builders/digital PRs are trying to achieve. It is very tricky to get them to link to these pages because there’s no real reason to; they aren’t relevant to them or their audience.

In most cases, the journalist will either amend it to a homepage link, or remove it entirely. A homepage link is always preferable in this instance, but there is another way. Where possible, digital PRs create campaign landing pages, which gives the journalist more incentive to link to because it hosts more data/more information than what was provided in the initial pitch, or press release.

SEO-minded PRs will include relevant internal links within that landing page to direct the SEO equity accordingly.

Digital PRs that work closely with SEOs will also have the added advantage of being able to pinpoint exactly which pages would benefit the most from high-quality links, and then create a strategy around this.

It’s always a better tactic to see where you can make ‘marginal gains’ and influence keywords in positions 2-20, than to try and close the gap between your domain and a competitor’s domain. This is because, in many cases where the competitor brand is bigger than your own, you’ll get disheartened by the total number of links they have, and wonder how on earth you’re going to secure hundreds, thousands (or even millions!) of links to catch up with them.

How soon can I build links to help with rankings?

The sooner you get started with digital PR activity, the sooner you’ll start to close that gap. Or, in the case where none of your competitors are doing PR, the further you’ll get ahead.

But link building should never be a scattergun approach; it needs careful consideration and a well-thought out strategy with various tactics and techniques.

Start by thinking which methods would work well from your business, and how much time you can realistically dedicate to each one per month. Alternatively, get in touch with a freelancer or agency who can become an extension of your team.

If reactive PR is one of your chosen tactics, then consider investing in a media enquiry service such as ResponseSource, or keeping a close eye on #journorequest on X.

If thought leadership is involved, then you’ll want to start pitching expert opinion pieces to a carefully crafted list of reputable and relevant publications.

In conclusion

Not all publications link out, and that isn’t something to be disheartened about. The benefits of digital PR are vast, with brand awareness at the heart of it (as is the case with traditional PR). But where a link is included, and it’s not tagged up with the ‘nofollow’ attribute, you can celebrate in knowing that you’ve received another ‘vote of confidence’, and over time will be rewarded with increased online visibility and engagement.

About the author

Becca Tee is the Digital PR Lead at Repeat Digital, an East Midlands-based agency which supports marketing managers with their SEO, PPC, and PR. Its primary goal is to help businesses to increase their online visibility and gain more sales/leads.