How to Leverage Digital PR in 2022 to Benefit Your SEO Strategy

How to Leverage Digital PR in 2022 to Benefit Your SEO Strategy

Any business that’s serious about its SEO strategy knows the importance of acquiring high-value backlinks. For the uninitiated, Google judges the authoritativeness of a website by analyzing the quantity – and the quality – of the backlinks a site has. The logic goes that if many reputable websites are linking back to yours, then yours must also be authoritative.

That’s why articles on Wikipedia, the New York Times and the BBC will most likely rank higher in Google than any blog posts you’ve written on the same topic.

However, for Google, the word “reputable” is in a constant state of flux. Every year, Google’s algorithm gets better at ignoring what it considers low-value backlinks. As a result, businesses need to continually revise their approach to earning backlinks, and rethink their formerly tried-and-true methods.

Essentially, what we’ve seen over the years is Google weeding out low value “paid for” backlinks and instead placing a lot of value in organically “earned” backlinks. For example, getting mentioned in an article in the Wall Street Journal or the Economist, with a link back to your site. But these wins rarely appear out of thin air (especially for smaller companies). To secure these wins, companies need to leverage digital PR techniques. And when it comes to strategies that work, here are three of the most effective digital PR methods in 2022.

Approach Guest Posting the Right Way

Guest posting used to be so simple. Businesses could simply pay sites that existed solely to host guest posts, include links back to their own sites, and then sit back and reap the benefits.

But Google has long since gotten wise to the fact that these sites would publish pretty much anything, and that the backlinks from the sites didn’t represent authority so much as pay-for-play. Google wants to provide searchers with high-quality content, and these sites provide anything but. So Google’s algorithm began excluding these results from search calculations, and the reputation of guest posting became tarnished.

However, guest posts are still a valuable method to earn backlinks. The key is to avoid spammy guest posting sites and focus instead on legitimate news sites that accept guest posts. Plenty of reputable, industry-focused websites accept guest posts as part of their goal to give readers relevant information on a specific subject. Every industry has around a dozen or so authoritative  digital publications that report on that industry, legitimate news sites that readers – and Google – trust.

Of course, these sites are far more discerning and frequently have strict guidelines that guest posts must follow. The posts need to provide the publication’s readers with something they will derive value from. The sites likely won’t print anything that’s shamelessly promotional, so it’s best to stick to providing readers with usable information, or that solves an important problem that readers have. It’s a bit more work to get a guest post accepted at these publications, but any backlinks will carry far more SEO weight than those from the more mercenary guest-posting sites.

Learn How to Leverage Press Releases

Just as with guest posting, there are good ways and not-so-good ways to use press releases to earn high-quality backlinks. One approach is to use a “wire,” or press release distribution service. With these services, companies pay to scatter their press releases to the four winds, out to any publications that the service is syndicated with. There are still genuine PR benefits to using wires, but when it comes to generating backlinks, wires are inefficient at best.

Businesses should instead take a more customized approach, and pitch stories to specific journalists at high-quality publications, ones that people in your sector actually read. As with the guest post pitching, it’s important not to be overly salesy. Take the time to figure out what the writers and editors are looking for. Journalists are always hungry for good stories. Take a look at the publication and think about how to frame your story in a way that the editors might find captivating.

It doesn’t need to be earth-shattering news. It could be a major new partnership, a funding round, or a merger, depending on the scope of the publication. The bar for acceptance may be higher, but so are the SEO rewards. Make it as easy as possible for these sites to say yes to your pitch by focusing on the newsworthiness of the story and how it fits into a broader context within your industry.

Tap Into the Podcasting Boom

Many people already know the PR-SEO value of guest posts and press releases, but fewer are leveraging the backlink value of podcasts. Sure, podcasts are primarily an auditory medium, but they still hold a great deal of SEO potential.

Many podcasts are part of a bigger media organization or company, and therefore host show notes and episode links on their parent website. And many of these parent websites are authoritative in the eyes of Google. So if you’re featured as a guest on an episode, you’ll be mentioned in the show notes and will often receive a backlink to your website.

As with guest posts and press release pitches, good podcasts are subject to higher barriers to entry. Hosts want to make their podcasts as informative and helpful as possible. So take the time to think about what the podcast’s audience is genuinely interested in. Look for podcasts that cover your industry, where you can demonstrate genuine value to the podcast’s audience. To make things easier, you can reuse the talking points and ideas you developed in your guest post pitching.

As Google’s search algorithm becomes ever more sophisticated, earning backlinks that provide genuine SEO value is becoming ever more difficult. The old pay-to-play methods made things simple, but those methods aren’t fooling Google anymore.

But with a little creativity and a clear plan, you can soon start developing captivating digital PR pitches that generate coverage in legitimate media outlets. And not only are the backlinks generated from this activity highly valuable, you also get the added benefit of media coverage for your business.

Author

  • Rudi Davis

    Rudi Davis is head of agency at Intelligent Relations, a PR platform that uses artificial intelligence and GPT-powered text generation to augment and improve a variety of PR functions that have traditionally been done by agency professionals.

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