These days link building is a very large topic in the SEO industry. Links are simply not as important as they used to be in the big SEO pie chart, but they are still one of the fundamentals. These days people in the SEO industry need to focus on getting better links rather than just getting a link from anywhere they can; being more selective is the way to win in modern SEO practices.
There are many different ways in which people acquire backlinks to boost up rankings, but one of the most effective, and perhaps the one that yields the best results, is digital PR. Earning media coverage for your website has multiple benefits, with the first being getting backlinks to your website from extremely high-quality websites with built-in traffic, authority, and great SEO metrics.
Many will disregard digital PR as a strategy, as they think it can only be done by large brands that have something interesting to share, but they are incorrect. Even the smallest of businesses can get noticed online these days, with many small business owners getting even more creative with their marketing efforts. There is no such thing as a small business these days; on the internet, every business can become an overnight viral sensation.
The power of digital PR is that it builds links, it builds social media shares, it builds viral marketing, and of course you get some direct traffic from the news websites themselves. All news websites want a great story with some viral element attached to it; they tend to get a lot of traffic based around celebrities, health trends, or even once-in-a-lifetime news stories. Small businesses need to get more creative when submitting to news websites, but in general you can always find a way to make your business newsworthy.
Digital PR is still a very new link-building method; however, we can see that branding is now forming a bigger part of the overall SEO picture. You can no longer just have a website that ranks; instead, what you want to do is to build a brand name that people know and trust. Putting together viral marketing campaigns is just one way of doing this, but with viral content, you often see that it’s very untargeted; you don’t get relevant links from sites within your industry, and most of the time you don’t get to really feature the brand name which you want to promote.
The best idea for digital PR seems to be analysis of top shared content and then focusing on what each of these pieces has in common. You should then find a way to make this relate back to your client’s brand and then promote both the idea and the company, never get caught up in one or the other; instead, never find a happy medium that will allow you the best of both worlds.
Just having your brand name mentioned by various websites is already a win. After you promote your brand name, you will find more searches for your brand are being done on Google. This will lead to Google giving you some more trust, but it will also lead to getting further attention for your website in general; more social media shares would be one example of this. These kinds of metrics will all start feeding into an overall picture that Google is developing of your business and brand name. In short, you want to get as much attention as possible for your business even if it doesn’t lead to an increase in sales or backlinks.
Volume of links is often what people want; everyone wants to hit the jackpot and get thousands of links from a single campaign, but this just isn’t realistic. What you want is some good coverage for your brand name that will filter in over months instead of a quick surge of links that fall off after a week. A steady volume of quality, related links over time will always beat having a huge spike in links followed by a drop-off.
You don’t need to be the most popular brand online to win; you need to have the most links from within your market. Getting a link from a website that is in the same market as you is incredibly hard to get due to the fact that you might be competitors. Google views these kinds of links as extremely hard to get and thus rewards them accordingly.
When putting together a digital PR campaign, you want to look at many different things. You want to look at which sites would be the best to submit to and how to create something interesting that the audience of that site would care about, and perhaps the most important metric is to figure out how you can align your client’s brand name with the angle you want to pitch. If you can’t make it fit, then obviously this strategy won’t work. You need to find a way to get the perfect blend, but you should also try to get some SEO benefit from the press releases themselves.
A digital PR campaign can get your client some direct traffic, especially if you submit it to high-traffic websites and mainstream news outlets, but let’s get it clear: you should still try to include some keywords in your campaign as you may be able to get the press release ranked directly, which can create many benefits for your client. You can get direct traffic, brand exposure, and also get a link back from a page that is ranking well on Google.
Since Google is getting smarter every single year, they can really put together a complete picture from content these days. It can take things like anchor text and figure out the larger context to see if it relates to the article that it’s in the middle of. Links that are placed in the middle of content tend to be the most powerful, and one of the things that Google wants to do is find some natural anchor text, so instead of keyword anchor text usage, try using the brand name on your press releases instead.
A good PR campaign is way more than just a single press release; it needs to be crafted to cover multiple angles. You always want to have multiple follow-ups, and if possible, get a conversation going about your brand on social media. To do this, you need some kind of narrative; you need to follow up a press release with another one that has an alternative spin or gives the reaction to the first one. This can help to keep your brand in the news and gives you further chances to create a narrative that you control.
Creating a positive spin around your brand name can be tricky; you always want to ensure that you think very carefully about your creative ideas and think about how they might backfire or be taken out of context by an audience. It’s a good idea to have a few people check them over before you go into full-scale launch mode. Try putting out a small-scale test run on a blog and see how people react. This can be as simple as putting up a blog post with a similar theme or creative idea and then testing the waters by posting it on LinkedIn or Twitter to gain some feedback.
The most critical aspect of digital PR is building trust in your brand but also having your brand name seen in as many high-traffic areas as possible. You have to attract eyeballs in order to have them know who you are; they can’t do that if they haven’t heard about you, so you really want to push for a site with nationwide readership so you can reach the maximum number of people within your country.
Brand building is more important than ever when it comes to the link-building process. Many who are from the old-school SEO mindset don’t understand that not getting a backlink isn’t the end of the world; as long as someone shares your content, mentions your brand name, or even reads your digital PR, then you have already started the process of them getting to know you. The new world is about creating branding messages that last a long time rather than a short-term spike.
The most important thing to remember about the link-building process is that, in general, the harder the link is to get, the more valuable it will be viewed by Google. Getting a link from Wikipedia, for example, shows that you have created a valuable resource, and since this site is checked over for accuracy, you get a very high-metric link from a trusted source. You only need to acquire a few of these links to really get a nice boost.
When thinking about building links, you should forgo the older methods that no longer hold as much value; things like article marketing and directory links in bulk simply no longer have as much effect. Instead, try to aim at the top of the pyramid and get the top-tier links that not everyone can get; these are the types of links you can get when you do a great job at building your brand and being trusted within an industry. With these links, you don’t need many of them, so you can really focus your efforts on the best strategies to get them.