Digital PR can oftentimes be used to run alongside your SEO efforts and has very quickly become one of the leading ways to create new backlinks and buzz towards a client’s website. This process enables some really high-quality backlinks which move the needle and can also generate some pretty positive results when ranking for long-tail keywords, trending news items or taking up more SERP results for your brand name.

Boosting brand authority is the basic game of anyone who is involved in SEO; this is usually done by creating targeted content that your site visitors want to read and also get information from, but without ranking that content, you won’t get many visitors. This is why digital PR can become your best friend.

Digital PR is one service that is often overlooked by smaller SEO companies who still use traditional link-building methods such as guest posts and local citations. These strategies are great for smaller brands such as a local shop, but businesses that are aiming for national rankings can get great value from a good digital PR campaign.

Boosting brand authority enables you to rank higher in Google by giving your website a boost in trust. Google tends to devalue brand new websites, as they have no authority and no one has vouched for them yet; they have no idea who is publishing this information, and as a result, they usually don’t promote new websites until they have demonstrated that they are valuable and trusted by the industry they target.

Branding is critical for SEO and all digital channels in 2026 and beyond. This market is ever-evolving, but we can see from data that some of the best-ranked and high-traffic websites are all based around current news. These sites are an excellent way to get traffic quickly and build trust in your brand name and website right from the launch.

Link hunting or copy-and-paste strategies which use templates are often the part of the PR industry that is killing results; these often have some type of content farm which reuses the same marketing angles over and over again and leads to poor results, or even worse, large-scale news sites start to reject your stories as they seem spammy or don’t generate clicks.

Having a story that seems too commercial means you will likely get some users in the comment section of that site who complain or simply click the back button on their browser. Since these metrics get measured by news sites, they will see that users are upset and bouncing off the website when they start reading your submitted story; this means bad news for both you and the news site, and as a result, you will likely lose trust with them.

Digital PR was once seen as the domain of the big brand names who had thousands to spend, but over time the industry has become very watered down and become almost a cookie-cutter template which allows people to buy X numbers of links at X price.

Reducing digital PR down to a cheap commodity has led to decreased effectiveness of this strategy, and now people view it as just another way to purchase high-quality links from an established website.

Digital PR, when done correctly, can produce so much more than just links; the ROI on a good digital PR campaign can be measured over years and maybe even decades. The issue is that SEO agencies and the industry itself tend to boil things down only to one metric, such as links.

Digital PR can really kickstart a viral marketing campaign for your brand or client’s brand; you can even use it to rank for a keyword directly, as a lot of these news websites have an extremely high level of trust. You can also convey your brand’s personal message and weave it into your news story; these are often neglected strategies when we boil it down to just links.

A good digital PR campaign requires studying each website that you want to publish on and then tailoring your content to each of them. Each of these sites has formatting rules and publishing rules, so don’t assume that you can just copy and paste the same things over and over and that you will always get a live backlink from each website, as some are extremely selective about which stories make it, and you don’t always get to leave a live backlink.

Finding out what types of news stories get published but also get traction and clicks or even go viral is critical information; you can only get this data by studying and testing out different PR angles and strategies for your submissions. Learning the ropes may take time, but the payoff will be worth it compared to just trying to get a link back to your website.

Thinking about the real benefits of a good PR campaign is how you can take your campaign and make it pay off in terms of ROI and time investments. Learning the different ways that you can leverage PR to benefit a client and make it a multi-channel talking point is the real skill set that needs to be learned and is the one thing that is most overlooked by those who just look at it from an SEO viewpoint.

A direct result of getting a backlink to your client’s website is not the most optimal way of doing PR; many in the SEO industry get too hung up on getting a dofollow backlink instead of tapping into the real power behind PR. Before the internet, people used to use PR as a storytelling machine and a way to align themselves with certain values. It really is one of the fastest ways to expose the whole of the nation to your story and brand name.

When you take digital PR as a stepping stone that can be leveraged, you really begin to see how it could be beneficial. For example, if you manage to write a great story and get it published by a major news site, then you can create an “as seen on” image that can be used as a trust signal, and you can mention you got a story published in a national newspaper whenever you put out social media posts. But perhaps the biggest leverage of a successful story being published is that you can leverage this to get larger, more mainstream news sites interested in your story.

Many websites have actually used digital PR to establish a whole new business model; these sites take traditional media but use online marketing to drive sales. This is the best of both worlds, as crossing over into mainstream media will drive online sales up and will do so very quickly.

A good example of the power of PR is when you compare it to SEO; SEO is very slow and, at times, expensive, and the process takes a very long time to be able to compete or rank for nationwide keywords, but with digital PR, if you can craft a great story, you can get traffic from the whole of the UK or even the rest of the world, and it can be done pretty quickly. Essentially, digital PR is a great way to leverage another site’s trust and existing traffic levels.

Another thing with digital PR is that it can be used in the offline world. After all, if you can get published online, then why not use that to attempt to get some TV time or exposure on your local news, who are always looking for people to interview? Getting TV exposure for a client or your own business is one way you can create huge leverage from your original PR campaign. The snowball effect really kicks in when you can take one campaign and use it to scale across multiple channels and even over multiple years.

The overall goal of any PR campaign should not be links but instead focus on brand mentions; these can easily be picked up by Google, and you should see a sharp rise in search traffic coming from your brand name. These brand name searches are a critical piece of the puzzle when it comes to your overall SEO strategy; the best converting keywords for most businesses are the business name or variations of it.

Overall we can see that digital PR can work alongside SEO but can also deliver completely separate results such as direct traffic, brand name building, generating viral buzz and even being able to leverage your PR mentions and use them to open doors to other channels such as TV exposure, radio interviews and invites onto podcasts.

We can see that just taking a traditional SEO perspective and using PR to get links is really selling yourself short on what you can do with online PR; it really pays to invest some time and effort into these campaigns, and if possible, speak with an expert who could guide you. If not, at least take a look at successful campaigns that are conducted by other businesses to gain some creative ideas that you can rework and come up with something that fits your own brand or a client’s brand.

When creating a pitch for a client, you may see that they tend to focus on the cost aspects above all else. With enough time in the game, you learn to create short sales pitches that are geared more around talk of lifetime value and positive ROI rather than keywords and page 1 rankings.

In order to pitch a business, you must first understand what problem you are solving for the client, and most of the time that is to increase sales and revenue for the business. This may not be the case for a big brand name who may want more market exposure and visibility, but for most clients a healthy ROI is the number one goal of hiring an agency to help with SEO.

Setting a realistic goal is not something that may have crossed your mind, but it is paramount when it comes to pitching a client and getting them to understand what is realistic when it comes to budgets and length of time to turn things around; SEO is always a long-term process, and it’s vastly important you explain the value that the client will receive if they stick with you over the long run; having some long-term case studies will help to persuade them.

Setting long-term expectations upfront is a great way to avoid negative feedback that you may receive when you are in month 2 of your service. This is simply way too soon to see any results, but the client may not understand that and will wonder why they are giving you money in exchange for very little results or sales. Explaining what value you are bringing to the table for the client should be done as part of the initial proposal.

One of the ways to create a good proposal is to put yourself in the mindset of the customer. You also need to do plenty of homework beforehand; you should learn all about the client’s industry and how their website is currently performing SEO-wise. You should learn about how much revenue they could be generating from SEO, and then you need to create a plan for how you can improve their visibility in search engines.

As you take on more and more clients over the years, you get a feel for what business owners really care about and how to shortcut the process so you can get them to sign on the dotted line and start paying you some money for your services and expertise. One thing you need to do is correct course as you go along, note down some changes after every client meeting, and then evolve your pitch and proposal to ensure you can answer a client’s question and can present the value to them in easy-to-understand words.

One thing to remember is that clients will often get lost when you start explaining keywords and rankings, so switching it over to talk about revenue and sales is a great way to start. ROI is critical for clients to understand; you should be able to explain how ranking for certain keywords will increase sales and also talk about how getting new customers will then start a chain of events that will produce more word-of-mouth marketing and better long-term customer value.

When doing your proposal, it’s important to discuss the industry and also highlight some of the metrics from the clients’ competition; this will give you an idea of how long it would take to beat them, and the client will also gain some insight into how this information could be used to improve their current revenue and also how they could be beating the competition.

Showing the client a page with their competition ranking for a keyword is a great way to get them to understand the value of ranking in that position; most clients already have an understanding of how large their competition is and probably have a good idea of how much money they generate every year. If you display how you could show a strong SEO strategy that could be used to beat the competition, then you will give them an idea of how much value you could bring to the table.

Clients will need to be impressed, so you should do an endless amount of research to present to them in your proposal; this will leave a very good impression with them and also enable them to understand that you have done your homework. If you do this level of homework upfront, imagine how much value you could bring to the table if they kept you under contract. This should be your mindset when you put together a proposal: create value before you ever ask to be paid any money.

There are many things that can derail a proposal, but one of the things many companies fail to realise is that businesses will likely have multiple pitches aimed at them, so you can’t just turn up and assume you’ll get it. If you do a small amount of homework, you must understand that there are many things that a client will consider, including how your SEO process is different from the rest being pitched, pricing, time scale, trust indicators and perhaps the most important one, which is previous case studies in a similar or exact industry.

Clients will expect you to be prepared when you present a proposal, but at the same time, you don’t want to overdo it either; giving them every answer they need may lead them to think about why they need to hire you in the first place. They may even give some of your answers to a rival firm that is willing to do it much cheaper. Always be careful when crafting a proposal not to give away too much information, but make sure you include enough so that the client understands you have done some homework.

You must demonstrate expertise when it comes to your proposal. You should include a plan for what happens if the client decides to go in a new direction; perhaps they want to launch new products, a new marketing campaign or even go after a different set of keywords. Your proposal should demonstrate that you can be adaptable to whatever changes they may need to make.

It can be very difficult when just starting out in SEO to really give the client an idea of your value since you don’t yet have the data to back this up in the way of case study examples. One of the best ways to get around this quickly is to build out your own website; it could be a personal blog, an affiliate site or even ranking your business for some local terms. Either way, before you show your proposal, it’s best to have a wide range of case studies that show you can rank for different keywords in different markets.

Many clients will be getting sales pitches and proposals every day from various digital firms, so something else you need to consider is how much value yours has. No one wants a copy-and-paste proposal, as it shows you really don’t value them or their business; instead, you should take the time to craft a personalised proposal and really study the client’s business to find out what problems they are currently facing.

Clients these days are becoming more savvy to digital marketing and dealing with digital agencies, so to set yourself apart, you should have something unique, a fresh idea, a marketing philosophy or even a special SEO technique that would set you apart from your competition. If you know that you can’t be the best option due to resources, then instead try to be the most unique option; in other words, have something the client can’t find elsewhere.

Value is decided by the marketplace, so even if your proposal is perfect, you may price yourself out of the market. Sometimes that’s by charging too much, and sometimes it may be because of charging too little. If you charge hardly anything, then companies won’t take you seriously and will assume you haven’t prepared for a business that operates at their level of scale.

Another important part of a proposal is keeping it short and concise. You should be going through your proposal and deleting out non-essential fluff; this will ensure you just highlight the issues and how you can fix them. You don’t want your client to get bored when reading it or start skipping over the sections; keep it simple but effective and easy to understand.

When thinking about value for your services, you should look into how your SEO services would boost both sales and the company’s profile. You may want to think about what could happen if the business is expanded, how that would affect revenue and brand visibility, and the owner could increase the value of the business by adding more staff members and even purchase a new location in another town or city to expand the retail side if they sell products. Start thinking about the bigger picture and sell the benefits of that rather than just keywords and rankings.

Large-scale brands with millions of pages and an endless marketing budget are starting to take a real chunk out of the Google search results pages these days; it seems that keywords are becoming harder to rank for than ever before, and with AI now capable of churning out content, it will rapidly change the landscape even further.

Ranking for a profitable keyword or even a keyword that can bring a large amount of traffic to your website or your client’s website is a really great way to boost your brand name and traffic levels. Sometimes this means you need to think small, and instead of going for existing keywords, you should try to rank for overlooked keywords that big-name brands are not creating content for.

This will require time and effort and also require you to get your thinking cap on to come up with a creative solution to the problem and be first to market on a unique content angle that may attract your target market and may even earn you some backlinks.

In order to do this, we need to do some research and dig up some brand-new trending keywords. This requires us to look at places other than a keyword research tool and start gathering in-depth research on our target market and find out how they think and what other sites they use.

Google Trends is a neat little tool which allows you to take a look at various topics and break the data down into smaller segments to find out the search volume over the history of the keyword or even the last year, month or week. This is a great free tool to come up with related topics or even find queries that are trending right now.

A great example might be to find people in your industry whose names are trending; this way you can see who is marketing themselves and get ahead of the curve to secure an interview with them for some exclusive content.

You can also use Google Trends to find out topics and news items that are unrelated to your market. Many firms will overlook this strategy and not realise just how much traffic these generic news terms can generate. Finding a way to blend trending news topics with your market-specific content is a great way to capture attention from a broader audience and increase your brand name online.

Targeting trending news items is a great way to get new eyeballs to your business; most of the time this has no direct effect on sales, as the traffic is likely not interested in your offer, but it could have a real lasting impact when it comes to social shares, engagement and even getting backlinks and mentions to your website, which all increases trust in the eyes of Google.

Another great place to look is forums, which are an often overlooked goldmine for finding new and emerging topics and opinions to write about. Many of these forums are updated with new content every few minutes, and they have a vast minefield of older indexed content that you could work backwards on to find older evergreen topics that you could rework and put a new spin on.

Getting creative to figure out a new angle or commenting on an old topic is a great way to get ahead of the curve in any industry; people often love to see retro topics being discussed again and put into the spotlight. Don’t be afraid to discuss things that had some popularity in the past, as nostalgia can provide many new clicks and visitors to your website, provided you do it correctly.

Forums are also a great way to find out what kind of language your target demographic uses, and you can also join the forum and ask them questions. You can find some real information and find out what the hottest new topics are but also find out what the most talked about and engaged with topic threads are; perhaps you can merge these with a new keyword and create a new piece of content from it.

Social media sites are one of the best places to mine trending keywords; these are often different than nationwide headlines or news, and they also tend to be right at the forefront of the latest breaking news. This means you can see a trending topic and very quickly create some content for it before a major news outlet can put up a dedicated page. This comes in very handy if you lack a budget but want to get a lot of eyeballs to your site quickly.

You can also break down trends within your marketplace and quickly discover something that is gaining traction, such as an influential person or keyword. This can allow you to see untapped value in real time, which allows you to create brand new content ideas that really gain traction quickly. You can even reply or use hashtags to generate traffic, and before long you will start to see retweets, link clicks and engagement.

I also highly recommend sites like Reddit, which are content-heavy and tend to produce some real insights into current market conditions. From here, you can get an idea of a popular new product or even look at complaints about an existing product which you could create content around or even edit your product descriptions to address the current frustrations that the market is giving you feedback on.

Content that is created quickly is often positioned very high in Google’s search index, as it has so few options to display. When major news outlets pick up a story, they tend to cram the search results pages. A breaking news website that picks up stories in real time, such as TMZ, can be a great place to start thinking up ideas and then creating stories that might be able to predict the future.

This might require a lot of work upfront, and sometimes stories will be hit and miss, but if you pay close attention, you should be able to spot some recurring patterns, such as a celebrity saying something controversial and then appearing in a new movie or launching a book a month after.

You could also think about new product launches that are going to happen 2 or 3 years down the line and start planning ahead. For example, if you are sure that a current football manager should be sacked, then why not create a detailed content piece beforehand and then launch it the second you get the news? This will allow you to be first to market and create some buzz around your brand name.

You can also do this with the latest industry news, such as a product launch like the latest iPhone or GTA gaming title. You know, based on the success of previous titles, that a sequel is going to be released, so why not plan ahead? You could also do this for things that may happen in the future.

Predicting things 5 years down the line might be difficult to do, but if you have your finger on the pulse of a market, you can probably guess which direction it will go and also be able to guess which companies or influencers may be at the top of the market. Creating content for them now and securing an interview before they go mainstream is an excellent idea.

In order to get trending topics and keywords, you should plan ahead and be creative in thinking about what your market would like to read about, but also don’t be afraid to go super generic and think about news items in the future. Sporting events such as the World Cup and major boxing matches also attract a lot of attention online and shouldn’t be ignored just because they don’t align with what you’re trying to sell.

Figuring out a way to blend the content together and make it relevant to your market while targeting popular keywords is a great way to show your creative side and also get some links and traffic from broader topics and websites that usually have never heard of you. This is a great way to build trust with Google while also aligning your brand with the current wave of newsworthy items.

Mining trending topics and keywords can be a full-time job, but if you have some creativity, you can find a way to cross over into mainstream topics and find a way to make your content relevant to that discussion. Doing this opens your brand and business up to all kinds of new and trending topics that otherwise you wouldn’t have been able to tap into. This will bring new eyeballs and new opportunities to the table.

A great example of small businesses using generic marketing trends to profit is small pizza shops that give away free food if England wins the World Cup. The sheer amount of attention this marketing effort gets is well worth the amount that they would give away for free should England actually win. Sometimes you have to see the long-term value in creating a newsworthy offer that gets mainstream traction.