Digital PR is the use of online channels to strategically develop a favorable public perception and boost your brand’s image. If executed properly, digital PR can serve as a steering wheel for an organization to help them maneuver the perception of their brand in the digital environment. As a result, your audience will have a captivating narrative about your product or service.

Before the digital era, most organizations utilized traditional PR strategies, which focused on live in-person events, broadcasts, and print media. Things are much different today because most customers and businesses have gone digital. Compared to traditional PR strategies, digital PR offers a more targeted reach and greater measurability. Therefore, brands that desire to stay ahead of the curve must turn to digital strategies and tap into various online channels, including digital publications, search engines, and social media.   

Companies that master the art of digital PR have better search rankings on Internet searches. Also, they enjoy increased brand awareness, better recognition, and greater website traffic. And since Digital PR helps you engage with customers better and nurture relationships, you can keep your existing customers and attract prospects effectively. This article will show you digital PR tips that can help you grow your business.

Optimize Your Website

Every business that desires to improve its digital PR strategy must have an SEO-optimized website. Your website will typically be the first place a prospective customer would go in search of information about your business. It makes it easy for customers to find you, discover what you do, and get answers they may be looking for regarding your offerings. Beyond having a website, you must ensure that it is optimized for search engine visibility. According to Digital PR, a digital PR agency, ‘’Websites that meet today’s development standards are critical to obtaining effective search engine results and displaying the image you would like for your brand.’’ 

To optimize your website, conduct a thorough keyword research. This will help you identify the terms and phrases that your target market typically uses when searching the internet for services and products related to yours. When you uncover relevant high-volume keywords that align with your business’ offerings, utilize them when creating your site’s content and incorporate those keywords in your page’s content description. Enhance your website’s visibility on SERPs (search engine result pages) by optimizing your on-page elements. Such elements include headings, URL structures, Meta descriptions, and Meta titles.   

Set Your Digital PR Goals

If you are considering launching a digital PR campaign, you’ll likely have a specific business need in mind. Of course, most business owners want to use their campaigns to improve leads and conversions, but it’s crucial to identify a specific mission. For instance, you might be an upcoming brand trying to establish your authority in your industry or an established brand looking to break into new audience niches. Whatever your bigger mission, identify and write it down.

Bear in mind that digital PR isn’t just about putting out great content and waiting for results. You must know your audience and where they spend most of their time. Having goals from the start makes it easier to track them and demonstrate value in the end. Ensure your goals are SMART- specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and time-bound. You can track the success of your digital PR campaigns based on leads, conversion, brand mentions, high authority links, share searches, social media shares, and organic traffic to your website. 

Build High-Quality Backlinks

SEO backlinks are links from other websites to your business site. It is an off-page SEO strategy because the content is not on your website. Google (News - Alert) and other search engines use backlinks to determine the relevancy of websites for search queries and the authoritativeness of website content. When you have high-quality backlinks, you increase your Google search rankings and improve your visibility. This translates to greater website traffic for you and higher conversion rates.

You must ensure that your backlinks are on pages or websites that are relevant to the one you’re sharing. For example, if you sell hair growth products, you might want to search out backlinking opportunities on hair-related blogs. People reading hair blogs would be more likely to click on your link than those reading travel blogs. Although backlinking is crucial in digital marketing and PR, you must avoid overdoing it. Search engines, including Google, collect information on backlinks that go against their rules. Excessive backlinking can be perceived by search engines as spam. Also, if you get so many backlinks too quickly, it might appear to search engines that you are involved in SEO black hat tactics. Remember, you must always create time to develop high-quality content for your website to satisfy user intent.

Make sure you link to websites other than yours. External linking may seem like you are sending visitors away from your site, but it is super beneficial for SEO. Citing your information sources and providing links for references improves your credibility and enables search engines to determine the usefulness and relevance of your website’s content.   

Have an Insightful Angle

To have a successful digital PR campaign, you must offer a fresh angle that will grab the audience’s attention. Unlike other types of campaigns, digital PR campaigns are more time and resource-intensive to develop. Repurposing existing campaigns can make the process more cost-effective and easier for you. This helps reduce your workload and cuts down the cost-per-click. One of the ways to do this is by focusing on hero campaigns with multiple angles and targets. Such campaigns typically take more time to develop, research, and implement. As a result, such types of digital PR campaigns are designed to be evergreen, and they consist of various angles to get as many links as possible. 

To ensure your campaigns can be reused, try to build in a seasonal hook. With this, you can reuse the campaigns yearly and tweak the outreach for a different seasonal event. For instance, if you tie an outreach that is relevant for your business to a recurring event like summer heatwaves, Christmas, or Family Day, your campaign can always be reused since these events will always recur. Be open to getting inspiration from various online media, such as news outlets, Reddit, SEO Monitor, and Google Trends.