SEO Strategies: Reactive PR vs. Expert Quote Link Building

James Dooley: Hi so I'm joined today with Chris Pontell from Linkify and today's question is about reactive PR versus expert quote link building which is better and why they're both different and if you can do both um but there's some differences and nuances between the two so expert quote link building is inbound so journalists are sourcing experts and you can view those sources and then make your decisions on on on uh which journalist you're going to reply to and and therefore which publication you're you're potentially going to receive a link from um oftentimes these are not going to be holistically on like on your brand and your message rather you're going to enhance the uh the point that the journalist is trying to make within their article um there's a great SEO play and there are some amazing publications that you can win links from and many of these publications are not receptive to PR uh campaigns so it'll either be freelance writers or journalists or the publication as a whole just isn't doing any form of PR um inbound from you as a PR so there's only real way to win these links like the only way is to answer uh expert commentary requests from the journalists or writers that are sourcing for their articles which are going to be on these publications PR campaigns however are um outbound so you need to come up with an idea or a story that's going to resonate with the the journalists um that write for the the publications and you need to build up a media list of journalists and you need to come up with your story idea and then you need to send your idea to the journalist so kind of like cold outreach but not because the journalists are expecting um these sorts of of emails from PRs all day every day um and also uh over a period of time you'll start developing relationships with these journalists so you know you'll say hey Judy it's me again you know we've got another idea uh we got another story we're working on and um you can uh do really well that way because of building these relationships and also you have much more control over the narrative with these uh with this sort of uh link building because you're coming up with the idea uh on behalf of the client and the client is going to be the feature of that whether it's a data campaign or an expert commentary campaign or uh a news jacking or a reactive piece so it's it's the euros is happening now maybe you've got a uh sports client and you want to talk about um something to do with the euros that's going to resonate with the journalists so there's the nuances between the two uh the reason I would suggest to do both oh one more nuance you'll find much more of a US slant on the expert quote side so uh a lot more us publications um and you'll find much more of a UK slant on the digital PR side the best thing to do is to do both because you want as many different referring domains and you want to be featured as an expert in as many different variations as possible so a great way that we recommend as an agency is to start with expert quote commentary um start building those relationships with journalist and then start getting an idea of what would work well from a PR campaign perspective and then you can leverage the network that you've built on the expert quotes in order to try and deliver your PR campaigns so going through this and try to simplify it slightly right a reactive PR campaign is where you reach out to journalists and reporters with a story or a trend topic and then you're trying to pitch that idea to them as being we think that you would like to write about this and it's an outbound PR campaign where an expert quote link building campaign is inbound where the journalist and reporter is writing about this topic whether you get added to that article or don't get added to the article they're going to write about this topic and what they're wanting is some third party experts to add and make valid what claims they're saying delivering from an expert in whatever niche that you are in and that and you're looking to place maybe a snippet of content and then they hopefully willing to backlink through back to your website so obviously there's a big SEO value for both what you find is easier obviously you own Linkify and you do both reactive PR and you also do expert link building from your point is any of them easier than the other to get those placements in the articles or not are they both the same great great uh summary of the difference between the two and great question as well I would say it boils down to uh a handful of things but it's really important um so first and foremost I would say the niche of the website which you want to build links for so you will have some niches are very very PR friendly so when you think about reactive campaigns or even data campaigns you've got to think that you are going to the journalist and you are saying hello journalist this story would be good for your readers um for your content quota it's going to do well if you publish it um it's going to get traffic and your bosses are going to be happy so in order to do that you've got to come up with something interesting and creative so there are certain niches which you can do these sorts of campaigns for day in day out so things like gardening for example many publications are always writing about gardening and then the seasonality as well if you're in in a period of time where you know gardening is something which is interesting that can be a perfect niche in order to do a reactive campaigns for um if you are a particular expert within your niche as well so a technology expert you can do really well with things like um if there's been a big data leak you could run a reactive campaign on you know tips on how to safely use public Wi-Fi in an airport so it really does depend first and foremost on the niche which the client is in you can do well with both but that's that's the first thing to think about secondly you want to think about the client's mentality behind the link building so if the client is very conscious about um their brand and how they want to be portrayed and their flexibility as well that can be a big guidance on which path that they would take that's the that's the the discussion that we would have with a client first so with the reactive pieces reactive campaigns you can have a lot more control on on the narrative and therefore the the client can give you know sign off on a campaign if they if they're happy with it but the client also needs to be aware before that they engage and you take them on as a client that we can't just say hello James Dooley from you know Searcher let's say yeah I want to do a PR campaign well we can't run a campaign saying James Dooley has got a link building agency called Searcher because nobody is going to publish that it's not interesting so you've got to give us the freedom to come up with something interesting and while we can control the narrative to an extent we still have to come up with something interesting that's going to resonate with the the journalists the expert quote commentary we can know the article that the journalist is is working on but we need the freedom to be able to pitch as you and come up with something interesting and leverage your expertise for the journalist to quote so two very different paths with the same aim which is links but you've got to understand the nuances of the client and the results that they want to get and the flexibility that they're going to be uh happy to give you in the process. Chris Pontell: Superb ampers there Chris so like for me to summarize this people ask me quite a lot what is better reactive PR or expert quote link building now what I actually took from this the most from Chris is that there's certain websites that do not allow for PR campaigns so if you try and pitch them with a PR campaign to write that on that article those websites will not allow it so if you want to have a nice big referring domain count kind of profile which is what you do need for SEO to be ranking in the top of Google then you want to be doing both because these different types of referring domains that you can get from expert quote link building versus reactive PR so Chris obviously you're doing this day in day out at Linkify.io like where can people get hold of you can you do both reactive PR campaigns as well as expert quote link building campaigns like where can people get hold of you and where you hanging out at present online uh yeah I mean we do both uh we do PR campaigns and we do expert quote link building we love to have a chat with the client um first if they want some guidance on which path to take we would all we would normally recommend to do both start with one um once you've ran like a number of PR campaigns and you've sort of got all all of the links that you can get well not can get because you can always get new links you can always get featured and it's always good to get signal after signal after signal new links new links new links um but we would recommend to have a chat with us and you can find us at Linkify.io uh um talk to me on X Linkify or book a call through our Calendly the widgets on the website um but yeah as anyone would say it's a holistic approach do as much as you can but don't do more than you can um and and pick one place to start and then move on um I think that's the best advice I can give good advice so anyone watching this if you've got any comments leave a comment in the comment section what you feel could be better in reactive PR versus expert quote link building are you doing either of them as part of your SEO strategies if not I strongly recommend you start to look at doing both but let us know in the comments what you think is the main difference and whether you feel one is better than the other.