Linkbuilding with Digital PR

I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge , hints and tips I've built up over the years . Today , I'm going to talk about link building with digital PR . Okay , so we'll start with the very big digital PR . Well , the PR stands for public relations .

So what we're looking at is how we use digital public relations , or digital PR , to help us with link building . So , just to say , digital PR is considered a white hat method of link building because , as you'll find out as we talk about it , you're not paying people directly just to link to you .

You are trying to get people to link to you , but the way you go about it is by . You're really you're bringing content to people and then , with an ask of , would you link to us ? You're not paying them to link to you , so that the work around it is to promote your content and get it in front of people who might would be willing to link to you .

So that's why it's considered white hat , and digital PR seems to have come as a sort of an answer to a reaction to the Penguin algorithms back in 20s of 12 , 2013 time , where , prior to that , people used to live pretty much just pay other sites to link to them and there was an open markets in it .

Then the Penguin algorithm came along and Google hit really hard on sites that were just buying links and I got hit in that myself . We bought it at UK . We got hit by Penguin . We had to disavow a load of links and think of our strategy and you .

Digital PR is one of the strategies that emerged from the sort of the wreckage of Penguin , and this is where people , instead of spending their budget on buying links , they would instead spend their budget on promoting content that they created with the aim of attracting links .

So the two pieces of it are that generally in a digital PR campaign , you will create a piece of content related to your topic and then you will spend time approaching journalists or the website owners with the story of your brand and the story of that piece of content that you've created , in the hope that they will then link to you because they want to share

that story with their readers , their audience , and you're hoping that it's part of doing that where they will link back to you but you don't require people to link . That's the difference . There's no exchange of cash in return for them covering the story and then hopefully linking back to you .

You can always ask them and they might do it , and I think I've seen plenty of people who specialize in digital PR and confide it frustrating when people will reference their content but not link to it .

But still , it's still positive having your product , your story , being spoken about on other places , even if it's not linked , because it can raise your brand awareness and people might then go and Google to try and find you and increase your brand searches and increase traffic just like that way , which over time will spiral and get you more links .

So this is the whole theory about digital PR is it's kind of link building without link building ? You know what I mean .

But yeah , the very much aim of digital PR and it's the KPI that lots of digital PR firms that specialize in doing digital PR will measure themselves on is the amount of links and the amount of volume of traffic that they will , that their PR work will send to their clients .

Now , as digital PR is considered a white hat sort of clean , legitimate tactic for link building , there's actually loads of public case studies of how firms have used digital PR to build links and build brand awareness , which you don't get with other types of SEO , which might be a little bit more shady or people are not willing to share .

Yeah , there's lots of examples out there that you can refer to , especially because some of the brands that actually spend a lot of money on this because digital PR is not actually cheap , because there's a lot of work in creating original content pieces and there's a lot of work in actually doing the outreach and getting hold of journalists and pitching basically .

So it's not a cheap thing necessarily to do . So a lot of the brands that do it are quite big brands and they're the brands that aren't afraid of talking about what they're up to , because they know who the competition is and there might be often times there's barriers to entry to get into those industries .

So it tends to be a little bit less secretive than some of the sort of the niche site stuff and the more shady stuff , shady tactics that people might use that they don't want to talk about for fear of being outed . So , yeah , there's loads of really good examples out there , so let's look at a few of them now .

If you listen to other podcasts on online marketing and SEO , you've probably come across Adverturamsearchintelligencecouk and a guy called Ferry , who I think is the MD there or the founder . He actually gives in his adverts examples of actual case studies that they've done for clients .

So a couple that come to mind are they did one where what would computer game characters earn in real life ?

So they took the top 50 computer game characters like Mario from Mario Kart and Super Mario Brothers and all those things like that , and then worked out what the average wage would be for someone of their occupation and then ranked them in order and then put this out to the journalist world . And then they got picked up .

Loads of places picked up the content and wrote pieces about it on their own websites and linked back to it . So that's one of their examples . Another great example of theirs , for a really quite boring subject , but that actually they got loads of links for , was placed the best place to pass your driving test in the UK .

Their client in this case was a firm of driving instructors , so people that teach people to drive and they create this piece yeah , where's the best place to pass your driving test in the UK ?

And how they did this was they found data , freely available data , government data that showed the pass rate at all the different test centres around the UK and from that I did a quick bit of analysis just to work out which driving centre people were most likely to pass in in order , so they could say the easiest place to pass is X and the hardest place to

pass is Y . And they then put this out and this piece of content was great because it mentioned lots of different areas around the UK and that gets picked up by lots of local papers with their websites in the UK .

So it's a great way of getting lots of localised links , because there's nothing that these local papers like more than being able to compare themselves with other regions . So that's another good example of having a good hook . In this case , you know where's the easiest place to pass your driving test , and that will be picked up by journalists and written about .

If you're interested in finding out more about digital PR , then there's a course on digitalprcoursecom that I'm not affiliated with anyway and I'm just putting this out there because the guy who runs it , mark Roof . He found fame on the internet when he actually got on TV stations all around the world and lots of coverage just for himself .

When he hired a billboard like a big advertising billboard in the UK with a , put a picture himself on saying date mark . He was trying to find a date and he got 2,000 applications for people wanting to date him and a huge amount of coverage online . And it's that kind of creativity that you kind of need for great digital PR campaigns .

And he's got a whole course dedicated to digital PR how to come up with ideas for campaigns and how to execute them . So that's at digitalprcoursecom . So , yeah , highly recommended if you want to discover more about this and how to implement it at a higher level than I can possibly share . Thanks for listening to episode 64 of SEO is not that hard .

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I'm at channel five on Twitter . You can email me at podcast at keywordspeopleusecom . Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO . Is not that hard .