Digital PR & SEO: My Favorite Link-Building Strategy

Digital public relations (PR) generates noise or awareness for your brand or product online. 

These days, digital PR is one of my favorite link-building strategies, and it is incredibly helpful in supporting your SEO strategies (beyond just backlinks).

There are many different types of digital PR campaigns, including data-driven content creation and creative content campaigns. 

Digital PR typically involves creating something exciting and engaging that is closely related to your brand’s product or service and then pitching that story to journalists to generate press coverage. 

Over the years, my team and I have created hundreds (not kidding) of digital PR campaigns and generated thousands of backlinks and press mentions. 

In this article, I’ll explain how a digital PR strategy can help your SEO strategy and show you how to do it with real-life examples, a pitch template, and more.

What is Digital PR?

Digital PR generates noise, coverage, and media mentions for your company’s product or services.

Typically, you’ll create a piece of content that says something interesting. You’ll often use data and graphics to tell stories or provide unique insights to readers and journalists. 

I’ve found that the most successful digital PR campaigns:

• Tap into a narrative that we as a society are already talking about, and journalists are already writing about.
• Allow multiple ways to pitch the story, such as national, regional media, and hyper-local outlets.

After creating the content, you’ll need to pitch this story to journalists to get them to write about your campaign and, hopefully, link back to your website, at least as far as SEO is concerned.

Several types of content can be created, such as reports that include unique data from your customer base data that you’ve collected from commissioned surveys or creative campaigns. 

You can certainly work with a digital PR agency to execute this strategy, or you can do it yourself, as I’ve done with our companies.

How Does Digital PR Help with SEO?

Digital PR campaigns can be beneficial for SEO and help accelerate your website's rankings and performance. There are a few reasons why.

Building Backlinks

Digital PR campaigns are extremely effective for building backlinks back to your website.

From the beginning, Google has considered backlinks an important search engine ranking factor. While Google no longer publicly promotes its PageRank algorithm, building backlinks to your website can be extremely helpful.

Simply put, if your website accumulates backlinks from high-quality and authority domains, that sends a positive signal to Google that your website and its pages are also high quality, to be trusted, and should rank highly in search results.

You can build backlinks in many different ways, such as guest blogging or creating link bait; however, these methods are often very manual and might only result in a small number of new backlinks. 

Conversely, I’ve found that building backlinks through digital PR is highly scalable and can often result in hundreds of new referring domains from a single viral campaign. Even better, the backlinks that you typically build from a digital PR campaign are usually high-authority, not spammy, and often very relevant to your target audience.

Promote a Positive Brand Signal

Some argue that Google is becoming less reliant on backlinks and that brand mentions are now an essential signal for Google when determining whether your company is legitimate, as Andy Holland argued on the Optimize podcast.

This makes sense. Google’s own Search Quality Rater Guidelines, highlight the process of determining a website’s reputation and E-E-A-T.

Digital PR campaigns not only lead to backlinks, but in the process, your company will likely pick up many brand mentions and media coverage. Some SEOs would argue that this is helpful for search engine performance beyond just accumulating backlinks back to your website.

Types of Digital PR Campaigns

There are many different types of digital PR campaigns to choose from. Here are a few of my favorites.

Surveys

If you lack interesting data, surveys are one of the best ways to create a data source. 

Nerdwallet, a company that helps consumers compare financial products online, created a survey of pet owners and asked them a series of questions about the costs of taking care of their pets, their usage of pet insurance, and more.

NerdWallet surveyed 1,366 pet owners with the help of The Harris Poll and generated some really interesting data points:

Surveys can be expensive, and you’ll typically want to survey at least 1,000 respondents. There are many survey providers out there, and the targeting capabilities and costs will vary pretty widely.

Depending on how specific you want to get in your targeting, the more or less expensive it will be to conduct a survey. For example, if you are just looking to survey Americans, that’d be pretty easy. Still, if you want to survey Americans who own a dog and also have pet insurance, that’d likely be more time-consuming and expensive.

NerdWallet’s survey has accumulated hundreds of backlinks, including from websites like CBS News, SF Gate, and Fox.

Data-Driven Reports

If you don’t have the budget to conduct a survey and you don’t have data on hand from your existing customer base, know that there are many freely available data sources online.

For example, WalletHub published a report titled Best & Worst Cities for Recreation (2024) using freely available data:

WalletHub found data in a variety of places, including from the U.S. Census Burea, TripAdvisor, and The Trust for Public Land:

Many free datasets are available, including those from government agencies like the FBI and other companies that make their data available online.

It is then your job to package that data, find interesting insights, and build a story highlighting those insights.

Best Ofs

To continue with this WalletHub example, they’ve also implemented another one of my favorite strategies: creating rankings or best-of lists.

Campaigns that rank or determine winners and losers are typically fairly successful, and there are many ways to pitch and build backlinks to a page like this.

For example, WalletHub could likely pitch national media for coverage, but they can also pitch local and regional media, too:

WalletHub ranks the best and worst cities for recreation, and it has received coverage from many local media outlets that want to promote its city as one of the best.

For example, WalletHub earned coverage and a backlink from this Tampa-based media outlet:

When creating a best-ofs campaign, you can also pitch the cities, towns, or organizations. 

For example, if you were creating a report on the best colleges in California, you could pretty easily pitch that story to the colleges themselves, who will gladly share this information on their website, securing you a backlink. In the past, I’ve even created badges for these organizations, such as towns, to highlight their ranking and display it on their website.

Creative Campaigns

You can get a little creative or build digital PR campaigns that don’t necessarily rely solely on data to generate coverage.

Take, for example, Auto Trader, who got really creative with their Eau De New Car campaign:

Auto Trader created a very limited edition fragrance designed to smell like the scent of a new car. Using an agency, Auto Trader pitched the campaign to journalists and influencers, generating a lot of buzz. 

Now, you might be thinking, but there is no way that this was a link-building campaign, was it? 

It was.

According to the agency behind the campaign, PRAgency One, the campaign generated 394 backlinks from 169 referring domains within just eight days of its launch. Given the coverage and context surrounding the backlinks, which were focused on the new car smell, these backlinks were highly topical to Auto Trader's new car business.

A Word of Caution

As you brainstorm potential ideas for digital PR campaigns, it might be tempting to stray outside your company’s core topic space. My advice here is to try to stay as in-topic as possible. 

For example, if I were building a company that helped consumers find flights and book travel online, I could likely run a digital PR campaign about the costs of travel this summer travel season, but I wouldn’t want to do a report on the cost of car ownership. You could argue that folks use cars for travel, but car ownership isn’t that closely related to our core topic space of travel.

I’ll show you a real-world example of a digital PR campaign that likely strayed too far away from their core topic area.

I recently saw a report from Betway, a company in the online betting industry, highlighting the top Irish fish and chip shops near the sea. I kid you not. It worked for them; for example, they got a backlink from Irish Central:

But in the context of the best fish and chips restaurants, these backlinks are highly off-topic from their website’s core topical authority (betting/gambling). 

I suspect that search engines like Google are smart enough to see through this backlink and discount it to a degree. Moreover, backlinks like this might even confuse Google about whether Betway is a good source of information on gambling or fish and chips.

A Few Best Practices for Content Creation

Here are a few tips I’d keep in mind as you start creating content for your digital PR campaign.

Tap into a Narrative That Journalists are Already Writing About

The best campaigns, or at least the ones that go most viral, often tap into a narrative journalists plan to write about. On the Optimize podcast, we spoke with Dave Rathmanner, former VP of Content at LendEDU, a consumer finance company. 

Dave and I chatted through digital PR strategy at length. As just a single example, LendEDU published this wonderful report highlighting how much fantasy football players would spend in their leagues that year.

Notice the publication date: September 5th, or the first day of the FL season. Journalists were already going to be writing about football, and likely fantasy football. Dave provided journalists with actionable statistics to include in the pieces of content they were already going to need to write.

Create Fantastic Visuals & Graphics

Helpful graphics are beneficial not only for readers but also for convincing a journalist to want to write about your campaign.

Journalists will also often embed your visuals directly into the content that they are writing, as seen here in coverage of WalletHub’s report on the best cities for recreation:

Graphics are great; I provided them to journalists when pitching. This will also increase the likelihood that you’ll get a backlink when the journalist ultimately writes about your data.

Position the Key Takeaways at the Top of the Webpage

I’m always a fan of making the journalist's life as easy as possible. When publishing your reports, I’d suggest positioning two or three of the key takeaways directly at the top of your webpage. 

Make it easy for journalists to find the headline on your page to get the headline. Don’t make them scroll deep into a piece to find the interesting data point that they should write about.

Keep It Short

I always prefer to keep things short. I’ve found that a 1,500-word report with a clear data presentation will perform much better than an extremely in-depth 5,000-word report.

Journalists have a lot to do each day, and they likely don’t have time to read a 5,000-word report. Keep things short, and allow journalists to get what they need quickly.

You can present the findings with a narrative, but I’ve found that it's best to present the data without a predetermined narrative. Allow the journalists to get the data and then make up their own narrative.

Put Together a Detailed Methodology

If you are creating a data-driven report, you will be asked for your methodology. You should create a clear and detailed methodology at the bottom of your report.

In the aforementioned WalletHub report, you’ll see that they’ve got an extremely in-depth methodology:

The methodology breaks down WalletHub's scoring system, explains the inputs clearly, and allows a journalist to recreate the results if they’d like. 

If you run a survey, you’ll want to explain how many folks were surveyed, how the respondents were selected, when the results were collected, etc.

Pitching Journalists

I’ve always handled the pitching myself, but many companies do opt to work with a PR firm to help distribute their campaign. If you are looking to do it yourself like me, here are a few tips that might be helpful.

You Need to Pitch a Lot, and Focus

I’ve found that you typically need to pitch many journalists for each campaign. Depending on the campaign, I might suggest pitching between 100 and 200 journalists. 

Now, you don’t want to pitch just any type of journalist. 

You’ll want to identify journalists who have previously written about the general topics space that your campaign fits into. For example, suppose I was launching a digital PR campaign for a company in the SEO industry. In that case, I’d prioritize reaching out to journalists who have written about SEO specifically and perhaps inbound marketing if I wanted to go a bit broader. But I likely wouldn’t be pitching journalists writing about outbound marketing.

I've used a few tools, including XXXX, to identify journalists and collect their contact information. But you don’t necessarily need a tool for this, and it is usually pretty easy to find contact information for journalists.

When making your pitch, you want to be as clear and short as possible. You want to deliver the journalist a headline and do the work for them.

Pitch Template

Here is an example of a pitch email template that I might use:

--
Subject: New Report Finds {XX% Change} in {INSERT INTERESTING TOPIC}

Hey {name},

Hope your week is going well. I’m reaching out because earlier today {company} just published a new report titled {insert name of the new report}. And I’ve enjoyed reading your pieces about {insert general topic space} over this last year, so I thought you might be interested.

Highlights:

• Our company surveyed 1,000 {insert type of respondent}, and we found that {XX%} of individuals are {insert interesting thing that would make for a good headline}.
• We also found that {insert second interesting thing}, and {insert third interesting thing}.

There is a lot more to this report. You’ll find the full copy of the report here alongside our methodology. We’ve created some interesting graphics to visually represent some key takeaways from the report.

Just wanted to make you aware. Would love to answer any questions that you might have.

Best,

{your name}

--

You’ll want to send these emails very early in the morning and time their release to the same day that you’ve released your report.

Over time, you’ll start to build relationships with the journalists, and you’ll be able to pitch them your story with an embargo or exclusive ahead of time rather than on that same day.

Repeat

Creating content for digital PR campaigns can be incredibly time-consuming and expensive. But on a cost-per-link basis (time spent, not purchasing backlinks), it has always been my lowest link acquisition cost channel for e.

I’d suggested getting into a regular rhythm. A single digital PR campaign might be effective, but there is some randomness regarding what ultimately does well or goes viral.

If I were planning to launch, let's say, ten digital PR campaigns, odds are that there is going to be a mixed level of success:

• I’d expect that two out of the ten reports do little for me or generate only a small number of backlinks.
• I’d expect five to six out of the ten reports to have moderate success, generating maybe 10 to 20 backlinks.
• I’d expect two to three home runs or reports too viral, generating possibly 100-300 backlinks.

The home runs ultimately bring down the cost per link for all of the campaigns. 

Don't get discouraged if your first digital PR campaign isn’t a huge success or only receives a small amount of coverage. This is a numbers game to a degree, and you’ll need a lot of shots on goal.

Over time, you’ll start to get a better sense of what will resonate, and you’ll build relationships with journalists, which will make securing future coverage easier.

Final Thoughts

Digital PR is a great strategy for many reasons. When done correctly, it can become a highly scalable link-building strategy. Moreover, it can generate significant press coverage for your brand in the process.

There are a few different approaches to creating digital PR content. I’d recommend starting with your own internal datasets to see if there is anything interesting you might be able to share, such as trends or learnings. But there are plenty of other ways to find data, too, such as with surveys or by finding free data available on the internet. You can get a little creative, too, if you don’t want to rely entirely on data-driven reports.

It takes time to figure out the right formatting and pitch and to understand what will resonate with journalists. The first digital PR campaign is the hardest, but gets easier over time.

Hopefully, a few examples highlighted in this article will inspire you regarding the different types of campaigns to try.