Using PR to Increase Your Search Rankings

By Becca Tee, Digital PR Lead at Repeat Digital

When it comes to public relations (PR), many business leaders and marketers still view the discipline as one of a traditional nature – primarily as a tool for gaining brand awareness through offline coverage. But PR has become so much more than that, and is now a critical component of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), helping businesses to improve their online visibility.

The Link Between PR and SEO 

In May 2024, Google faced a massive leak of internal documentation. While those in digital marketing were already aware that numerous factors determine a site’s ranking on the search engine, this leak surprised many –  revealing a whopping 14,000 ranking factors. Of course, no one knows the weighting of the criteria, but it does confirm that the acquisition of backlinks from external sites is still extremely valuable.

Backlinks are links from websites (i.e. publications) that point to your site, signalling to search engines that your content is valuable and authoritative. Think of them as a vote of confidence, which Google rewards by boosting your rankings in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

In order to stand the best chance of increasing your digital presence, sites must have solid technical foundations, provide a good user experience (with content that’s written with the user in mind), and have a strong, diverse backlink profile. When any one of these are out of balance, a company may experience a significant loss of traffic as a result of decreased rankings.

So, More Links Equal Higher Rankings? 

After reading this, businesses may be tempted to try and gain as many backlinks as possible, with the aim of having more than their competitors.

If only it was that easy!

Firstly, there is the issue of paid-for backlinks. There are many freelancers and agencies out there that will promise you links from ‘high-quality’ websites – in exchange for a fee.

This may seem like a quick and easy way to build links – and many people sadly fall into this trap – but the issue is it’s explicitly against Google guidelines. If Google becomes aware that a business is partaking in these underhand tactics, it can deploy several penalties that can negatively impact a website’s search engine rankings and visibility. In severe cases, Google may completely remove a site from its search index, making it impossible for users to find. Imagine how detrimental this would be, considering how many people search online?

Secondly, it’s unwise to take a scattergun approach and try to get your business featured everywhere and anywhere, for the sake of gaining backlinks.

Relevancy in digital PR is one of the hottest topics in the industry right now, and one thing the leaked documentation confirms is that Google could be ignoring links from content that’s not relevant. 

Ethical Link Building Takes Time 

As the well-known saying goes: “Rome wasn’t built in a day”. It takes time for links to have an impact on search rankings, and there isn’t a clear cut correlation between building X number of links and achieving a certain increase in keyword movement.

This is why digital PR is always recommended as a long-term strategy, alongside SEO, with coverage and links achieved consistently to provide fresh content to highly reputable and relevant publications. This leads to a diverse backlink profile demonstrating Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust (E-E-A-T) – a set of signals used by Google to help it decide which websites to rank at the top of the SERPs.

What we can say for certain though, is that it really is a case of quality over quantity. Digital PRs are generally in agreement that five links from highly relevant publications are worth more than fifteen from random websites that are only very loosely – if at all – aligned with your brand.

How Do I Get Started With PR For SEO?

As you’re digesting this information, it may seem overwhelming to know where to start. How exactly do you do PR for SEO? Here are some initial steps.

Determine The Areas That Will Benefit The Most

Using a tool such as Ahrefs or Semrush, you’ll be able to see which keywords are floating around in positions 2-20 You can use this as guidance to determine which pages are most likely to benefit from an increase in backlinks, especially when you’ve done everything else you can with that page (i.e. it’s technically sound with good, optimised content). Use the Keyword Difficulty (KD) as a guide here too. KD is a metric used to estimate how difficult it would be to rank on the first page of Google for a given keyword.

If you have an SEO team, it’s highly recommended that you collaborate with them to get this data.

Delve Into Competitors

The same tools can be used to determine where your competitors are gaining links from. This will give you some immediate places to outreach to. If you don’t have access to these paid-for platforms, you can search for a competitor on Google, filtering down by the most recent placements. With this data, you should:

• Manually vet each publication to see if it’s relevant to your business
• Analyse the types of content the site publishes (i.e. thought leadership or data-driven stories)
• Add sites to a ‘hit list’ and prioritise which ones to outreach to first
• Craft tailored pitches that align with sites’ content style and audience(s)

You may also have some ‘dream publications’ in mind that didn’t crop up during the above research. These are publications you’d really love to be featured in. Add them to the list too.

Craft A Digital PR Strategy

Now, this is deserving of a blog of its own! Once you’ve worked out where you want to be seen, it’s time to work out the how. When coming up with a plan of attack, it’s best to think about the formats that are already working in your chosen sector(s), and the topics you can provide comment/expertise on. The key is to provide journalists with valuable content that they haven’t seen a million times before. That could be through unique data, insights, or opinions.

Some PR formats you may wish to consider are:

• Press releases – a structured news story issued to journalists
• Thought leadership – the crafting of expert opinion pieces, offering unique insights
• Reactive PR – monitoring and responding to relevant news and journalist requests
• Proactive PR – making the news yourself (i.e. perhaps you have some internal data you can share)
• Content marketing – the use of long-form content such as guides, reports and whitepapers
• ‘Hero’ campaigns – larger-scale campaigns which are more resource intensive. They may be data-heavy, visual, or interactive in nature

If possible, and there is enough resource available, it’s best to employ several of these tactics concurrently. Doing so helps to minimise the peaks and troughs in media coverage and link acquisition, ensuring a more consistent and sustained PR impact.