TL;DR

Digital PR is the evolution of historic link-building tactics, and has become a foundational “trust” pillar in modern search. At a moment when search and discovery is mediated by increasingly complex algorithms and LLMs, appearing in relevant, high quality publications can provide more than just backlinks, serving instead to build trust that humans, search engines and LLMs require when validating factual claims and deciding which brands to purchase or to recommend.

Our digital PR service is planned and executed by experts who understand the intersection of journalism and algorithms and, by integrating PR with deep SEO data, we make sure every campaign supports your commercial objectives.

Pain points

The pain points that are addressed by digital PR have been around since Google began delivering search results. Page Rank has always incorporated link profiles in its ranking, and despite the growing number and complexity of search algorithms, links have remained one of the top corollaries with performance in search.

However, though the pain points may have remained the same, the way to overcome them has come a long way. If you’re struggling with any of the following, you may need a little help from our digital PR service:

• Building links but not visibility: the link building techniques that work have changed, but not all of the people working to build links for brands have kept up. If you’re still getting a report with plenty of new inbound links every month, but are stagnating in search, you need digital PR.
• You have received a manual action penalty: they’re not as common as once they were, but brands still receive the dreaded manual action penalty notification in their Google Search Console messages. 
• Declining visibility while still actively working on SEO: Google has been working on ways to devalue what they consider ‘spammy’ links for almost 30 years, and the search engine’s defences get stronger all the time – if you’re doing everything right, but still noticing declining visibility, your link profile may be decaying.
• Invisible expertise: despite publishing your senior team’s unique insights, you are struggling to rank for the targeted terms due to a lack of external validation from trusted publishers and seed sites.

What we mean by Digital PR

The way search engines treat links has changed a lot over the last ten to fifteen years. Back in the olden days, links were a numbers game – but first Google began penalising link farms, comment spam, doorway pages and low hanging fruit, before then moving on to develop algorithmic penalties for unnatural linking and finally ways to devalue low-quality links. Because of these advances in the capabilities of search and discovery platforms to handle what they consider low quality links, it was necessary for search and digital agencies to develop a service offering that was capable of building high quality linked and unlinked citations.

Our digital PR service acts as a method of improving the signals your brand communicates as required by the ‘authority’ and ‘trustworthiness’ aspects of Google’s EEAT framework:

• Experience: proof of firsthand, IRL involvement with products and/or services that machines cannot synthesise and which is difficult to duplicate.
• Expertise: evidence of formal credentials and qualifications, emphasised through use of structured data as well as ongoing topical consistency.
• Authoritativeness: broader industry recognition conferred on a site by high-tier editorial backlinks citations from relevant industry publishers.
• Trustworthiness: demonstrated via technical security, corporate transparency, active efforts at reputation management (including earning and responding to reviews) and, again, trusted third party citations (linked or unlinked).

Trust flows from primary trusted seed sites and relevance is communicated through semantically relevant and established publishers. These links, while they will accrue over time as you produce worthwhile content or grow your reputation for quality goods and/or services, are generally earned through concerted efforts at link-building. 

The digital PR method does this by providing expert commentary, original research and other novel, proprietary data and insights that allow journalists and publishers to organically link to your site as part of their everyday activity. Like regular PR, the best results are generally achieved by the building and maintenance of publisher relationships which help to maximise coverage of individual campaigns.

While technical SEO helps search engines discover you, and growth strategies help them understand you, digital PR helps them to believe you – it’s a process of building a “citation infrastructure”, a network of mentions from trusted, editorial sources that both humans and AI models rely on to establish factual claims. Integrating PR with SEO data makes sure that link or mention isn’t just about “buzz”, but directly supports commercial objectives.

MMC Digital’s Digital PR service

Like all of our services at MMC Digital, our Digital PR campaigns are planned and executed by senior-level experts; experts who understand the intersection of journalism and algorithms and the role that citations play in modern search. 

We don’t issue “spray-and-pray” press releases, we build data-led, newsworthy assets which are then communicated to a highly relevant network of publishers and journalists with whom our experts have communicated long term. Our digital PR service includes:

• Data journalism and research: we turn public datasets, original surveys, or your own proprietary internal data into headlines that journalists can’t ignore.
• Reactive PR & newsjacking: we monitor the news and breaking social media trends in real-time, and are always looking for opportunities to promote your experts during relevant breaking stories, aiming to secure high-authority links and mentions.
• Thought leadership placements: we pitch and position your senior team and inhouse experts as industry authorities, offering expert commentary and opinion pieces to relevant trade and national press.

What can Digital PR do for your business?

A consistent and systematic approach to digital PR can help to change how the internet and the increasing number of search and discovery platforms perceive and how much they trust your brand, helping to deliver measurable commercial results that extend beyond “vanity metrics” or a number of monthly placements:

Successful digital PR can:

• Lower customer acquisition costs (CAC): authoritative third-party validation can help to create a “trust-halo” that improves organic visibility and brand mentions, thereby reducing reliance on expensive paid media spend, and improving conversion rates for paid media traffic.
• Future-proof visibility: establishing your brand as a trusted source for relevant publications, helps to make sure your brand remains one of the recommended options in both traditional and AI-mediated search.
• Increased branded search demand: high-tier coverage, much like traditional PR efforts, serves to get people talking and searching for your brand, which can help to boost the performance of every other acquisition channel.
• Direct SEO uplift: high-quality, editorial backlinks remain one of the strongest correlations with ranking performance, helping to move the needle for your most important commercial pages.