In the world of SEO, we’re so often busy talking about the new buzzword within the industry, whether it’s domain authority, ROAS or link juice. Over the past couple of years, one that really caught my attention was digital PR. Essentially using PR as a means to create effective content marketing campaigns that get natural & authoritative links. Or creating insightful and inspiring content in turn, resulting in links. However, you like it I guess.
In this post, I?m going to show you how I used digital PR to supercharge a client SEO efforts & also provide a guide to how best to do this yourself.
1. Why?
Firstly, you need to understand why you’re doing this? What are you’re goals?? PR provides several beneficial results, so it?s important you layout your KPI?s for this campaign so you?re able to track the success of the campaign. They could be any of the following and more.
- Backlinks
- Data (e.g for email marketing)
- Traffic
- Brand Awareness
- Increased Social Following
- Reputation management
- Leads
What we did? we decided our main KPI was generating natural links to the homepage of our site to increase authority across the site. As an FYI, this was for a travel company specialising in travel to Florida.
2. Idea Generation
All successful digital PR campaigns start with a brainstorming session. Within these sessions there are no wrong idea’s, this is the part where you should let all your creativity flow. Make sure you remember why you’re doing this and what your KPI?s are. You should be creating ideas around maximising success against this metric. Here are some great tips on brainstorming.
What we did? After many a spider diagram, we decided to go with a campaign which we named the ‘Theme park tester’. The idea was simple, we wanted to recruit someone who could spend 3 weeks travelling around the various theme parks in Orlando creating insightful content for our customers. This was a genuine role we had planned but considering the employee would be tasked with testing rides & trying all the snacks Orlando has to offer, we believed it had legs.
3. Ideas & How To Track
After creating a job spec & a specific page for potential candidates to apply, we saw the following results.
- 339 pieces of coverage
- 316 of these pieces were linked
- Of those, 51 are unique followed links
- 9 No follow linked pieces
- The average domain authority across those placements was 67
- 59766 applications for the role
- We even got TV coverage in US news.
Aside from links, we wanted to understand what other value we got from the campaign, so I decided to keep a report in changes to the following.
- Domain Authority : This increased from 42 to 53.
- Citation Flow & Trust Flow ? CG increased by 31% & trust flow 17%.
- Overall Site Links: The campaign helped us increase overall site links by 78%.
- Organic Visibility?
Below shows how the above has affected our visibility across all the keywords that we track, from the campaign go-live date we?ve seen a 42.24% increase in visibility.
- Keyword Changes
Below was the movement of our highest volume keywords that we track.
The below graph also shows the impact on impressions & clicks form our largest volume keyword (Source: Search Console)
Social Following
We also saw some great increases across our social following within this time period.
Twitter / Facebook / Instagram?
Data Gathered
We?ve gathered over 35,000 email addresses from the campaign.
Brand Awareness
We had 14,359 users come through a brand term on the 10th of Jan!
When carrying out a campaign such as this, it?s vital to track absolutely everything you can to understand the full effect a PR campaign can have, especially one which aligns with your SEO strategy.
4. Final Note
My last tip to maximise your SEO strategy through Digital PR, has nothing to do with PR.
Make sure your on-site strategy is nailed, and that you have completed a thorough website audit beforehand. This is vital is to ensure the links that you generate have the biggest impact they possibly can to your keyword visibility.
I offer a free SEO audit, take advantage of this if you’re looking to maximise your results this year.
Please let me know any questions you have in the comments below.
