30-second summary:
- Earned media coverage can be a valuable asset to your website.
- As important as technical SEO is digital PR, so is digital PR.
- If a large number of links is the goal, then what stops someone from choosing the most newsworthy idea even though it doesn’t have anything to do with you client?
It’s hard to ignore the impact digital PR has on organic growth strategies in 2022. Your website is now more valuable because of earned media coverage. Although you may be doing all the right things for SEO, if you aren’t building backlinks, you still miss out on increased search visibility, organic traffic and brand awareness that backlinks can bring to your company.
Google’s John Mueller, a Google employee, finally spoke out on digital PR last year. He confirmed what we all knew for some time: it is just as important as technical SEO.
While I like some of the digital pr’s benefits, I find it frustrating that it is often buried with spammy link building. It is just as important as tech SEO and probably even more so in some cases.
—
Johnmu (personal), updated for 2022
Digital PR is still relatively new and has only recently emerged. Many PR professionals have relied upon viral campaigns to increase backlinks for their clients. Although viral campaigns are frequently celebrated, they are often not considered relevant or on-brand.
If a large number of links is the goal, then what stops someone from choosing the most newsworthy idea, even though it doesn’t have anything to do with you?
Link volume in 2022 is not the goal.
Many PR professionals were basing their success on this one metric (link volume), but others in the industry know that the relevancy of linking coverage was a key factor Google considers when assigning “value to” links.
John Mueller once again settled the link volume vs. link relevance debate, coming out in 2021 saying that “the total number” doesn’t really matter.
If you’re happy, keep counting your links! It is good to have some pleasure in our modern world. It won’t make ranking algorithms happy, however.
—
This clarity has allowed the digital PR industry to focus and has forced PR professionals to reevaluate which metrics and KPIs they need to focus on in order to drive organic growth.
It is no longer enough just to be popular. You also have to be relevant. You need to be relevant not only in the context of the publications you target, but also in terms keywords that you want to rank, audience interest, as well as brand alignment with the story you are pitching.
Google continues to improve its intelligence through machine learning and artificial Intelligence. It is attempting to understand web content like a human. Therefore, through natural language understanding it will not only be looking at anchor text in third-party articles but also the context in which a brand is placed.
How to make sure your link-building activities are relevant to your brand
To come up with content ideas that are relevant to your digital PR campaign, the first step is to:
- Understand your client and
- Understand your client’s audience.
These two pillars will be the foundation of every good idea.
Google’s primary objective is to provide the best content to searchers. Your job is to create content that supports your client’s products or services or their customers.
It is important to create content that is relevant and on-brand in written form. However, it is also crucial to ensure that supporting assets (audio, video, images, and audio) are relevant to the target keywords and products or services that the brand sells.
It’s also important to create engaging content to increase brand awareness and affinity with your customers.
How to determine the relevancy of your backlink profile
Now we have the technology to be able understand and assign quantifiable metrics regarding the relevance and relevance of linking coverage (or indeed any text-based material) – this allows us to become more data-driven, targeted and data-driven when developing digital PR, link-creation activity, competitor analysis and market analysis.
Natural language understanding tools such as Salient can measure the relevance of off-page and onto-page content. These tools allow us to see how search engines view a brand’s content. They also help us identify gaps in the client’s backlink profile.
Journey Further uses this proprietary tool for assessing the relevancy of off-page and onpage content to determine its relevance for clients.
This tool allows us to see how search engines view a brand’s content. It not only helps us identify gaps in our client’s backlink profile, but also assists us in optimizing the site’s content. This results in a more targeted, efficient, and measurable digital PR campaign that is better aligned with SEO goals and delivers better ROI for clients.
Looking ahead to 2023
Google is expected to continue developing better technology to understand web pages in 2023 and beyond.
This should be reflected in all digital PR campaigns. It is important to think as marketers and not as SEO professionals in order to maximize the ROI. It is important to adopt a brand-plus performance approach to digital PR and SEO.
Beth Nunnington, VP of Digital PR at Journey Further is responsible for leading digital PR strategies for some of the most prominent brands in the world. Her work has been featured by The Drum, PR Moment and Prolific North. Follow Beth @BethNunnington on Twitter.
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Search Engine Watch’s Data speaks: Link relevancy outweighs volume in SEO appeared first on Search Engine Watch.
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