How Digital PR Builds Trust And Why It Matters for SEO

Intro

Digital PR is an online extension of traditional PR that targets coverage in online media. Through diverse coverage, PR helps brands amplify their awareness and outreach. At the same time, it helps build credibility and trust.

By affecting many essential trust signals, PR also has a significant impact on search engine optimization. In this article, we will tell you what public relations stands for, how it helps build trust, and what benefits it offers for your SEO. You’ll also find actionable tips on how to implement PR for maximum benefit and which pitfalls to avoid. Let’s dive in!

Source: Freepik

What Is Digital PR and Why Do You Need It?

Digital public relations (PR) is a subfield of marketing that establishes your business’s relations with the public. It uses various digital channels to create online coverage of your brand and manage its reputation. This can include:

• Building relationships with different media representatives.
• Create a decent coverage of your brand in channels.
• Engaging with the audience on social media.
• Managing online reputation.

On the passive side, PR also involves creating share-worthy content that the media will want to feature and give credit to you.

Why Does Trust Matter in Search Engine Optimization?

Now that we’ve got a clear on the concept of public relations in general, let’s delve into why and how digital PR and SEO go well together. And the short answer is “trust.”

For search engine optimization, trust is one of the fundamental things. It directly impacts your positions in SERPs. Why? Because Google aims to give its users the best experience. This requires providing them with high-quality and reliable content. And a lack of trust contravenes this.

The importance of trust is explicitly indicated in Google’s E-E-A-T framework. This abbreviation stands for the four content characteristics that Google values the most:

• Experience
• Expertise
• Authoritativeness
• Trustworthiness

Being one of the main factors that Google looks at in content and websites, trust affects how high you appear in SERPs. And it also matters a lot for users by offering them a positive experience and valuable content. So, when you build up trust, it increases everything – your visibility, user engagement, and conversions.

The Role of Digital PR in Building Trust

So, as you now know, SEO and PR are linked with one important thing – user trust. But how exactly does PR help you build and maintain it?

There are four primary areas through which public relations can give you an increase in trust:

Media Coverage

Coverage in the media has always been a massive trust signal for consumers. Brand mentions in media (whether online or offline) act as a third-party endorsement. This increases your credibility level, especially if mentions come from sources that your target audience knows and trusts.

Thought Leadership

While different types of mentions can increase trust, there is one type that can establish you as a real authority in your sector. We’re talking about the cases when journalists and bloggers refer to you as a field expert who sources them with valuable and unique information. Your business can bear fruit from thought leadership by becoming an expert in interviews, data-driven reports, etc.

Reputation Management

A proactive digital PR strategy usually includes managing your reputation on the web. It begins with communicating the right message and telling your brand’s story through journalists and influencers whom people trust. It also involves engaging with audiences directly and responding to their feedback (both negative and positive) to maintain a decent image.

Social Proof

Lastly, a good PR campaign can make people talk about more. It doesn’t matter where they learn about you. It may be a press release or a story on a news site. It can be a recommendation from a popular influencer or a publication in a blog. In any case, this can motivate consumers to share their own stories with your brand.

Besides, by becoming active on social media and engaging with your prospects directly, you can also ask them to share feedback and generate content for you. This all will serve your brand as social proof that indicates your credibility and trustworthiness.

The Benefits of a Digital PR Campaign for SEO

Clearly, public relations efforts help foster trust, which, as you already know, is an important factor for rankings. Still, if you dig deeper, there are many other reasons why SEO and PR should go hand-in-hand.

Here are some of the biggest SEO benefits you can gain from PR:

• More backlinks. Most often, when a journalist or a blogger mentions your brand and gives credit to you, they will also link back to your website. Thus, online PR is a way to naturally generate high-quality backlinks.
• Greater domain authority. When you receive lots of links from reputable sites, you gain a part of their credibility and enhance your domain authority.
• Amplified outreach. Public relations helps you gain lots of quality content, such as press releases, news articles, blog posts, etc. Most importantly, this copy is published on third-party websites. This helps you get in front of a larger number of people and increase engagement.
• Increased brand searches. When people see you in different media more frequently, some of them will likely take an interest in your brand and Google it by name. This will increase the volume of important, high-intent brand searches.
• Better local SEO. Finally, when your business gets mentioned in local sources, this will enhance your local SEO efforts and help you rank better within your area of operations.

Basically, public relations can help you gain trust and improve rankings. However, its benefits for SEO are much deeper than that.

Top Metrics to Measure PR Success and Its Impact on SEO

As you can see, public relations and search engine optimization should work together to give your business a broader outreach and authority. But how do you assess the outcomes of your digital PR SEO efforts?

Here is an overview of the key metrics you should keep an eye on:

PR-specific metrics:

• Media coverage (clippings)
• Published press releases
• Social shares
• Brand awareness
• Audience sentiment

SEO-specific metrics:

• Organic traffic
• Domain authority
• Brand search volume
• Rankings for target keywords
• Backlink profile

To measure your success with accuracy, you should benchmark your point A (before you amplify your PR efforts) and continuously monitor the metrics mentioned above to see how they change over time. This will give you a clear vision of whether your strategy is effective or not.

There is a broad selection of analytical tools that can help you keep an eye on your key metrics. Google Analytics is a popular choice. However, you can go a step further and choose among the best AI tools for SEO. An AI-powered tool will help you deepen your data analytics and foresee future trends in traffic and rankings, and refine your digital PR SEO strategy based on these insights.

Best Digital PR Practices to Amplify Your SEO

So, how do you combine digital PR and SEO correctly to get the best of both worlds? We’ve gathered a few proven practical tips that will get you on the right track:

• Focus on crafting excellent shareable content. All content you create is added to your library of assets. Focus on delivering original and easy-to-share copy to build links and mentions naturally. Give preference to infographics, surveys, market reports, and case studies.
• Build relationships. Start with some research. Since trust is a product of quality mentions, you want to find relevant outlets that capture the kind of audience you are targeting in your business. Then use strategic outreach strategies. Before connecting with media reps, do deep research to personalize your first touchpoint. And provide real value through your expertise and industry insights to build meaningful relationships.
• Connect with influencers. As shown in the SlickText survey, 69% of people trust the recommendations they get from influencers. This fact makes them a powerful channel for establishing awareness and driving conversions. So, find influencers who align with your TA and audience and partner with them.
• Become a guest expert. One of the most common ways to become an invited expert is HARO. Help a reporter out is a platform that will connect you with journalists looking for expert opinions. Additionally, you can share your expertise in interviews, podcasts, and webinars. This will help you establish greater credibility while also getting mentions.
• Collaborate. Together with like-minded businesses, you can create offer packages that would offer added value to both of your customers. There are plenty of PR success stories that rose from such partnerships. Look at a legendary pair of sneakers by Nike and Tiffany & Co., or at a viral collection by H&M and Moschino.

Source: Freepik

Common Pitfalls to Avoid

Now that you have a list of actionable tips, let us give you a few pieces of advice on what you SHOULDN’T do to get the most out of your PR. Here are the major mistakes to avoid:

• Not doing sufficient research and wasting time on getting covered in sources that span a non-relevant audience.
• Chasing easy coverage opportunities that are low-quality (remember that trust is born from high-quality mentions).
• Sounding overly salesy in your press releases and other materials.
• Failing to track and measure the results.
• Ignoring other aspects of SEO. Although public relations helps your rankings, it won’t allow for fast progress if you neglect on-page, off-page, and technical optimization.

Conclusion

As you now know, both search engine optimization and public relations are essential marketing tools that must be present in your growth strategy. And they can actually reinforce each other if you balance your efforts and keep your focus on creating quality content and media coverage.

At the end of our guide, we also want to take a sneak peek into the future. Both SEO and public relations are ever-changing fields. And though we expect them both to thrive in the future, there will be plenty of changes we’ll observe in the upcoming years. What exactly is waiting for us in the future? At the moment, we can name the following major trends to keep an eye on:

• A focus on E-E-A-T signals (aka the quality of content will matter more and more).
• Further blurring of lines between social media marketing, SEO, and PR (they all will have to work together).
• Embracement of multimedia coverage – to reach more people, brands need to combine influencer publications, short-form videos, large YouTube interviews, podcasts, and other types of media beyond written content.
• Growth of AI use for targeting, personalization, and predictive analytics.

Watch and embrace these changes to make your strategy future-proof!