Digital PR gets sold as an SEO tactic almost as often as it gets sold as a brand awareness tactic and the two goals don't always align. A campaign can generate dozens of mentions and still do very little for your rankings if the links are nofollow, buried in low-authority sites, or irrelevant to your niche.
The difference between coverage and SEO value
Coverage is a vanity metric until you check three things:
- Link attribute: a nofollow link from a major outlet still helps brand visibility, but it won't pass the same ranking signal as a followed one.
- Topical relevance: a link from a site in your industry, even with lower domain authority, is often worth more than a generic lifestyle mention.
- Placement context: a link buried in a long news roundup carries less weight than one central to an article's argument.
Questions worth asking before you commission a campaign
If you're comparing digital PR agencies, it's worth pushing past the pitch deck and asking how they report on these three factors specifically, rather than just impression counts. Our own breakdown of standout UK agencies working across PR, SEO and paid search covers some of this in more depth, see our comparison of leading SEO and digital PR agencies in the UK for what strong reporting looks like in practice.
Building your own link-worthy assets
Rather than relying purely on outreach, the strongest digital PR campaigns start with something genuinely worth linking to, original research, a useful tool, or a data study relevant to your industry. This is a big part of how we approach our SEO services: building the asset first, then pitching it, rather than pitching a generic press release and hoping for a follow link.
Measuring it properly
Track new referring domains against ranking movement for your target pages, not just total link count. A campaign that earns five relevant, followed links from industry sites will usually outperform one that earns fifty low-relevance mentions.
You can see examples of campaigns we've run for clients in our portfolio, and our services page covers how PR, content and SEO work together on our end. If you're planning a campaign and want a sense-check on the target sites, contact us, happy to have a look.