What is the Definition of Digital PR?

You may be wondering how digital PR differs from old fashioned public relations (PR). According to the Digital Marketing Institute, “Digital PR is a strategy used to increase awareness of your brand using online methods. In many ways, it’s similar to traditional PR, but it offers the opportunity to reach a much broader audience that can’t be reached with only offline methods.”In other words, it’s reaching people through devices and online outlets instead of trying to grab their attention in the real world. 

The definition of digital public relations includes spreading brand and cause awareness through social media, organic website traffic, online reviews, text messages, email newsletters, virtual reality, augmented reality and more. The definition of digital public relations includes 

Before the internet and social media, pr specialists tried to increase awareness of a brand or cause through billboards, fliers or getting their client’s name mentioned in magazines or newspaper articles. 

Digital PR specialists have the same goal – promoting the brand and trying to get people to spend money on the brand or inquire about the brand – but their methods are different. The definition of digital PR includes:

• Monitoring and promoting positive reviews of  a brand’s online 
• Flagging negative reviews online 
• Responding to both negative and positive reviews online
• Reaching out to journalists via email and social media to get the client mentioned in news stories, which studies show people trust more than ads
• Creating content for websites to increase a company’s ranking in Google search results and 
• Creating engaging social media posts with the goal of going viral or gaining traction that produces results
• Posting links to a company in online communities related to a cause or a company’s product line
• Sending products and samples to social media influencers with the goal of getting them to review
• Encouraging other companies to link to their client’s website 
• Regular updates of at least 1500 words to a company’s website

 

Is SEO Part of the Digital PR Definition? 

Yes. Search engine optimization (SEO) is about making sure your website is “high quality” in Google’s eyes. 

Google won’t exactly tell people what SEO factors, over which there are 200, get a company to the top of SERP but experts have found some answers. Some of them include backlinks, content creation with certain keywords highlighted and regular updates to a website. These are all things a digital PR company, like us at SEO Design Chicago, should do as part of their digital PR services. If a company doesn’t offer these services, then they don’t know the definition of digital public relations. 

 

Use Digital PR Tactics to Prove Expertise and Experience

Google claims that its algorithm crawls websites to learn if the content exists to help people find information, not just sell them products. They say they use a mix of traits to make this determination. The factors are experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, or what Google calls E-E-A-T. That means you should have many pages on your website that contain content that is trustworthy, professional, and makes it clear that it is coming from a source with experience and expertise. At SEO Design Chicago, we have over 30 writers on call to write compelling, human-first content. Our writers are public relations professionals, so you can avoid the in-house costs of a PR team. We always think digital first when it comes to public relations. 

We don’t want to give away all of our secrets for free, but here are a few.

 

Your Digital PR Strategy Should Emphasize:

• Consistent SEO friendly website and social media content that shows a company “knows it all” about an industry, service or product line
• Regular production of new pages on a website, often in the form of a blog, that includes author bios that prove there are real people who are experienced and experts creating the content
• Regular re-posting of user generated content, like reviews from satisfied customers who encourage others to use your service
• Monitoring and responding to both positive and negative online reviews in forums like Yelp, NextDoor, Google Reviews and other sites

 

Got it. Can’t I do this Alone? 

You can do these SEO boosting, digital PR strategies on your own. However,  living up to the definition of digital pr is time consuming.

That’s why so many companies outsource digital PR help. A recent survey found that 34% of small business owners outsource PR work. They have learned, often the hard way,  that the benefits of digital PR justify the cost. The same study found that 59% of business executives are happy to give work to third-party vendors, like us at SEO Design Chicago, because it ultimately saves them money. After all, you don’t need to pay benefits to third-party vendors. 

What’s the Role of Backlinks in Digital PR? 

Hyperlinking to your own website, linking to other websites, and most importantly – getting other websites to link to your website – is collectively called link building.  

Experts have long theorized that link building is one of the most important factors in how Google, Bing, and other search engines rank your website. Google is trying to make their SEO algorithm more transparent by posting updates about what makes a website rank above another website, but the language isn’t always consumer-friendly. That’s led to some misconceptions, but there is one thing we know for sure: Links still matter to Google in 2024. 

The second thing that we know for sure is that building links still takes time, patience, and outreach. This is what digital PR professionals do for you – create quality backlinks to improve SEO. Google couldn’t be more clear that their search engine algorithms are still designed to detect high quality, unique content. They want other websites to link to your website, showing that you are a trusted source of information. Google recently suggested “Tell people about your site. Be active in communities where you can tell like-minded people about your services and products that you mention on your site.”

When other people link to your site, Google sees it as a vote of recommendation on  your site. They think, “If a person took the time to tell another person about a website, there must be something good there. So let’s rank the site a little higher in our search results.” Google is basically trying to be an amplifier for word-of-mouth recommendations. And word of mouth is what old school and new school PR are all about. 

 

Why Hire a Company That Knows the Definition of Digital PR

Getting journalists to write about you, monitoring online reviews, and making sure you get clients high quality hyperlinks takes time and effort. At SEO Design Chicago, we offer packages to manage your digital PR needs, along with other services like:

• Optimizing the outbound links on each webpage on your website, focusing on quality, not quantity
• Making sure you aren’t accidentally linking to competitors
• Fixing broken links on your website, which is especially important if you’re linking to pages that no longer exist 
• Creating buzz in communities focused on your company’s business
• Reaching out to other websites, offering to link back to them if they link to you
• Trying to get media outlets and other organizations to create content that mentions your company
• Training your employees to help out with your digital PR needs

At SEO Design Chicago, we provide all kinds of SEO, website redesign, migration, security and digital PR services. We can train you on how to do all of these on your own, maintain the services for you, or get you started. Get in touch with us to learn more about digital public relations. The definition of digital public relations is always changing, and we’re always keeping up to date with the changing trends and terms.