An online presence is vital, and oftentimes necessary, for a business’s success. Using Digital PR strategies in conjunction with SEO optimization can help strengthen your brand awareness, ultimately improving your chances of outranking competitors.

What is Digital PR?

Digital PR is defined as an online marketing strategy used by businesses to increase their online presence. Digital PR specialists network with journalists, bloggers, and key industry influencers to share online press releases, blog posts, and content to gain high-quality backlinks, social media mentions, and increased brand awareness. The editorial coverage that’s earned will bolster a law firm’s backlinking efforts, brand exposure, SEO and more.

Why is Digital PR Important to SEO?

Digital PR is all about increasing brand awareness through tactics such as backlinking, guest blogging, quoting, and interviews. The higher your content ranks for certain keywords, the more visibility your brand receives, thus leading to higher brand awareness.

Digital PR can also help benefit your website’s overall authority and rankings. Factors that determine your website’s ranking include domain authority, backlink profile and quality, relevance, and other key metrics. The mentions and backlinks that you gain from your PR efforts ultimately enhance your brand’s reputation and enable you to increase awareness of your brand, company, services, or other key messages.

Top positions in online search bring more benefits than any other form of promotion. Nowadays, SEO is one of the most common forms of online website promotion. According to research, search results on the first page of Google results generate 92% of website traffic, and only a small percent of people visit the following pages. The further down a website position is, the less likely it is to be viewed or clicked by a potential customer or client. Thus, position ranking in Google is crucial. Even if users don’t decide to visit your page right away, they’ll certainly notice it in the search results which will have a positive impact on your brand awareness and recognition, also known as impressions.

Digital PR works hand in hand with SEO to strengthen website impressions and clicks to outrank competitors and dominate valuable keywords.

You can integrate digital PR into your SEO strategy by asking for links back to your website, identifying and collaborating with high-ranking websites (and maintaining those strategic relationships), and implementing relevant keywords throughout your content.

5 Benefits of Integrating Digital PR with SEO

A thoughtful PR strategy requires preliminary research and planning in order to have the best return on investment, and by enhancing your efforts with SEO, your law firm can benefit from double the reach. Media opportunities, social media efforts, guest blogging, and webinars are all marketing strategies that exist in the overlap of the PR-SEO venn diagram.

Increase Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is a general term that describes how familiar consumers are with a brand or its products. In other words, brand awareness is the measure of how memorable and recognizable a brand is to its target audience.

Establishing brand awareness is a powerful marketing strategy that leads consumers to develop an instinctive preference for a brand and its products. Making a brand recognizable and memorable is at the heart of most marketing strategies because it is a major force behind brand trust, and ultimately, sales generation or client conversions.

Expand Backlinks

Backlinks, oftentimes referred to as “inbound links” or “incoming links,” are links embedded on one website to a specific page on another website. Google and other search engines consider backlinks “votes” for a specific page. Pages with a high number of backlinks tend to have high organic search engine rankings and the quality and quantity of your backlinks can help you rank higher in search engines such as Google and Bing.

A good digital PR strategy will emphasize the importance of backlinking in order to increase a specific page’s or website’s ranking. An example of this is a law firm specializing in family law being quoted in a high domain authority online publication, which links back to the law firm’s family law page, increasing their outreach and visibility. Other quality backlinks include websites such as alumni listings, attorney directories, attorney associations, and other education or business organizations. You can also gain backlinks (as well as gain ground in thought leadership and brand awareness) by placing guest blogs in relevant, respected publications, demonstrating thought leadership and expertise in your area of law.

Increase Domain Authority

Domain authority is a search engine ranking score that gives a measure of how successful a site is when it comes to search engine results. It was created by the software development company Moz, and gives an overview of likely search engine performance.

Domain authority gives sites a score ranked between 1 and 100, with the higher end of the scale representing a better-ranking website. Being aware of your website’s score helps to create a website that you know clients and customers will want to engage with. It will also help you see the areas that may need some improvement.

In addition to backlinks, digital PR and SEO can help optimize your website to steadily increase domain authority and online traffic.

Increase Online Traffic

Website traffic refers to users who visit a website and is measured in visits, sometimes called “sessions.” Website traffic is a common way to measure an online business’s effectiveness at attracting an audience.

Through digital PR efforts, as your brand is mentioned online on a more frequent basis in different places, the higher your brand’s visibility and website traffic.

Strengthen Keyword Rankings and Optimization

Digital PR utilizes an ever-evolving array of digital tools to increase your brand visibility, and help you stay above your competition.

With Digital PR, your potential audience is nearly limitless, allowing you to develop your brand, communicate to the masses (and your target audience), and set yourself apart from the competition. After all, websites that are of higher quality will have better keyword positions, and websites that are of lower quality will have lower keyword positions.

Learn More About How SEO and Digital PR Can Help Your Business

At 9Sail, we develop an understanding of your business and the environment you compete in to create a plan of action that is catered to your needs and goals. Interested in learning more about integrating digital PR into your SEO strategy? Contact us today!