Digital PR Manager, Joanna, takes you through why digital PR, including outreach and link building, should be a key element of your law site SEO strategy.
You may think you know everything about how to rank highly on Google, Bing and Yahoo, but think again. Digital PR has swiftly become an integral element of SEO and is a tactic you should seriously consider to boost your website’s authority in the eyes of Google.
So, what exactly is “digital PR”, why is it important, and how do we generate links for our Conscious clients?
What is Digital PR?
Digital PR is the act of enhancing a brand image across the web through generating articles on various websites, containing links back to your website.
A “link” is as simple as it sounds: a reference to your website on someone else’s site, which has been hyperlinked. The link can come in various forms, whether it be a naked URL (www.conscious.co.uk), a branded anchor link (Conscious Solutions), or a keyword link (SEO for law firms). These then direct viewers to your website if they click on said hyperlink.
Gathering these links is achieved through outreach; networking with bloggers, business owners, and news sites, encouraging your website to be linked to through various techniques. There are multiple methods you can use to generate these backlinks which we have ranked in order of effectiveness, including:
- PR campaigns: to generate organic links.
- Creating shareable content: gaining organic backlinks through creating great web content and being found on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
- Infographics: creating informative and unique infographics which can generate links when used on other sites.
- Guest posts: guest posting on websites, with backlinks to your site included within them.
- Contacting influencers: for sponsored content on their blog.
- Broken link building: through reaching out to sites who have broken links within their articles and encouraging them to use your link instead.
- Link insertions: by reaching out to site owners for a relevant link in an existing article.
- Link swaps: through contacting bloggers and websites to exchange a link between both of your sites.
Some of these techniques are simpler to execute than others. What’s more, some of them aren’t as effective, and could be damaging if done incorrectly.
What Makes a Good Link?
Getting links isn’t just about quantity, it’s also about quality. So, with this in mind, what exactly makes a good backlink?
- Links from good quality websites that aren’t spammy.
- Links from an authoritative site that ranks in the SERPs itself.
- Ideally, you’ll want to get a do-follow backlink to your site, rather than a no-follow (no-follow links still have value, but not as much).
- Making sure the link to your site has relevant anchor text.
- Being careful to ensure the link is as natural and un-salesy as possible.
- Ensuring the link is included within a well-written article.
- Ensuring the site you are getting the link from is not filled with ads.
- Making sure the website is user-friendly and easily navigable.
- Being sure that the website that links to your site is relevant to your topic, i.e. if you’re an employment law solicitor, make sure the link is from a business-related website.
- The article shouldn’t be labelled as “sponsored” or “paid”.
- Getting a link from someone with a higher site authority than your own.
- Making sure the site doesn’t have questionable content, i.e. talking about damaging diets.
- You can get links from any website in the world, but getting one from a site local to you or your target audience is even better.
What Are the SEO Benefits of Digital PR?
Your ultimate aim for your law website is to rank highly on the SERPs for relevant search terms, right? Well, you may or may not know that there is an index designed to help search engines generate these rankings.
This metric is assessed based on the number of quality backlinks a site has. This is because, the more a website is cited and linked to across the web, the better value the search engines deem it to be. Makes sense – so how is this determined?
SEO tools, such as Ahrefs and Moz, have a metric to determine a website’s authority called Domain Authority/Rating (DA/R). They use a number out of 100 to assess this.
Of course, on-site SEO including copywriting, web design, and site speed are all brilliant ways to help your site rank organically. That said, a huge factor in whether your site ranks regularly or not is determined by your DR.
Your site DR can only be improved by increasing the number of backlinks to your site. This is instrumental to whether your site gains clicks and traffic from people who are searching for your services.
The Outreach Link Cycle
A great way to visualise the SEO benefits of backlinks is this step-by-step process, which inevitably leads to more links:
- You create great content that is designed to rank on SERPs.
- Another site is writing an article, needs some trustworthy information, finds your content and likes it, thus links to it.
- Your site DR increases.
- Meanwhile, you build backlinks through the strategies we’ve listed above.
- Your site DR increases even more.
- Google and other search engines like this, thus increasing your rankings in the SERPs.
- More people find your site organically and link to it.
Ultimately, this helps to boost your rankings for certain search terms, thus boosting engagement, leads and sales in the process. What more could you want?
How Does a Digital PR Manager Generate Links for SEO?
Now that we know exactly what digital PR is, the many ways you can do it, and the SEO benefits of it, how do we build these links?
At Conscious, our main focus is on reaching out to bloggers, news sites, and sometimes business websites, from certain niches to request a guest post. Using an extensive list of contacts our Marketing Services department have been building over time, we then pitch them article ideas. These ideas are tailored to fit that website and its audience, as well as remain relevant to our client’s services.
During this exchange, we agree on a do-follow link to our client’s site naturally placed within it.
By using the guest posting method, rather than others we’ve listed above, we have control over the article topics, as well as the insertion of the anchor keyword and link, to ensure it remains relevant and natural.
Is Digital PR Worth It?
As you can see, the SEO benefits of choosing to begin a digital PR strategy speak for themselves. Ultimately, your SEO efforts will reach a standstill if you aren’t being recognised by search engines as “linkable”.
By gradually building quality links to your site month-on-month through digital PR, you are sure to increase your website’s domain authority, rank higher on search engines, generate more enquiries and build your brand image.