According to Aristotle, the foundation of persuasive communication is credibility, reason, and emotion. A lot has changed since 322 BC, but this definition still holds up in PR.
In recent years, Google’s ranking algorithm has become more brand-centric and stricter in defining a quality link. In 2025, Google’s emphasis on Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) means brands must create credible content while demonstrating clear expertise and genuine insights.
Generative AI is also reshaping content marketing and outreach, requiring PR professionals to navigate ethical considerations and maintain authentic brand voices amidst automation.
To rank in 2025 and beyond, you need quality SEO content that reputable publications want to link to because it’s unique and fulfills a need. Attaching a high volume of links to low-quality content doesn’t get the job done anymore, especially in the age of AI.
So how can you build your brand in a reputable way that appeals to both humans and search engines?
The answer: Digital PR.
Digital PR, like traditional PR, is a strategic way to control how the public perceives your brand.
With the majority of news and information being consumed online, it’s natural that PR has entered the search landscape, bringing with it some traditional PR techniques like relationship building, sharing thought leadership concepts, and the cold email.
But what’s the role of digital PR in SEO?
The truth is that digital PR isn’t an SEO concept at all, but rather a brand reputation technique with major SEO upsides.
Digital PR agencies blend traditional PR with SEO by helping get content to high-DA publications, thus resulting in quality backlinks, more organic links, and less money spent on traditional link building.
Keep reading as we break down what digital PR is and isn’t, how you can create a campaign that drives major results, and some examples of successful digital PR in action.
What Is Digital PR?
Digital PR is a marketing technique to enhance a brand’s reputation and increase its visibility online. The practice is typically done by creating topical content and pitching it to journalists and bloggers in relevant media outlets.
Finding ways to speak directly to your target audience is key for building brand identity, but a difficult process to nail.
Through digital PR, brands work to create relationships with journalists and publications that speak directly to their consumers. This way, brands can build a following by funneling their content through popular and relevant news outlets.
If this sounds like traditional PR to you, that’s because it is. But since it exists online, it has search implications that can help you increase both brand and non-brand traffic.
Essentially, digital PR involves:
- Creating engaging content and thought leadership to generate online visibility.
- Building relationships with journalists, bloggers, and influencers.
- Pitching your stories and content to relevant media outlets to earn media placements.
- Leveraging social media and SEO to amplify your message.
You can build trust with Google the same way you would with the general public. If news outlets reference and link to your content, Google will begin to view your site as an authoritative voice in the industry and, as a result, rank you higher.
However, it’s here where the lines begin to get blurred between digital PR and link building.
Digital PR Is Not Link Building
The simplest way to differentiate the two is by looking at the content’s purpose.
Link builders have traditionally had one thing in mind: building a lot of links in order to impress Google.
Digital PR, on the other hand, is more concerned with promoting content that serves a human purpose and will therefore naturally accumulate backlinks.
Link building exists within the larger scope of digital PR, but is an organic part of the process, rather than the main function. In other words, digital PR prioritizes content that will link organically over time, instead of content that requires manual outreach to succeed.
We learned this from experience here at Siege. After sending over one million outreach emails, we realized that traditional link building done through manual outreach didn’t make sense for most of our clients.
The PR ROI from organic links, generated from high-quality content, was rapidly outpacing that of manual link building.
In fact, industry data shows a similar shift – only 21.4% of marketers who employ link building in 2025 use manual outreach as their main strategy, down from 38.2% in 2024.
However, this isn’t to say link building is necessarily the wrong strategy; it just depends. While we’ve mostly shifted away from manual link building, we still recommend it in certain situations.
Startups, for example, require manual link building at first while the brand is relatively unheard of. Clients in industries with high-link value also see significant ROI from manual outreach.
Why Digital PR Matters
Digital PR is important because of the compounding effects it has.
This is especially true as content marketing investments grow – 11.4% of content teams plan to spend over $45,000 per month on content in 2025, nearly triple the share from 2024 – meaning more brands are vying for online attention.
Digital PR helps you cut through that noise by building authority rather than just buying visibility.
When done well, digital PR will help you establish brand identity, enhance your reputation, and then generate more leads and customers — all while improving your DA.
Brands that excel at digital PR not only rank higher but also build lasting authority through organic brand mentions and favorable digital sentiment, which is crucial to long-term growth.
A successful digital PR campaign can result in making your brand a household name online, so the next time a journalist or blogger is looking to reference a study or post, they’ll say, “Hey, I know that brand. Their stuff is the best. I’ll link to them.”
Take Lexington Law, for example, a credit repair client that came to us with a solid content strategy but sat in a very competitive vertical.
Siege’s content marketing and digital PR services boosted multiple pieces of content to the top of SERPS and generated a number of organic links.
Our piece on Millenial Spending Habits, for example, ranks on page one of search results and has generated hundreds of unique links over time.
In competitive industries like this, digital PR keeps you in the game. Having a solid digital PR strategy gives you a competitive advantage over competitors and sets you up for long-term success.
Looking ahead, the fusion of AI, SEO, and digital PR will further accelerate, pushing brands toward even greater innovation. Staying ahead means adapting to AI search and how it works. Brands committed to authenticity, audience connection, and creative agility will dominate search rankings and consumer minds alike.
AI’s Impact on Digital PR
The fusion of AI, SEO, and digital PR is accelerating, pushing brands toward greater innovation in how they earn media. Staying ahead means adapting to AI-driven search and evolving PR tactics without losing authenticity.
AI tools are rapidly becoming part of the PR toolkit – in fact, 90% of content marketers plan to use AI in their 2025 strategy, up from 83.2% in 2024.
For PR professionals, this AI adoption means many routine tasks (research, drafting press releases, initial pitch outreach) can be streamlined with tools like GPT-4 and other writing assistants.
However, more automation also raises the bar for creativity and integrity. PR teams must ensure AI-generated content maintains the brand’s voice and accuracy – a point underscored by Google’s continued emphasis on E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).
Human oversight is key: AI can assist with data analysis and content generation, but crafting a compelling narrative and building genuine relationships with journalists still requires a human touch.
AI is also changing how audiences discover content. Search engines are increasingly featuring AI-generated summaries (e.g., Google’s SGE and Bing’s chat answers) that provide information without a click. This can reduce direct traffic for top-of-funnel content, but it also opens new opportunities for brand visibility.
If your brand is mentioned in an AI overview or voice answer, you’re getting exposure even if the user doesn’t immediately click through. Our 50-site study confirmed this silver lining: when AI Overview results rolled out, homepage traffic from branded searches jumped ~10% as users saw brand names in AI answers.
In other words, digital PR that builds a memorable brand can convert AI impressions into future site visitors, even when traditional clicks decline. Finally, AI’s data-crunching power lets PR practitioners uncover trends and craft data-driven stories faster. By analyzing large datasets or social media conversations via AI, you can pinpoint the narrative that will resonate best with your audience. Brands that thoughtfully embrace AI (for efficiency and insights) while doubling down on authenticity and creativity will come out on top.
The takeaway: use AI as a force-multiplier for your digital PR efforts – not a replacement for the human connections and creative spark that make your brand newsworthy.
Product-Led Digital PR: The New Frontier
Product-led digital PR is a strategy focused on building content around your own first-party data and expertise – effectively turning your product or proprietary insights into linkable, newsworthy assets.
Rather than chasing generic topics for links, this approach centers PR campaigns on exclusive data points, original research, or unique user insights that only your brand can offer.
These strategies are “product-led” because the content can easily tie back to your product or services, even repurposed on sales pages or throughout your site, making it truly integrated with your business goals.
Why go product-led? The performance difference is striking: in a study of 100 blog posts, those that included first-party data saw 83% higher organic traffic value, 51% more traffic, and 34% more backlinks than those without proprietary data.
In short, content featuring unique data tends to earn more links and traffic because it offers something novel to journalists and readers. (It’s hard for competitors – or AI – to replicate your internal insights!).
This approach also future-proofs your digital PR in the age of AI. Generative AI can summarize common knowledge on the web, but it can’t replace truly unique insights from your own data.
By leaning into first-party research, you create referenceable content that others want to cite, boosting your E-E-A-T signals. For example, Siege Media’s 2025 content marketing trends report is a product-led PR asset – we gathered original data on industry benchmarks and published it as a report.
Not only did that earn media coverage and backlinks, but we also leveraged those same stats across our site (like this!) to strengthen content with current insights.
Create a Successful Digital PR Strategy
Although Siege has been able to land content in Fast Company, Thrillist, Business Insider, and more, it didn’t come without some trial and error.
Creating an effective digital PR strategy requires some legwork up front. You’ll need to know exactly who you’re trying to reach — both in terms of news outlets and your ultimate audience — and the content marketing best practices necessary to rank highly.
1. Define Your Goals
Knowing what you want to accomplish is critical in, well, pretty much every strategy. However, with digital PR being a larger and more all-encompassing term, it’s important to be very intentional in your goal-setting.
If you don’t have a narrow focus, you’ll find yourself casting too wide of a net and likely coming up empty.
At Siege, we like using S.M.A.R.T. goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound). For example, if improving your SEO was the goal of your digital PR strategy, a S.M.A.R.T. goal may look like this:
“We want to improve our DA from 43 to 50 by the end of Q2.”
2. Identify Your Audience
Identifying your target audience early on is perhaps the most important part of this process, as it will be crucial for building your pitch list (more on this later).
Audience research is one of the biggest separators of digital PR and link building. Good audience research will give you insight into what your target audience is actually talking about, not just what has the highest search volume. As a result, you’re likely to find low-difficulty terms or topics that convert better, even if they aren’t the most searched.
When jumping into audience research, ask yourself:
- What’s my audience interested in?
- How old are they?
- Where are they located?
- Where are they in their career
- What income bracket are they in?
Audience research tools like Sparktoro and Brandwatch can help you sort this information and expedite this step.
3. Brainstorm Topics
Content marketers have the difficult task of identifying a question within an industry and then creating a unique and engaging answer to it through content. At Siege, we’ve integrated a few content marketing tips into our brainstorming process to ensure we’re creating content optimized for digital PR.
Our brainstorming process meshes a lot of different things: competitor analysis, SERP analysis, backlink analysis, and more. It’s extensive, but well worth the time. Additionally, consider what unique first-party data or insights your company can share – this product-led approach to content can drastically increase your results, yielding more traffic and links than generic topics.
Ahrefs, Google Analytics, Semrush, and Reddit are a few helpful tools we use for brainstorming topics.
We also enjoy the good ol’ fashioned method of putting our heads together and bouncing ideas off each other. Check out our podcast below on exactly that.
4. Create an Outreach List
From your audience research, you’ll have an idea of the type of publications and media outlets you’ll want to reach out to cover your piece.
Put these publications into a list and trim it down to only the most relevant, remembering that digital PR prioritizes the relevancy and focus of the publication over the number of publications reached out to.
Gather the email addresses of the specific reporters you’ll be contacting. When contacting large publications, dive into the stories they cover and make sure you’re finding the journalist who is most likely to be interested in your content.
5. Dazzle With Design
When thinking about design, make sure you’re not just adding images for the sake of having images. Ask yourself how you can use graphics and images to add value to the piece and enhance the point you’re trying to make.
At Siege, we take our design services as seriously (if not more) as the copy. We use infographics as a way to display data in a more digestible way, like in the example from The Zebra below.
Consider what function design can play in your post:
- Will it make data more accessible to the reader?
- Can it highlight the main points of a large section of copy?
Design is pivotal because it can flex your brand and surmise large blocks of the copy at the same time.
6. Pitch Your Product
Pitching is an art when it comes to digital PR.
Journalists receive tons of pitches every day, so standing out from the crowd requires a calculated approach. Make sure you’re keeping your email short and to the point, but you’re giving the journalist enough so they know what the content is about and why it matters.
At Siege, we like the AIDA method for pitches, which breaks down an outreach email into four phases: Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action.
By using the AIDA method, the reader is naturally guided through the email until they arrive at the desired action. In practice, the method looks like this:
7. Measure the Results
So how exactly do you track “brand awareness”?
It’s hard to quantify if your brand is picking up steam, but there are a number of insightful metrics that gauge whether or not your content and brand are gaining popularity.
A few of these include:
- Earned links
- Organic visibility
- Brand searches
- Number of leads
While these are a few big ones to be aware of, the list is expansive and can include any SEO metrics you currently track.
As you see success in your digital PR campaign over time, you can expect corresponding SEO wins.
Examples of Digital PR in Action
After a decade of existence, we’ve experimented with pretty much every type of content. While all types of content work in some capacity, some better lend themselves to digital PR campaigns and building a brand.
Here are a few:
Data-Driven Campaigns
Take Vena Solutions as an example, an innovative platform empowering businesses to achieve financial excellence through smarter, more connected planning.
This client had seen success through traditional PR but was looking to enhance its digital presence and build a strong library of backlinks.
To help, we ran a substantial statistics-based content piece that aggregated trends and benchmarks in the SaaS space relevant to Vena’s audience. The data, supported by stellar design, earned the post over 126 backlinks.
Another method we’ve seen success with at Siege is “existing data” campaigns. This is a nice blend of the creative and analytical, as we take data that’s available to the public and use it to craft a unique story.
For example, for our friends at The Zebra, we analyzed public data from the U.S. Census Bureau and Zillow to reveal that Americans were living in bigger homes with fewer people. Using public data from the U.S Census Bureau and Zillow, we were able to easily pull data together and create a compelling story.
Creative Campaigns
Not all digital PR wins come from hard data. Creative content can be just as impactful. Animations and interactive pieces, for instance, are great for step-by-step or visual storytelling content.
In our example from Hippo, we’re able to show what fire-resistant home upgrades can look like compared to standard homes. Design improvements like this separate our content from similar posts.
Remember, content creation goes far beyond the words on the page.
There’s a science to figuring out the best ways to present information so it’s digestible and warrants an emotional response from a reader. In creating content at Siege, we think about not only what there’s a need for, but also the form in which the content will be best served.
Jump on the Digital PR Wave
Long story short, digital PR is here, and it’s not going away anytime soon. Given the way that Google’s algorithm is shifting, digital PR will likely be an integral part of a well-rounded SEO strategy for years to come.
So what does this mean for you?
Well, if you’re creating high-quality content that fills a need and is written for human beings, you’ve done the hard part.
Identifying your target audience and then developing relationships with journalists who speak to that audience will bolster your overall brand and boost your content to the top of SERPs.
By embracing new tactics like AI-assisted outreach and first-party data storytelling, you can future-proof your digital PR efforts and stay ahead of the competition.
Need help jumpstarting your digital PR efforts? Check out our digital PR services and get a free assessment.
Digital PR FAQs
What is the difference between digital PR and traditional PR?
Traditional PR focuses on securing coverage in offline media (print, TV, radio) to build a brand’s reputation, whereas digital PR centers on online channels – like securing backlinks from authoritative websites, getting mentions in online news outlets and blogs, and leveraging social media.
Digital PR is often more SEO-driven, aiming to improve search rankings and online visibility, while traditional PR emphasizes broader brand prestige.
In practice, the two overlap and complement each other, but digital PR offers more measurable outcomes through metrics like link growth and web traffic.
Is digital PR the same as link building?
Not exactly – link building is a subset of digital PR. Digital PR campaigns earn backlinks as a byproduct of creating newsworthy, high-quality content and promoting it to media. The goal of digital PR is broader: to increase brand awareness, authority, and online mentions (including but not limited to links).
Pure link building often focuses only on acquiring links, sometimes via manual outreach, whereas digital PR prioritizes content quality and genuine storytelling so that links come naturally. The result is typically higher-quality links and a stronger brand reputation than link building alone would achieve.
How do you measure the success of a digital PR campaign?
Success in digital PR can be measured with both SEO metrics and brand metrics. Key indicators include the number of earned backlinks (and their quality/relevance), organic traffic or visibility improvements for your content, growth in brand search volume (more people searching your brand name), and any uptick in conversions or leads attributed to the campaign.
For example, if a campaign secures 20 media mentions and you observe a corresponding boost in referral traffic and a dozen new sales leads, that’s a clear success. Over time, successful digital PR should also contribute to higher domain authority and improved rankings for your site as a whole.
A suggestion: Set specific goals for each campaign, such as X number of links or Y% increase in branded traffic, and track progress against those targets.
