At the end of 2023, we won “Best Digital PR Campaign” at the SEMrush Search Awards — the Industry’s most coveted Search Marketing Awards. The program we ran with our client TileCloud — Australia’s leading online tile retailer — doubled organic search visibility and secured a raft of premium links with high-quality websites.
Over the last 15 years, we have developed one of the world’s most sophisticated digital PR programs. Why? It comes down to maximising the opportunity now while preparing for the future (which has arrived).
Digital PR in a changing search landscape
Put simply, digital PR builds the authority of your website by obtaining content placements, links, and references from authoritative websites in your market.
However, that is only the beginning. The search landscape has changed significantly in 2023 and will continue to evolve in 2024. In this article, I’ll address some of the consequences of these changes and why a meaningful digital PR program is more critical than ever.
Expert Authority = increased organic rankings
Google has increased its focus on EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness), a critical component in its search quality guidelines. This means Google is giving more weight to content authored by experts in the market rather than anonymous or non-expert content.
In other words, your brand should be building and leveraging Experts in your industry to write content for your site and other sites that reference your site.
So, how do you become an expert in your market?
- Write meaningful, expert content on your website; and
- Write content on other sites to build your profile as an expert (e.g. a featured placement in a publication or a mention in an article)
This is digital PR.
The Search Generative Experience (SGE)
SGE is the inclusion of Google’s AI answers in search results. By doing this, Google seeks to provide better answers, faster.
SGE results appear above traditional organic results, redistributing a reasonable amount of traffic from organic results towards SGE results. Why does this matter? It’s now critical for brands to optimise for SGE results in addition to traditional organic search results.
Google forms its opinion of your brand or personal profile (i.e. what it refers to as an Entity) by gathering information all around the web. Obtaining visibility on relevant websites in your market and high authority, well-respected websites helps to guide Google in forming its opinion of you.
In other words, what other people say about your brand, i.e. references on other sites, is now even more critical than ever regarding your visibility (and messaging) in Google.
Award-winning digital PR programs designed for your business
We have created and run multi-year Digital PR programs for some of the biggest brands in the world, including Expedia and Blue Nile (the world’s largest online retailer of diamond rings), as well as dozens of scale-ups and mid-size businesses.
We are masters of obtaining references about your brand and links to your website from high-authority publications in line with your target audience. This is the power of a world-class Digital PR program within the context of a world-class SEO Program.
Talk to us about tailored solutions, including one or a combination of the following programs:
- Journalistic outreach
- Thought leadership placements
- Content Partnerships with businesses and publishers
- Asset creation and outreach
- Influencer management
Contact us to discuss our Digital PR Program and how it may benefit you.