How digital PR improves your organic search rankings
How your website ranks on Google is down to a number of related factors. One of the most important of these is its backlink profile.
Every website has links to it from a variety of sources. It’s the mixture of these – the number and type of sites from which they’re from – that creates a backlink profile. This forms Google’s impression of how your site is regarded by others, and of how trustworthy and informative its content is.
The primary way digital PR improves your website rankings is by working to enhance this backlink profile.
How digital PR broadens your website’s backlink profile
Digital PR uses an evolution of traditional PR techniques to lay the best possible foundation for the technical aspects of SEO, all working together to push your business under the noses of the people you want to target online.
Google’s most basic aim is to return the most trustworthy and reliable results to its searchers. To rank highly, it needs to clearly recognise your website as a reliable expert for first-hand knowledge.
The authority of a website that links to yours, and the nature of its content, is what determines how revered your site is as an information source. Simply put, the more of the right links you have, the more trustworthy you are seen as.
News websites are among some of the most authoritative around – either in general news or in a particular specialism or sector. A diverse link profile, from a variety of websites with an interest in your product or service, shows you to be an authoritative expert in that field.
Increase domain authority/rating
Although Google’s specific metrics that determine result rankings are a closely guarded secret, there are several ways in which it’s possible to get an estimate of a website’s clout. The most common is with an overall score from 1 to 100, known as either domain authority or domain rating, depending on the tool used from providers like Moz and Ahrefs.
This figure predicts the likelihood of your website ranking highly for relevant search terms. When a domain with a high score links to a particular page, it effectively lends some of that value to your page of content.
The more respected the news site is, the higher its domain authority or rating number will be, and the more beneficial a linking piece of coverage on it will be for your page. This, alongside other measures, is what will gradually increase your own domain rating over time.
Build brand awareness
Good quality and trustworthy content is important, but it also needs to be newsworthy for digital media titles to take note. This is why our PR and media knowledge is so crucial – we know what journalists want.
When a press release’s associated content on your website is interesting and relevant, the piece of coverage is more likely to include a link. When it’s particularly newsworthy, it’s more likely to be syndicated and run by other websites, or be quoted or referred to in other articles on the subject – all of which may also include a link.
It makes sure Google sees your website as continuous source, not a one-hit wonder
Without a sufficient supply of high authority links, even a website with the very best content and technical optimisation will hit a ceiling of how highly it ranks in search engine results pages (SERPs). This severely restricts the amount of organic traffic you’ll see.
Digital PR, and the links it generates, is what enables it to surpass this limit. With news coverage providing a continuous, steady stream of new links to relevant pages, Google is able to see your site as a source of fresh information that stays relevant.
Intrigued? Visit our digital PR services page or continue reading the following articles to learn more about digital PR: