Hi, Sad Dawson here. Now link building has always been and continues to be a crucial part of the SEO jigsaw that you need to build authority and drive rankings in Google. And with the emergence of AI-based search like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity, the importance of links in getting your site cited in responses means that link building becomes of even greater importance. So I've grouped together all the best episodes of the podcast that touch on link building into a series dedicated to all the many strategies and tactics you can use to get more links to your content. So let's get on to the podcast. Hello and welcome to episode 64 of Theo Is Not That Hard. I'm your host, Ed Dawson, the founder of KeywordsPeopleUse.com, the solution to following the questions people ask online. I'm an affiliate marketer, SEO, and I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years. I've built sites from the ground up, bought sites and sold sites in large exits. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge hints and tips I've built up over the years. Today I'm going to talk about link building with digital PR. Okay, so we'll start with the very basic digital PR. Well the PR stands for public relations. So what we're looking at is how we use digital public relations or digital PR to help us with link building. So just to say that digital PR is considered a white hat uh method of link building because as you'll you'll find out as we talk about it, you're not paying people directly just to link to you. Um you are trying to get people to link to you, but the way you'd go about it is by you're really you're bringing content to people and then with an ask of would you link to us, you're not paying them to link to you. So so that the the work around it is to promote your content and get it in front of people who might be willing to link to you. So that's why it's considered white house. And digital PR seems to have come as a sort of an answer to a reaction to the penguin algorithms back in 20 sort of 12-2013 time, where prior to that people used to live pretty much just pay other sites to link to them, and there was an open market in it. Um, then the penguin algorithm came along, and Google hit really hard on sites that were just buying links. And I got hit in that myself. We bought an Kit at UK, we got hit by Penguin, we had to disavow a loads of a load of links and think of our strategy anew. Digital PR is one of the strategies that emerged from the sort of the wreckage of Penguin, and this is where people instead of spending their budget on buying links, they would instead spend their budget on promoting content that they created with the aim of attracting links. So the two pieces of it are that generally in a digital PR campaign, you will create a piece of content related to your topic, and then you will spend time approaching journalists or the website owners with the story of your brand and the story of that piece of content that you've created in the in the hope that they will then link to you because they want to share that story with their readers, their audience. Um, and you're hoping that in it's part of doing that where they will link back to you, um, but you don't require people to link. That's the difference, you know, that there isn't there's no exchange of of cash um in return for them covering the story and then hopefully linking back to you. Um you can always ask them and they might do it. And I think you know, I've seen plenty of people who specialise in digital PR can find it frustrating when people will reference their content but not link to it, but still, it's still positive having your product, your story being spoken about on other places, even if it's not linked, because it can raise your brand awareness, and people might then go and Google to try and find you and increase your brand searches and increase traffic to your site that way, um, which over time it will spiral and get you more links. So, this is the whole theory about digital PR is it's kind of link building without link building, if you know what I mean. Um, but yeah, the the the very much aim um of digital PR and a hat and it's the the KPI that lots of digital PR firms that specialise in doing digital PR will measure themselves on is the amount of links and the amount of volume of traffic that they will that their PR work will send to their clients. Now, as um digital PR is considered a white hat sort of clean legitimate tactic for link building, um there's actually loads of um public case studies of um of how firms have used digital PR to build links and build brand awareness, um, which you don't get with other types of SEO which might be a little bit more shady or people are not willing to share. Um, yeah, there's there's lots of examples out there that you you can refer to, especially because some of the brands um that actually spend a lot of money on this, because digital PR is not actually cheap because there's a lot of work in creating original content pieces, and there's a lot of work um in actually doing the outreach and getting hold of journalists and pitching basically. So it's not a cheap thing necessarily to do. Um, so a lot of the brands that do it are quite big brands, and they're the brands that aren't afraid of um talking about what they're up to because they know who the competition is, and there might be oftentimes there's barriers to entry to to get into those industries. So um it tends to be a lot less secretive than some of the sort of the niche site stuff and the more shady stuff, uh shady tactics that people might use that they don't want to talk about for fear of being outed. So, yeah, there's loads of really good examples out there. So let's let's look at a few of them now. If you listen to um other podcasts on online marketing and SEO, you've probably come across um adverts from searchintelligence.co.ukai and a guy called Ferry, who I think is the the MD there, uh or the founder, he actually gives in his adverts examples of actual case studies that they've that they've done for clients. So a couple that come to mind are they did a um they did one where what would um computer game characters earn in real life. So they took the top 50 um computer game characters like Mario from Mario Kart and um Super Mario Brothers and all those things like that, and then worked out what the average um wage would be for someone of of the of their occupation and then ranked them in order, um, and then put this out to you know to to the journalist world, and um yeah they got picked up um loads of places picked up um the content and wrote and wrote pieces about it on their own websites and linked back to it. So that's one of their examples. Another great example of theirs for a really quite boring um subject, but that actually they got loads of um uh uh links for was uh place to the best place to um pass your driving test in the UK. Their client in this case was a um firm of um driving instructors, so people that teach people to drive, and they um create up this piece yeah, where's the best place to pass your driving test in the UK? And how they did this was they found data, freely available data, government data, that showed the pass rate at all the different test centres around the UK. And from that they did a quick bit of analysis just to work out which um which um driving centre people were most likely to pass in in order to say they could say the easiest place to pass is X and the hardest place to pass is Y. And they then put this out. Uh and this piece of connect was great because it mentioned lots of different areas around the UK, and that gets picked up by lots of local papers uh with their websites in the UK. So it's a great way of getting lots of localized links because there's nothing that these local papers like more than being able to compare themselves with other regions. Um, so that's another good example of having a good hook in this case, you know, where's the easiest place to pass your driving test, and that will be picked up by journalists and written about. If you're interested in finding out more about um digital PR, um then there's a course um on digitalprcourse.com that I'm not affiliated with anyway, and I'm just putting this out there because the guy who runs it, um Mark Roth, he who's found fame on the internet when he actually um got on TV stations all around the world and lots of coverage just for himself when he hired a billboard, like a big advertising billboard in the UK, with a um put a picture of himself on saying uh date mark, he was trying to find a date, and he got 2,000 applications for people wanting to date him and a huge amount of coverage online. And it's that kind of creativity that you kind of need for great digital PR campaigns. And he's got a whole course dedicated to digital PR PR, how to come up with ideas for campaigns and how to execute them. So that's at um digitalprcourse.com. So, yeah, highly recommended if you want to discover uh more about this and how to implement it at a higher level than I can possibly share. Thanks for listening to episode 64 of SEO Is Not That Hard. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share, it really helps. SEO is not that hard is brought to you by Keywordspeopleuse.com. The solution to find the questions people ask online. See where thousands of people use us every day. Try it today for free at keywordspeopleuse.com. If you want to get in touch, have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I'm at channel 5 on Twitter, or you can email me at podcast at keywordspeopleuse.com. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO Is Not That Hard.