What's the difference between digital PR and SEO?
SEO is everything you do to help your website rank: technical fixes, better pages, new content and local listings. Digital PR is getting your business covered by journalists and publications, which brings readers, links and brand mentions.
Put simply, SEO is about being the best answer. Digital PR is about other people saying you're worth listening to. Search engines and AI assistants look for both.
What does SEO cover?
SEO is mostly work on your own site and listings.
- Technical: making sure search engines can find, crawl and understand every page.
- On-page: making each page clearly answer what people search for.
- Content: new pages for searches you don't rank for yet.
- Local: your Google Business Profile, reviews and consistent business details.
- Off-page: links and mentions from other sites, which is where PR comes in.
What does digital PR cover?
Digital PR is mostly work off your site, with journalists and publications.
- Finding stories and angles a journalist will want.
- Writing pitches, press releases and expert comment.
- Outreach to national, trade and local press, with follow-up.
- Answering journalist requests quickly.
- Pointing coverage at the most useful page on your site.
How do digital PR and SEO work together?
SEO builds pages worth linking to. Digital PR gets other sites to link to them. Each makes the other work harder.
Links from respected publications are among the hardest things for SEO to earn on its own, and paying for links breaks Google's spam policies. Coverage earns them the honest way. In return, a well-built site turns the attention from coverage into enquiries, instead of a spike of visitors who leave.
AI search adds a third reason. Assistants such as ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews draw on your own pages and on what trusted publications say about you. BidScript combined both: clear answers on its own site and a feature in The Times, alongside 40x more Google AI answers in 3 months.
Which should you do first?
Work through these questions in order. They point most businesses to the right starting place.
- Is your website fast, clear and easy for Google to crawl? If not, fix that first.
- Do you have a page for each service and the questions buyers ask? If not, start with SEO content.
- Is your Google Business Profile complete, if you serve a local area? If not, do it now. It's quick.
- Do you have stories worth telling: launches, data, expert views, customer stories? If yes, add PR.
- Are competitors outranking you with stronger sites, even with weaker pages? That's often a links gap, which PR helps close.
- Do you sell on trust and credibility? Then coverage helps sales as well as search, so bring PR in early.
When is digital PR the better spend?
When your site is in good shape but stuck behind competitors with more authority, when you've got real news to share, or when buyers need to trust you before they'll talk to you. Start-ups and B2B businesses often fall into all three.
How do you measure digital PR and SEO?
SEO is measured on impressions, rankings, traffic and, above all, enquiries. Digital PR is measured on coverage, links and mentions, then on the referral traffic, brand searches and enquiries they bring.
Judge both on the trend over months, not a single week. Backpedal's organic traffic grew 50% every quarter for 12 months while we ran its SEO and digital PR together.