What is digital PR?

Digital PR is earning coverage for your business in the media people read online: national and regional news sites, trade publications, blogs, podcasts and broadcast. The aim is reputation and reach, plus links and brand mentions that make your website more visible in search.

It looks a lot like traditional PR. You still need a story worth telling and the right journalist to tell it to. The difference is that a digital PR campaign is planned for two audiences: the people who read the coverage, and the search engines and AI tools that notice who's being talked about.

Traditional PR measures success in coverage and reputation. Whether the piece linked to your website was largely beside the point.

Digital PR keeps all of that and adds a layer. It picks publications that matter for your buyers and your search goals, it points journalists to a useful page on your site, and it reports on links, mentions and the traffic and enquiries they bring, not just column inches.

Links from respected sites are one of the signals search engines use to judge how trustworthy a page is. A link from a well-known publication is hard to get, which is exactly why it carries weight.

Google's spam policies treat buying links that pass ranking credit, including paid advertorials, as link spam. Digital PR works where those shortcuts don't, because a journalist chose to cover you. It helps locally too: Google says local prominence is partly based on what's known about a business from across the web, including links and articles.

AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews build their answers from what's published across the web. When trusted publications write about you, there's more credible material for them to draw on when someone asks for a recommendation.

That makes coverage useful twice: once for the people who read it, and again every time an assistant uses it to describe your business. Our guide to generative engine optimisation covers the rest of that picture.

Most campaigns follow the same steps, whether the target is local news or a national paper.

1. 1Find the story: something new, useful or surprising about the business or its market.
2. 2Pick the outlets your buyers read, and the journalists who cover that subject.
3. 3Write a short pitch for each one, with the story in the first line.
4. 4Get the extras ready: a spokesperson, photos, data and a page on your site worth linking to.
5. 5Send the pitches, follow up once, and answer questions quickly.
6. 6Answer journalist requests for expert comment as they come in.
7. 7Track coverage, links and mentions, and the traffic and enquiries they bring.

A business simply existing isn't news. These are.

• Something new: a launch, an expansion, funding or a first for your area.
• Something useful: practical advice from someone who knows the subject.
• Something surprising: your own data, or a view that goes against the grain.
• Something human: a founder story, a customer story or a community angle.
• Something timely: expert comment on a story that's already in the news.

A clear plan, honest feedback on which stories have legs, and regular updates on who's been pitched and what's landed. Coverage tends to build on itself, because journalists who've written about you once are more likely to come back.

What you shouldn't expect is a guarantee. Nobody can promise a journalist will run a story. Packages that sell a fixed number of links for a fixed price are usually paid placements, which is exactly what Google's policies warn against.

Often, yes. Local and trade press are open to stories from smaller businesses, and that coverage can help local search as much as national coverage helps brand recognition.

It works best alongside solid SEO. If your site is slow or your service pages are thin, the extra authority from coverage won't go as far as it should.