PR link building is a valuable SEO practice that many under-utilise. The nature of PR means you work to build relationships with people to be used in a variety of ways. People’s first thought isn’t always link building, but perhaps it should be…
What is link building?
Link building is a valuable form of off-site SEO that aims to get other websites to link back to yours, or the act of building backlinks. Google views backlinks as a vote of confidence and by building backlinks from other relevant and authoritative websites, you can build your own or your client’s relevance and authority. If you want your client to rank well in search results, this is imperative.
It is important to remember that not all links are viewed equally by Google. Unfortunately, but perhaps not surprisingly, the most valuable links are the hardest to secure. The higher the domain authority (a website’s relevance for a subject area or industry) of the website linking back to yours or your client’s, the more valuable the backlink.
Why is PR link building so important?
PR link building has many benefits including:
- Improve search rankings – because Google considers backlinks to be a vote of confidence, the algorithm means that the more quality backlinks a site has, the higher they rank on SERPs (search engine results pages). These higher-quality backlinks will also help to boost your client’s website’s credibility in the eyes of Google and other search engines.
- Helps Google find new pages – when Google follows a backlink to a site, it crawls the page and discovers all the links on it. This highlights the importance of ensuring an internal linking strategy on yours or your client’s website so that Google can continue to crawl the different pages on the site and index them, in turn making them more searchable.
- Send referral traffic to your website from other sites – referral traffic is anyone who has visited your site via another website, without searching for you or finding you on Google. The benefits of this form of traffic are that it increases brand recognition, introduces new audiences to your website, gives you opportunities to engage with new leads and improves your authority through backlinks.
Are there different types of backlinks?
In short – yes there are. Want to know the different types? We’ve got you covered:
- Follow links – these are standard hyperlinks which tell Google to pass trust and authority to the site being linked to.
- Non-follow links – as we have established, when you link to a site you vouch for its authority but you may not want to do that. A non-follow link uses the rel=“nofollow” and informs Google that they shouldn’t pass authority to that site.
- Sponsored or paid links – if the link has been exchanged for money, a product or a service, you must use rel=“sponsored” to help Google identify promotional links.
- UGC links – UGC stands for user-generated content, so UCG links inform Google which links were generated by users or customers.
- Editorially placed links – these are links you naturally earned and Google values these links highly, as they are meant to enhance a user’s experience rather than manipulate the algorithm.
- Link schemes – these links attempt to manipulate Google’s algorithm and can involve exchanging money, goods or services for links, link exchanges and automated programmes that create links to your site. Be careful of these – they can result in a Google penalty which will negatively impact rankings.
How can PR be used for link building campaigns?
PR requires a multitude of skills, and these can be very valuable when working on a PR link building campaign:
- Digital PR is all about creating content that is so compelling that journalists want to cover it and link to it. From news articles to features, research reports and whitepapers, this engaging content can be used to earn high-quality links.
- Much of link building depends heavily on relationships with journalists and publications. As we all know, developing these relationships takes time and sometimes daily communication so we know what they want and what they are likely to engage with.
Origin Comms Top PR Link Building Tips
- Make sure you are chasing the ‘right’ links
PR link building is all about quality over quantity. When it comes to giving value to your client through a PR link building campaign, you want to make sure you are delivering links from a high domain authority website, links that are not ‘non-follow’ links, and links that are relevant to your client.
- Get tracking in place!
One of the most important elements of any digital activity is tracking. Make sure you have analytics, conversion and keyword rankings tracking set-up to help you keep track of campaign success and optimise accordingly. Future you will thank you when it comes to reporting!
If you are looking for a PR Agency to help with a PR link building strategy, or any other PR services, get in touch to see how we might be able to work with you.