Danielle says: “SEOs should stop focussing solely on building links and they should focus on building a brand with digital PR.”

How do you run a successful digital PR campaign in 2025?

“Well, David, there are so many moving elements in digital PR, but it all starts out with strategy and doing research.

A brand could do this, or SEOs could do this by using our favourite resources and our favourite tools – which are Semrush, Ahrefs, etc. – looking at what people are talking about regarding the brand itself and, obviously, the key topics that are associated with that brand.

Looking at what people are saying on Reddit, on social media, etc. – as well as using, as I said, Semrush and Ahrefs to do that competitor analysis and seeing where other successful brands are getting featured in the press and what kind of content they're producing that's building their brand's mentions and building their backlinks.”

Okay, so it starts out with strategy and research. You mentioned some tools there, in terms of what you use, but I'd like to delve into how you go about doing it.

When you're doing the research, what specifically are you looking for?

“First of all, we're looking at the key messaging. What are the actual topics that the press is covering regarding a particular brand? For example, if you are a brand that does supplements, like whole foods and that sort of thing, you're looking at, ‘What are my competitors getting featured in the press for?’ as well as, ‘What are the press actually talking about in my industry?’ Are they looking at how that supports how supplements support gut health, for example?

Then, from that kind of content, you can think, ‘Alright, let's produce a digital PR piece based on that – backed up with some data as well.’ We can marry that up with some industry data, whether that's from the brand itself or public data we can get from ONS, for example, or Google Trends.

Just getting some data to back up that story/content that we can see is popular or will land quite well because people are talking about it, or people really want to know more about that particular topic.”

So, just backing up into how you go about selecting that specific topic, because there are potentially hundreds of different topics to select from.

How do you decide on the relevance of a topic? Is keyword volume, for example, really important to that topic? How do you know which topic is going to resonate the most with an audience?

“You can start off by doing keyword research, obviously; looking at what people are researching, what people are searching and what pages/content that lands on. You can also look at traffic and volume, and tools like Google Trends, to see which keywords are popular and are going to work in terms of the topic that you should select.

Once we have some digital PR campaign ideas and topics, we also use something in-house at HANDNOTE called the competency check. The competency check is basically validation. We want to make sure, before doing the whole media list and reaching out to these publications, that they are actually interested in it. So, what we do is a warm-up.

We approach these publications – the press, the journalists, etc. – and say, ‘Hey, we're thinking of launching a piece about XYZ. This is the kind of data that we have. This is the way we imagine the visualisation to be. Would it be of interest to you? Would you cover a story like this?’

Just getting that feedback from these journalists really helps. Then, from there, you can see what stories are resonating with the press, and you’ve just done the research to see that they are resonating with the target audience.”

So, you're researching to see what stories that already exist are likely to be resonating with your target audience. Obviously, however, those stories exist already.

How do you know the slant, the additional angle, to add to the story so you're coming up with something relatively unique?

“With that, data is a good starting point. Also, looking at the brand, talking to the brand, and understanding the brand itself. What are their target audience's pain points? What do they really feel is an issue for them? The brand will know that first and foremost, right?

Delve into those pain points of the target audience, what their desire is, and what they really want to get out of it. That helps to then be able to think, ‘Okay. We can think of some ideas around that in terms of the kind of content that will work well.’”

Is there a particular trend that you're seeing at the moment in terms of the style/type of content that is more likely to engage an audience in 2025?

“The kind of content that is working really well is content that’s easy to read and ranking lists, like ‘The Best Places to Go in…’ and ‘Top 5…’ or ‘Top 10…’ lists. Those work really well. In 2025, it's still going forward.

Also, content that can be chopped up and used across social media. We know that search engine optimization is going across social media now. So, in terms of digital PR, that is pulling up into not just what the publications are talking about, but also within the search engines. You can see that social media is pulling up through there.

Having content that is really resonating and can be used across various marketing channels works really well in digital PR. That could also be video content as well. Using videos within digital PR works really well.”

You mentioned being able to use it across different channels. How do you launch a piece of digital PR content alongside other channels, in order to maximise its impact?

“That's the good thing about digital PR because, initially, you've done the research. You know what's working well, and what could work well. Then we can adapt it, for example, for emails – like an email newsletter.

Those are really great. The brand can send that out and say, ‘Check out this piece that we've done!’ and show a snippet of it in that email newsletter, linking back to the piece.

Also, on social media. For example, if the piece is about the best foods to eat for your gut health, you can make that into a Reel. You can get influencers on board as well, if the budget allows for it. Just getting them to add their commentary and then adding that to social media will bring up the buzz for it, as well as drive backlinks and interest back to the main web page we’re driving traffic to.”

Is your goal generally, for digital PR pieces, to get an influencer from the industry to publish that piece on their blog and get other people to promote it?

“That's definitely a key element of it

To really push for the links, you can definitely get key influencers or key people within that industry to take a look at the piece and write about it or share it with their audience. Definitely.”

Should every SEO know about digital PR and how it works or is digital PR a specialist field that someone needs to concentrate on by themselves?

“I definitely feel like SEOs need to learn about it. It is more than just links. As you can see, there are so many parts to it.

Of course, links are great – Google loves it. It helps – but really building that brand is more than that. It's evergreen as well, to some extent. It can also continue to generate interest over time.”

How can SEOs and digital PRs work more effectively together, if they're working separately to some degree?

For instance, can SEOs help with the planning process? Can digital PRs help make other aspects of SEO campaigns/tasks more effective?

“I think SEOs play a vital role, particularly in the first initial stages of research and seeing what's working well, what we should be doing, what kind of content we should be producing, and what can work well when we're pitching or outreaching for digital PR. SEOs are vital for that part.

Also, when we're trying to drive revenue for the brand in the long run, SEOs work really well because, obviously, they know the technicalities of product pages and how everything works. We can talk to them about, ‘What are we actually pushing for? Where should we be driving the traffic to?’ That helps as well.”

What metrics do you look at when measuring whether or not your digital PR campaign piece was successful?

“There are three main umbrellas that we use here at HANDNOTE. We call them the ‘Triple R metrics’: that's rankings, reputation, and revenue.

Of course, we know that digital PR sits really well within SEO – it's based on SEO to some extent. We're trying to improve the rankings for certain keywords that the brand wants to rank for. Digital PR supports the SEO aspect of it. We're looking at that. We're also looking at traffic increase. We've had a brand that increased their traffic by 2000% in a month once we had done digital PR outreach. That really helps in terms of tracking success.

Going on to the second one: reputation. With reputation we get to see, over time, since we've launched this digital PR campaign or started doing digital PR, how is the brand being perceived by the public, the target audience, and the press? Is it positive? Is the brand sentiment positive? Are we getting positive articles? Are people loving it? Are we getting fans? Or was it hit-and-miss, and we’re not quite sure where it's going? We can measure that as well. That's reputation.

Then finally, revenue. Again, digital PR is very good at bringing in that traffic and obviously mapping that to the pages that we want: the money pages. The pages that bring in the revenue. It could be product pages, category pages, and that sort of thing. We can see, over time, how the traffic correlates with the revenue as a result of the PR that we've been doing. We can check all of that.”

You talked about some metrics there that you can use but how do you know that it's digital PR that has had the impact if there are lots of different marketing channels and other SEO campaigns that are potentially having the same effect?

“When we look at the back end, we can look at referring traffic to wherever we're driving traffic to. We can look at referring traffic.

We can look at where the backlinks are coming from to see that, let's say, it's coming from Forbes or it's coming from Huffington Post. We could see that we've pitched to them and the content that they're talking about is about a digital PR piece that we put together, and it's linked to the web page that we were driving traffic to or the home page of the brand.

We can easily see that correlation through referring backlinks.”

What's the time scale, on average, that you should take from contemplating that you should actually have a digital PR campaign to the campaign being carried out? Are we talking about months?

Is there any standard time scale that you can give?

“Typically, it takes about three to six months before you can start tracking and seeing lots of consumer return on investment.

What does happen is, if you just want to be in a publication, we cannot manage that. It can happen overnight, it can happen in two weeks' time, or it can happen in a month's time.

That’s the thing with PR: we're always on. We're constantly spotting opportunities and pitching. We have had clients where they've had two backlinks overnight. We've pitched, and it happens overnight.

One thing that we can do, with SEOs doing digital PR, is that you don't have to launch a digital PR campaign. You don't have to sit down and do the whole thing. To get started, you could do a bit of research on what your key messaging is and what your brand stands for, and then do some research, build a media list, and pitch to publications that you can see will talk about your brand or the topic that you are trying to pitch for.

Then, on top of that, you can use reactive PR and #JournoRequest. I don't know if you've heard of that. #JournoRequest is a big thing now. There are so many tools out there that have made it so much easier to get yourself in the press, and get those backlinks as well.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“They should stop worrying about just getting their links from anywhere. ‘We need to get a hundred links.’ They’re just pitching low-quality websites to get a link. We shouldn’t be doing that.

It's all about brands now. It's all about relevancy and the long term. Stop doing that and focus on creating stories that people actually care about and getting the right people to talk about those stories, so that it goes back to the brand. That way, they will link to you, because it's of genuine interest.”

Danielle Neah Amponsah is a Digital PR Consultant and Co-founder at HANDNOTE, and you can find her over at HANDNOTE.co.uk.