In the world of digital marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) is an essential tool for companies looking to generate leads and drive traffic to their websites. According to a recent survey, 61 percent of B2B marketers believe that SEO and organic traffic yield more leads than any other marketing strategy they use. Moreover, an average of 51 percent of website traffic comes from organic search.
While many small business owners and SEO practitioners understand the importance of driving backlinks to their SEO-optimized content, most marketers are building backlinks with expensive, tedious strategies. They’re either paying agencies a high cost per link or doing old-school backlink outreach in-house. However, there are better ways to drive backlinks and improve your SEO results.
The most successful companies in the world use digital PR to drive backlinks and boost their SEO. Digital PR provides better results than traditional backlink outreach, regardless of financial investment or time input. Here’s why.
Firstly, it’s easier to get a yes for a digital PR request than a basic link request. Instead of asking websites to link to your site, you ask for digital PR coverage, which typically produces links anyway. It only takes about five to ten emails to get a yes for a guest post or podcast interview. And often, you don’t even need to send emails. You can start by leveraging relationships with content managers, bloggers and podcast hosts that you already know.
Digital PR also allows you to build new relationships with non-competing companies, influencers, journalists, and content creators. You can leverage these relationships again and again. For example, you might do co-marketing activities like webinars and virtual summits, or you might swap features in each other’s email newsletters. Your creativity is the limit.
Moreover, when you use digital PR to drive backlinks, you also generate content that you can share with your audience to build your brand authority and stay top-of-mind with your leads. You can share your best media features, podcast interviews, and contributor articles across all of your social-media channels and in your email-nurture sequences.
Another benefit of digital PR is that it ensures more people consume your content. If you mention an SEO-optimized resource page at the end of an interview for a popular podcast, you could get dozens or hundreds of direct views of that resource when the interview goes live. Listeners will click on the resource from the podcast show notes, search the name of the resource directly, or type the URL you mentioned into a search bar. On the other hand, backlink outreach doesn’t necessarily drive immediate traffic to your desired page.
Lastly, when you use online media as your main link-building strategy, you’ll rake in more backlinks from high domain authority (DR) sites. Many online publications have DR scores in the 80s and 90s, while the average DR of all websites is between 40 and 50.
In conclusion, while backlinks are an essential part of any SEO strategy, it’s important to use the right techniques to drive those backlinks. Digital PR offers many benefits, including an easier yes for digital PR requests, new relationship-building opportunities, content repurposing and sharing, immediate traffic, and links from high DR sites. By using these SEO secrets of the world’s most successful companies, you too can improve your SEO results and drive more traffic to your website.