2025’s Digital PR Playbook: Building brands, not just backlinks

Digital PRs have always been primarily responsible for capturing brands in search alongside onsite and technical efforts. In simplified terms, this has always been about building high quality, hyper-relevant backlinks through quality content. In addition, Digital PRs work with Digital Marketers and SEOs to ensure tactics are targeted, to drive improvements in wider SEO metrics as a result, including:

• Traffic

• Rankings

• Keyword visibility

The secondary and long-discussed benefit of Digital PR has been brand awareness, not only in the SERPs but also in the media. It’s pivotal to remember that whilst Digital PR drives SEO value to a site, it’s also responsible for conveying brand messaging and stories through close work with the media. We’re responsible for not only helping Google understand who we are, but also the rest of the world. Brand and traditional PR is therefore intertwined with Digital PR and SEO efforts.

That’s why we can’t measure our impact and success from backlinks alone. We also can’t create content just for the sake of backlinks. To make a real impact, we need to combine both brand and SEO goals to create meaningful content that also generates meaningful results — going beyond just links.

Digital PRs offer a unique opportunity to bring together brand, PR and SEO teams — departments often siloed in-house. Digital PR is able to take its SEO background and apply it to PR efforts to ensure coverage is driving as much value as possible through:

• Linking

• Anchor text

• Targeting pages

Not only does this drive value for SEO, it also helps in-house PR teams in KPI conversations where they struggle to directly contribute to bottom line. On the flip side, Digital PR is also able to take its press and media expertise to drive brand awareness tactics that will help improve visibility in the SERPs for SEOs.

This straddling of departments should be reflected in Digital PR strategy and reporting, showing that results go far beyond just links and the typical metrics we report on.

So if Digital PR isn’t just about securing backlinks, then what else can it contribute to?

 

• Traffic and click improvements
• Ranking and visibility improvements
• Keyword improvements
• Audience sentiment
• Revenue and transactions
• Social media engagement
• Sign-ups
• Broadcast coverage

Knowing how to report on all of the above, as well as talk to stakeholders from these teams puts Digital PRs in a critical position of bringing teams together and driving greater impact for a business.

The importance of these metrics varies based on the stakeholders and the overall goals of the business. Defining the core objective is crucial in determining how to create a strategy and KPIs for Digital PR that will drive tangible results that can be easily digested by these individuals.

At Kaizen, we always ensure the historical fundamentals of Digital PR are included — reporting on:

• Backlink volume

• Link type

• Link quality

However, our strategy and reporting never stops there, as we understand our goals are part of wider SEO, brand and business goals. As a result, each of our decks is unique and based on the bottom line goal each of our clients has — which is always different — and we use the metrics above to report on our success.

Creating reports that include wider SEO and brand metrics allows us to prove the value of our work more, as well as gain approval from wider stakeholders about the benefits of Digital PR.

How Kaizen Can Help

If you want to know more about how Kaizen can help support you on your DPR journey, please get in touch.