Why is Digital PR Important and Whats the Difference?

Public relations is managing communications between a company and its audience. That is still true however, we are in the digital age now and PR is one of the most valuable tactics within digital marketing.

Enter, Digital PR. Since 2019, press releases have been used as a reliable digital asset for building and promoting a brand. SEO and marketing techniques combined with PR strategies is the preferred way to attract visitors. It only makes sense to optimize all content published, including press releases.

Traditional PR is a more direct approach to brand awareness. Digital PR is similar, but you are dealing with a much wider audience. Traditional press releases would have been sent to high-level news agencies and companies directly. This might have meant 100 people whereas, digital press releases are available to the entire world. Anyone from any country could have access to your company news. But with thousands of people searching Google, how will your press release rise to the top of the search engine and attract potential leads?

SEO! SEO! SEO!

Simply stated, the solution is search engine optimised content and how your press release will be seen by millions of people but more importantly, the right people. Anything on the internet is digital and should be optimised for search and high ranking. It’s fundamentally important to treat your PR just like all your social media and web content. Companies with a high industry SoV (share of voice) will most likely publish at least one press release per month alongside their weekly web and social content. And all will follow SEO guidance if the company is worth their salt.

SEO includes, on-page, off-page and technical which includes your URL slug as bolded in this example: https://www.tomera.uk/trb-blog/digital-or-traditional-pr

A press release should follow the exact same guidance as any other piece of content or marketing collateral. Therefore, before drafting the press release you should:

1. Obtain the prepared list or search Google for keywords to be used in the copy.

2. Create the headline and slug with keywords in mind

3. Make sure your sentences follow the Flesch Reading Ease Readability Formula

4. Ensure 20 words or less in every sentence

5. Verify the copy is with 5th-7th grade level reading ability

• RE = Readability Ease
• ASL = Average Sentence Length (i.e., the number of words divided by the number of sentences)
• ASW = Average number of Syllables per Word (i.e., number of syllables divided by the number of words)

The output, i.e., RE is a number ranging from 0 to 100. The higher the number, the easier the text is to read.

• Scores between 90.0 and 100.0 are considered easily understandable by an average 5th grader.            
• Scores between 60.0 and 70.0 are considered easily understood by 8th and 9th graders.
  
• Scores between 0.0 and 30.0 are considered easily understood by college graduates.

A good way to measure your press releases would be to track all digital publications as well as your own website links. It might be helpful to subscribe to a PR monitoring and contacts tool such as Meltwater or Cision but archaic searches are still golden. It is important to include your digital PR into your marketing campaigns and efforts. This will organically increase your industry share of voice.

Don’t just take my word for it, see what HubSpot has to say about it and check out their Marketing Trends  report.

A few things to remember for on-page SEO:

• Include Your Keyword In Your URL slug Use Short URLs
  Front-Load Your Keyword In Your Title Tag Embed Title Tag Modifiers
• Front-load your keyword in your title tag
• Embed Title Modifiers
• Use Your Keyword Once In The First 150 Words
• Use Your Keyword in H1, H2 or H3 Tags Optimize Images
• Copy should contain keywords
• No more than 20 words per sentence
• Include reputable links
• Include statistics
• Readability should be 7th-9th grade ability
• Avoid clickbait at all costs! It's a sure-fire way to destroy your credibility