The New (But Old) Field of Digital PR

6 min read

Digital PR gets talked about as a relatively new discipline in the marketing world, which is a slightly odd way to describe something that is, at its core, traditional public relations — the decades-old craft of pitching journalists, telling a compelling story, and earning coverage. What’s actually new is the purpose: digital PR applies that old craft specifically to earn backlinks, brand mentions and citations that support SEO, in an environment where the old link-building tactics (covered in our companion article on how the backlinks game has changed) have largely stopped working.

What Digital PR Actually Involves

At its simplest, digital PR means creating something genuinely newsworthy — original research, a proprietary data set, a timely expert opinion, a well-produced survey — and pitching it to journalists and publications whose audience would find it relevant. When it lands, the result is coverage in a real publication, usually with a link back to the source, and a level of third-party credibility that no amount of directory submissions or guest posts can replicate.

Why It's Not New

Businesses have been pitching stories to journalists for a hundred years. Press releases, media events, expert commentary and sponsorships are all classic PR tools; digital PR simply applies the same instincts for what makes a story newsworthy, with the explicit additional goal of earning a link and search visibility from the coverage. The skills that make a good traditional PR practitioner — knowing what a journalist actually wants, understanding a news cycle, writing a pitch that gets opened rather than deleted — transfer almost directly.

Why It's Suddenly Essential for SEO

In the post-spam-update environment we operate in now, the links that actually move rankings are the ones that look like genuine editorial coverage, because that’s precisely what Google’s spam detection is designed to reward over manufactured link placements. Digital PR produces exactly that kind of link by design — it’s coverage first, with the SEO benefit as a natural consequence, rather than a link placement dressed up as an article.

What Makes a Story Newsworthy

Original data or research — survey findings, proprietary analysis, or industry data nobody else has published
A genuinely useful expert take on a current news story relevant to your industry (often called reactive PR or newsjacking)
A compelling human angle — a customer story, a founder’s experience, a local community connection
Timeliness — tying a pitch to a relevant calendar moment, industry event, or breaking story significantly increases the odds of coverage

Speed matters more than it used to. Reactive PR — responding to a trending topic or breaking news with a relevant, credible comment within hours rather than days — has become one of the more reliable ways to earn coverage, because journalists are actively looking for a knowledgeable source right when a story is breaking, not a week later.

Who Should Actually Be Doing Digital PR

Digital PR sits somewhat awkwardly between marketing and communications skill sets, which is part of why it’s often done badly — an SEO specialist with no media relations experience tends to produce technically sound but forgettable pitches, while a traditional PR practitioner with no SEO grounding can land great coverage that never quite converts into the link or citation structure that actually helps rankings. The strongest digital PR work tends to come from people (or teams) who understand both: what makes a story genuinely newsworthy to a journalist, and what makes a resulting piece of coverage actually valuable from an SEO and brand-visibility perspective.

Where Digital PR Fits Alongside Traditional Link Building

Digital PR isn’t a replacement for every other SEO activity, but it has become the highest-value layer of a modern backlink strategy. We treat it as complementary to on-page content and technical SEO, not a substitute for them — a brilliant piece of coverage pointing to a slow, poorly structured website will still underperform. But as a source of genuinely high-authority, hard-to-replicate links, digital PR now sits at the top of most effective backlink strategies we run.

Building a Repeatable Pipeline, Not a One-Off Campaign

The businesses that get consistent value from digital PR treat it as an ongoing pipeline rather than a single campaign tied to one big idea. That means building a recurring source of newsworthy material — an annual survey repeated each year to track a trend, a standing process for commenting on relevant news as it breaks, or a regular cadence of smaller data stories rather than betting everything on one large campaign. A single successful placement is a nice result; a repeatable process for generating them is what actually compounds into meaningful authority over time.

Measuring Digital PR Beyond Just Links

A narrow “links earned” metric undersells what good digital PR actually delivers. We also track brand mentions (linked and unlinked), share of voice relative to competitors in relevant coverage, and referral traffic from placements. Increasingly, this also matters for visibility in AI-generated search results — AI systems draw on entity recognition and third-party mentions as trust signals, meaning credible coverage can influence whether your brand gets referenced in an AI Overview or an AI assistant’s answer, not just a traditional search result.

There’s also a human dimension worth taking seriously: audiences are increasingly good at spotting generic, AI-flavoured marketing content, and most say they’d prefer brands lean into original, human-centred stories rather than chasing every trending topic. Good digital PR, done properly, is exactly that — a real story, well told, to the right audience.

A Quick Example

A local trades business could run a small, genuinely original survey of its own customers — say, on how much home maintenance costs have risen over the past year — and pitch the results to a property or lifestyle journalist as a timely, data-backed story, rather than pitching “we’re a great plumbing business, please write about us.” The first pitch gives a journalist something their audience will actually find useful; the second is a request for a favour. Only one of those regularly gets published.

Common Digital PR Mistakes to Avoid

Pitching a generic company update or product announcement with no genuine news value to the journalist’s audience
Mass-sending identical, unpersonalised pitches to long lists of journalists rather than targeting a smaller, genuinely relevant list
Treating a single successful placement as the end goal, rather than building an ongoing program
Ignoring unlinked brand mentions instead of tracking and, where reasonable, following up to request a link
Chasing volume of coverage over relevance and authority of the publications actually covering you

The Bottom Line

Digital PR isn’t a buzzword for a new tactic — it’s the return of proper media relations, now pointed deliberately at SEO outcomes. In an environment where manufactured link placements have stopped earning trust with Google, genuine coverage is one of the few link sources that reliably still works, and works better the more genuinely newsworthy the story actually is.

If your current link-building activity looks more like outreach spam than PR, it’s worth rethinking. Talk to Medium Marketing about a digital PR program built around your business’s real expertise.

About

Ethan Caldwell

Reflective Blogger

Dinesh Arasaratnam

Fractional Leader

Dinesh Arasaratnam is the founder of Medium Marketing, a performance marketing agency helping mid-to-large businesses drive growth through strategy, systems, and fractional CMO support. He has advised clients across sectors like energy, eCommerce, SaaS, and education, with a focus on data-driven decision-making and marketing efficiency.

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