Digital PR for Link Building: Beginner’s Guide for 2025

Digital PR aims to boost visibility, authority and discoverability online through media coverage, brand mentions, and high-quality links. When used strategically, it’s also one of the most powerful white-hat link building methods you can use to build links that boost your website’s SEO.

Unlike traditional link building, which often involves manual outreach or paid placements, digital PR link building makes your brand part of the online conversation. It combines traditional public relations tactics with SEO goals to earn links by inserting your brand, insight, or content into places where journalists and publishers are already creating value for their audience.

That might look like:

• Getting quoted in a journalist’s article as a subject matter expert
• Providing original data that media outlets cite in their reporting
• Sharing timely, relevant insights that land in news stories or roundup posts
• Publishing a newsworthy story or asset that gets picked up by publishers

When journalists cite your brand, content, or commentary, they often link back to your website as the source. These are known as editorial links, and they’re among the most valuable backlinks you can get because they are unpaid, organic, contextually relevant and on authoritative domains.

This is the kind of link Google wants to reward, as it signals your site is a legitimate authority.

Digital PR vs Traditional Outreach for Linkbuilding

Digital PR isn’t just an alternative to traditional link building, it’s a superior evolution of it.

If you’ve done cold outreach, link exchanges, or guest post swaps, then you already know the struggle of low response rates, spammy domains, and hours of effort for a few low-quality links.

Digital PR solves those problems, by shifting the value exchange from transactional to editorial.

Here’s why it’s a much more effective strategy.

You Earn Links, Not Just Place Them

Traditional link building often involves negotiating for a placement through outreach, partnerships, or payment.

In contrast, digital PR earns links because a journalist sees value in your insight or data and they choose to include it in their story. The link is a natural byproduct of editorial coverage, which makes a significant difference to Google and your brand reputation.

You Get Links From High-Authority, Real Media Sites

Let’s be honest: most manual outreach lands links on outdated blogs, author contribution pages, affiliate-heavy listicles and sites you’ve never heard of. 

Digital PR, on the other hand, can get you links from:

• National news outlets (e.g. The Guardian, Forbes & BBC)
• Niche trade publications (e.g. Search Engine Land & HubSpot)
• Top-tier business sites (e.g. Business Insider, Entrepreneur & CNN)

You Strengthen More Than SEO

A great digital PR campaign doesn’t just move rankings, it boosts brand awareness, referral traffic, trust signals, and visibility among your ideal customers and search engine rankings. This creates momentum that compounds because media mentions often lead to syndication, social shares, and additional citations.

You Align With Google’s E-E-A-T Guidelines

Google cares about:

• Expertise
• Experience
• Authoritativeness
• Trustworthiness

Editorial coverage, especially quotes, features, and citations, helps check all four boxes. It shows you’re a credible source being referenced by other credible sources. And that’s the kind of signal that strengthens not just your rankings, but your long-term digital presence.

Types of Digital PR Campaigns That Attract Links

Below are the most effective campaign types and approaches that brands, agencies, and individuals use to earn high-authority backlinks through digital PR:

Expert Commentary & Reactive PR

Also known as “link-byline” PR, this is where you provide insight for someone else’s article. Journalists constantly need expert quotes and credible perspectives for their articles, and when you give them something useful, they’ll often link back to your site. 

This type of digital PR approach works well for founders, specialists and consultants looking to boost authority in their industry.

If you don’t have established relationships with journalists who may reach out to you for commentary, use platforms like Qwoted and Featured to find pitch requests and regularly submit insights. 

Newsjacking

Newsjacking is the art of riding a breaking story by providing commentary, context, or a contrarian take that journalists can quote. If your insight helps their audience understand what’s happening, or makes the story stronger, you earn inclusion (and usually a link). 

Timing is everything with newsjacking, so you need to be fast and relevant to make this work. While you may find some journalists looking for time-sensitive commentary on platforms like Qwoted, your best bet is to keep an eye on X and LinkedIn, or reach out to journalists directly who often write about your industry.

Data-Driven Content & Reports

Journalists love original data as it helps them tell stronger stories, back up claims, and add authority to their articles. Publishing surveys, data studies, or unique research can position your brand as a primary source.

This type of digital PR method can be used in two ways:

1. Share it with industry-relevant journalists, particularly if you think your data is enough to build a story around.
2. Optimise it to rank in traditional and AI search engines so journalists find it when researching their articles

If they cite your content, you’ll earn editorial backlinks. 

This approach can often create a snowball effect where more journalists want to cover the data in their own articles, and one survey or data study can build thousands of backlinks (if you get it right!).

Visual & Creative Campaigns

Visual PR campaigns give journalists something to show, not just something to say. Whether it’s an interactive map, chart or a series of infographics, the design itself should tell the story, making it more likely to be embedded and linked. 

For this type of digital PR campaign, you need design skills and a solid narrative, as one without the other won’t yield much in the way of results. However, when you get it right, it can often be picked up by more generalised media outlets and shared further for even more brand awareness.

Human-Interest & Brand-Led Stories

Sometimes, the link-worthy angle is you. Whether that’s your story, your mission, or a unique customer narrative. These campaigns work best when there’s emotion, novelty, or a strong founder angle that resonates with a broader audience. Think: underdog wins, major pivots and personal impact. 

Tools & Linkable Assets

If you create something useful, like a calculator, generator, template, or explainer, that helps people solve a problem, that tool becomes a natural target for backlinks. You don’t necessarily need to reach out to journalists for this, especially if your tool is unique or works exceptionally better than others. That being said, you can’t rely on “if you build it, they will come”, so take the time to optimise the tool for search to get the ball rolling with exposure. 

Reaching out to journalists to share your tool will likely boost it’s visibility sooner if they share it, and these assets often earn links passively over time after the initial PR push.

Digital PR for Link Building: Step by Step

Before you pitch a journalist, write a press release, or build a new landing page, you need to start with a clear strategy. A digital PR campaign is only as effective as the story behind it, and that story needs to be designed with journalists and link value in mind.

1. Clarify Your Link Intent

What kind of links are you actually trying to earn? Not all links are equal and not all campaigns target the same kind. So you need to decide upfront if you’re aiming to build links to a specific product or service, whether they are top-of-funnel links to raise domain authority and whether you need industry relevance or broader domain authority.

For example, a dramatic study may land you a link on the Daily Mail, but original research could earn you multiple links on niche industry sites that will boost your industry relevance and rankings much more than one Daily Mail link.

2. Choose the Right Angle (Not Just the Topic)

Journalists don’t link to topics. They link to stories. 

Once you know your focus, craft an angle that will resonate with both readers and editors. Great digital PR angles tend to fall into one or more of these categories:

• Timely (tied to current news or trends)
• Surprising (counter-intuitive or little-known insights)
• Useful (data, guides, tools, calculators)
• Emotional (human-interest, impact stories)
• Entertaining (humor, oddities, pop culture hooks)

Pro tip: Avoid generic pitches like “10 Tips for Better Time Management”. That’s not PR, it’s a blog post.

3. Research Journalist Demand

Don’t just create your asset or story and hope that journalists will want to share it. Before you build anything, ask yourself, “who might want to share this?”.

The easiest way to answer this question is to use platforms like X, or going directly to the publications, to find out what journalists are writing about, what gaps your contribution could fill and what headlines are trending in your industry. You can also use tools like Semrush’s Backlink Audit to enter your competitor’s URL and see which publications have covered them to get an idea of what’s relevant.

From this research, build a list of journalists you plan to use for outreach as part of your campaign.

4. Set Measurable Campaign Goals

If the goal is just to get links, you’ll never know if it’s really working. Instead, set some goals, like:

• Earning links from specific domains in your industry
• Building X number of links to a specific page
• Specific sites or publications you want to share your asset
• Earning X links from domains with a high domain authority

These goals will help guide your strategy and help you assess the success of your campaign once it’s in full swing.

5. Audit Your Existing Assets

Sometimes the story worth pitching is already buried in your own data. Before you create something new, review any internal metrics you have access to, tools you’ve already created, studies already published or even expert insights you’ve submitted previously that were never picked up. It’s about working smarter, not harder.

6. Create Link-Worthy Content

Whether you’re pitching commentary, a stat, a story, or a visual asset, your content needs to do one thing above all: give a journalist a reason to link. 

Make It Newsworthy

If it’s not new, useful, surprising, or emotion-driven, it’s not news. And if it’s not news, it probably won’t earn you any links. 

Examples of newsworthy content include:

• Ties to current events or trends
• Surprising original data
• Seasonality or awareness days
• Controversy, contradictions, or shifts in perception

If you’re on the fence, ask “why should a journalist cover this today?”, and be brutally honest with yourself.

Design for Citations

When creating content for digital PR, you’re not just designing for the consumer, you’re also designing for the journalist who might link to it. This means:

• Pull out key stats with tables, bold text & callouts
• Use quotable phrases that can be easily pasted into an article
• Include an embed code or direct link to make referencing easy
• Structure content clearly with headers and logical progression

Pro Tip: Journalists skim read, so make it easy for them to find the “linkable” parts at a glance.

Back Up Everything

If you’re presenting data, you must cite the source, even if it’s your own. If it’s your data, you need to explain how you got it (i.e. sample size, tools used, methodology, etc.), provide downloadable assets for the raw data and add context and interpretations. Journalists don’t want to have to do all the work, so how you package your data with credibility and clarity will make all the different to how they interpret and use it.

Don’t Overproduce

Some of the most successful digital PR campaigns are simple stats, quotes or tools. Providing it’s useful, interesting and/or relevant, the right journalist should want to reference your contributions. However, if you go too much the other way and overproduce something so it’s 100% more complicated than it needs to be, you’re going to lose their interest. And your opportunity for a link.

8. Time Your Outreach

When you send your pitch matters just as much as how you pitch. Mondays and Fridays tend to be busy days for journalists, so aim to submit on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday mornings for the best chances of your pitch being opened. 

You also need to make sure you are available to respond quickly to any journalists who get back to you. Once they’re interested, they will want to move quickly, so you need to as well. 

9. Follow Up (Without Being Annoying)

If you’re using a pitch submission platform or responding to a pitch request, skip this step as the journalists often share via these platforms which pitches they’ve chosen, if any.

If you’ve reached out directly, a polite follow-up 2–3 days after your first email can increase your chances of getting a response. Re-forward your original email and add one line to the top explaining why you think it’s relevant for them.

If you don’t get a response after this, move on. The last thing you want is to be blocked or marked as spam.

10. Measuring Success

You’ve pitched. You’ve landed coverage. You’ve earned some links. Now comes the important part: Did it actually help?

Here’s what to measure and how to interpret the results.

• Referring Domains (Not Just Links): Google values diversity of referring domains over raw link count., so the most important link metric isn’t how many backlinks you get, it’s how many unique domains are linking to you. 
• Domain Authority of Linking Sites: Getting one link from a DR 85 site (like Forbes) is often more valuable than 20 links from DR 20 blogs.
• Anchor Text Quality and Variety: Aim for branded, topical, or natural anchors and avoid exact-match keyword spam. 
• Link Destination: Check whether the links go to your homepage, a content asset or product/service page. Ideally, you want a mixture of all of these, but they should also align with your campaign’s goals.
• Coverage-to-Link Ratio: Not every piece of coverage will include a hyperlink. Some may mention your brand without linking, which is still valuable, but less impactful for SEO.

Want to Launch Digital PR That Actually Builds Links?

If this all sounds great but you want to leave it to the professionals to generate results, let’s talk.

At Webhive Digital, we help brands turn stories into search visibility, using proven digital PR strategies that earn real editorial backlinks from the sites that matter. Whether you’re starting small with expert commentary or ready to launch a full-scale data campaign, our team can help you plan, pitch, and place content that moves the needle.

Apply to work with us today and find out how digital PR can accelerate your SEO results.