Published
28th January 2026
Read time
6 min read

A PR pro and SEO whizz walk into a bar…and instead of arguing about who drives more value in a marketing strategy, they realise they’re actually far stronger together. One brings the art of storytelling and media relations, the other brings the search data and keyword strategy. Put them together and you get Digital PR.

In an increasingly digital world, where searchability matters just as much as visibility, Digital PR is the new marketing powerhouse that can put your brand ahead of the competition. Here’s everything you need to know about it.

What is Digital PR?

At its core, Digital PR is about telling your brand’s story in a way that reaches the right people online – but always through the lens of search. Like traditional PR, it focuses on earning coverage in trusted media to build brand awareness. But digital PR takes it one step further, aiming to secure backlinks on authoritative websites to strengthen your brand’s online authority and improve search performance.

While it may be the latest buzzword on the marketing scene, Digital PR didn’t appear out of nowhere. It emerged as a response to the way the internet changed how people discover and trust information. In the past, having your brand featured in a print magazine or on TV was enough to build authority. Today, most brand discovery starts online – with consumers relying on Google search results to vet who’s trustworthy and relevant.

How Digital PR differs from Traditional PR

Digital PR builds on the foundations of traditional PR: creating newsworthy stories for your brand and leveraging media relationships to earn coverage. But it adds a layer of SEO science to make it uniquely suited for the digital age.

Digital PR focuses on media outlets that not only have strong reach and credibility for your audience, but also high Domain Authority (DA). Websites with high DA are trusted by search engines, so earning a backlink can signal to Google that your brand is credible and authoritative too, as well as helping to drive traffic.

Storytelling is still at the heart of digital PR, but content is crafted with ‘linkability’ in mind. Data insights, interactive elements and infographics make it easy for journalists to cite and link back to your site.

Traditional PR can be hard to measure beyond reach, but the success of Digital PR campaigns can be tracked through backlinks, organic and referral traffic, and keyword rankings – allowing brands to see tangible results for their efforts.

Another key shift in the PR world is that journalists themselves are increasingly thinking about search – with many now optimising their stories for SEO, adding keywords and structuring content to rank in search engines. By creating stories that are newsworthy and search-friendly, brands make it easier for journalists to pick them up.

The benefits of Digital PR

Having digital PR as part of your marketing strategy can deliver real, measurable impact for your brand, such as:

  • Building brand awareness

  • Improving your position on SERP (Search Engine Results Page)

  • Increasing organic search traffic

  • Improving your website’s Domain Authority

  • Driving referral traffic from media mentions

  • Increasing share of search

And in today’s AI-driven landscape, digital PR takes on an even more critical role. With many people turning to tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini for information, brands need to make sure they’re also optimised for large language models – or LLMs.

To generate answers, these AI systems draw heavily on content from authoritative media outlets, news sites, and published articles. That means the more your brand is featured in trusted publications, the most likely it is that AI will reference or surface your content when answering user queries. So, digital PR can not only give your brand visibility in search engines, but also directly within the AI powered tools people are increasingly relying on.

How to build an effective Digital PR strategy

It’s important to remember that digital PR is not simply a glorified version of link building. Within the traditional SEO world, backlinks are secured through a variety of tactics, such as guest blogging, securing directory listings and fixing broken links. These are important for building a balanced link profile, but digital PR helps to land links on sites with a high DA, which is crucial for increasing the authority of your site.

In contrast to typical SEO link building, digital PR requires a more nuanced treatment: creating compelling stories that are aligned to the news agenda, with ‘linkability’ seamlessly woven in.

That’s why it’s advised to bring the skills of both PR and SEO professionals. You’ll need to employ the typical SEO tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs and Google Analytics to identify your keywords and backlink targets, alongside PR wordsmithery to craft a great story and sharp media pitch.

Luckily, we have a talented team of digital PR specialists here at Leopard Co who know the art of securing media coverage and links like the back of their hand. It’s something we have done successfully for many clients, such as Mitchells & Butlers.

We helped the hospitality giant launch their new restaurant discovery app, Eat Drink Meet, with a robust digital PR programme that landed them more than 70 pieces of media coverage with heaps of backlinks – increasing their DA from 0 to 18 in a matter of months and generating more than 25,000 bookings as a result.

Digital PR agency services

If you want results like that, or want to find out more about how digital PR can work for your brand, get in touch with our team today.