Digital PR is one of the most effective ways to earn backlinks and boost brand authority.
However, many are treating digital PR as just another SEO commodity, which puts its true potential at risk.
This article highlights why focusing only on cost-per-link damages digital PR.
We’ll explore how you can leverage digital PR more effectively, going beyond link acquisition to provide genuine value for your brand.
Cost per link is hurting the market
Digital PR has evolved into an essential SEO strategy that builds brand authority, boosts organic traffic and improves search rankings.
With a strong digital PR campaign, you get quality backlinks, brand mentions and improved trust, visibility and growth.
However, focusing on “cost per link” has damaged the market.
Agencies selling fixed link packages have become popular as they offer predictable, low-cost results.
While fixed link packages promise predictability, they come with significant downsides.
It reduces digital PR to a numbers game, sacrificing creativity, scale and, ultimately, higher rankings.
Why hunting link ROI is awful for SEO
ROI is an awful word. The issue isn’t with tracking numbers itself. The problem is that it means different things to different people.
You need to be clear about its definition and context to avoid misunderstandings.
ROI is an efficiency metric, not an effectiveness one.
When SEOs focus on cost per link, they believe they are increasing the value they gain from digital PR.
In reality, they are reducing the value they gain from digital PR, causing the industry to race to the bottom.
Let me explain.
As an SEO, you want more links and brand mentions. We can all agree on this.
Digital PR offers this. It’s a service that generates brand publicity and backlinks, often based on data, creativity, expert commentary and stories.
So, naturally, bigger brands with larger budgets were the first to enter the digital PR world.
As the success stories emerged, others wanted digital PR for their brands, and the industry grew.
However, for many SEOs, the cost of digital PR was too high, and the retainer contracts were too long.
Additionally, many SEOs still live under the page rank ideology of follow/no-follow link values.
Naturally, it was only a matter of time before lower-priced digital PR emerged and today, fixed-price link packages are becoming the norm.
Buy 10 links for “X” fee.
The problem with this approach is that it places the efficiency of digital PR before the effectiveness.
Dig deeper: How SEO and digital PR can drive maximum brand visibility
Obsession with do-follow links hurts creativity
Efficient digital PR competes with effective digital PR.
If digital PR aims to generate as many links and brand mentions as possible within a given time frame, focusing on cost per link will naturally mean that agencies reduce their waste and risk.
Think about this logically.
A focus on low cost per link is you asking for more links at a lower price.
You get more links from the same budget and the digital pr agency agreeing to this before they do any work.
And it’s here that digital PR finds itself: on a path of commoditization and a race to the bottom.
But does this make any sense? Not really.
Backlinks are important. No one is saying otherwise. But arguably, brand mentions are even more critical.
As a byproduct of digital PR, you usually gain a brand mention with every link.
You also gain brand mentions without links. Yet, cost per link never discusses this.
This is a key mistake by SEOs.
It’s long been known that Google can parse every sentence on the web, ignore the waffle and see where brands are being cited.
Equally, we know that most “guest posts” use keyword-focused anchor text, not brand mentions.
It doesn’t take a Google engineer to see how powerful a brand citation can be in a relevant and high-authority article, link or not.
This flies in the face of cost per link.
If you’re going to judge digital PR, we need to focus on the effectiveness of digital PR as a whole, not a single part.
Digital PR effectiveness vs. efficiency
Digital PR should be based on effectiveness first, followed by efficiency.
As we know, digital PR aims to increase the volume of high-quality links and brand mentions.
We should judge digital PR contracts based on their effectiveness in this task.
Efficiency is a secondary metric when looking at digital PR success.
This creates a massive issue for SEO and digital PR. When you focus on efficiency first, you set the digital PR market to reduce what you want.
More links and brand mentions.
You’re telling the digital PR market to minimize risk and not to focus on reach.
Because, like it or not, links and brand mention volume come from creative thinking. And that takes time and skill.
Efficiency turns digital PR into a product rather than a service.
Agencies are already “on the hook” for more links and can’t afford to waste outreach on ideas that might lead to massive results.
But as an SEO, you’re trying to get value for money.
You want to reduce the risks to your budget and career.
However, the secret lies in measuring digital PR differently.
Dig deeper: How to use digital PR to drive backlinks and business growth
Get the newsletter search marketers rely on.
How to negotiate a better digital PR contract as an SEO
The first thing that needs to change is the idea of looking for cost per link before the contracts begin.
This happens because people have limited budgets and seek a link guarantee or minimum KPI. Having a link KPI is now standard practice in digital PR, and it is used to negotiate contracts.
But here’s where the first hurdle of digital PR gets knocked over.
You’re forcing digital PR agencies to be less creative and focus on ideas that win links and don’t carry the risk of not working.
Remember, it’s about effectiveness first.
We need to judge a contract based on its effectiveness in generating backlinks and that’s the first place you start.
How to judge the effectiveness of digital PR (as an SEO)
When you aim to judge the effectiveness of digital PR, you need to compare it with two things.
How you generate links through other methods such as guest posts or outreach.
Previous digital PR campaigns.
Those are your two benchmarks.
The difference between digital PR and traditional link outreach is that PRs reach out to journalists who need stories.
In contrast, the other approach reaches out to website owners or marketers with the goal of promoting your content as something they’d like to link to.
Digital PR is vastly more effective at generating links because the target audience will likely be more receptive.
An agency is likely to give you an “anticipated link number.” This is where you would compare your current methods to this number.
If a six-month digital PR retainer previously generated 40 links with a high average authority, you’d be right to ask the agency, “How could they beat that?”
They may not be able to. In your sector, links may be difficult to come by, but this is where the agencies’ selling points come in.
Their creativity, their relationships and their sector experience.
Effectiveness must be judged after the retainer ends or over time.
But what about efficiency?
The efficiency of digital PR (and how it works)
When your digital PR campaign ends or even during the retainer, you’ll start to see its efficiency.
Let’s take a $3,000 per month investment over six months.
Month 1: No links.
Month 2: 3 links and 5 brand mentions.
Month 3: 15 links and 10 brand mentions.
Month 4: 10 links and 8 brand mentions.
Month 5: 18 links and 4 brand mentions.
Month 6: 10 links and 15 brand mentions.
You have 56 links and 42 brand mentions.
Your total bill was $18,000, giving you a cost per link of $321.
But you also gained 42 mentions, so you paid $183 per piece of coverage.
Now, you might be sitting there thinking, “Yeah, that’s great, but if I have a retainer-based contract rather than a product-based approach, I risk not generating links.”
I’ll explain why this is a false economy.
Retainer digital PR vs. productized digital PR
One of the reasons I love retainer-based PR is that when a client comes on, the team has to ideate and consider the future.
With product-based PR, it’s all about the “now.”
We offer both a product version and a retainer model, but with a retainer, you think strategically over the length of a contract. I say this as an SEO who works inside a digital PR agency.
I get to see the links we earn and the strategy behind them.
Short-term retainers require a short-term strategy.
It’s about how we can get links now versus what the best way to generate links and brand mentions for the clients over the length of the contract.
I appreciate that this is hard for some SEOs to swallow, especially if they’re used to gaining links via guest posts. There is a transactional approach to that, often fuelled by cash. But with digital PR, you’re earning links and brand mentions, not buying them.
Which brings me to the final point.
Digital PR as a wider marketing function.
How a focus on links kills the wider benefits that digital PR delivers
All we’ve talked about is links and mentions here.
But digital PR is more than this. It acts as an advertising function for your brand.
Because it earns links and brand mentions, these stories are seen by thousands and often millions of people.
Some people are either in the market to buy what you sell right now or will be in the future.
The effectiveness of this depends on the link you gain and the subject matter you discuss. However, that’s what we call ‘relevance’ in digital PR.
The point is that digital PR acts as a marketing and sales activation strategy.
I’ve listed many of digital PR’s benefits, but above all else, I want you to remember one thing.
If you’re negotiating on cost per link before signing for digital PR, you’ll reduce the amount of ideation and creativity your agency can undertake.
You’re taking an efficiency metric and using it at the wrong time.
You judge digital PR success at the end of the retainer.
And focusing on the wrong metrics will likely harm your success.
But that’s on you.
As long as SEOs seek low-cost per-link guarantees before signing a contract, you’ll get what you ask for.
But it’s a surefire way to limit the potential of digital PR, and arguably, it’s a case of SEOs shooting themselves in the foot.
For me, as an SEO who uses digital PR to fuel growth. What I care about is as many relevant brand mentions and links as I can get.
And to do that, digital PR teams need to ideate and create strategies to achieve maximum success.
Because as long as real people read the news, digital PR needs to have human creativity at its heart.
And that’s what we buy when we ask for digital PR.
Human talent that maximizes SEO success.
Dig deeper: 12 SEO metrics to add to your digital PR measurement program
Contributing authors are invited to create content for Search Engine Land and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the search community. Our contributors work under the oversight of the editorial staff and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. The opinions they express are their own.