PR link building vs ‘conventional’ link building

Joining David Bain to discuss the merits of PR link building vs ‘conventional’ link building are Alexandra Tachalova from Digital Olympus, Amit Raj from The Links Guy, Eva Cheng from Evolved Search and Nick Rubright from Ranko Media.

Watch On-demand

Listen to the Podcast

Transcript

David Bain 

PR link building versus conventional link building. Hello and welcome to the May 2024 edition of the Majestic SEO panel. Where we’re going to be covering: what is PR link building? What is conventional link building, and where do these two areas of link building converge in 2024?

I’m your host David Bain and joining me today are four wonderful SEO, digital PR and link building experts. So let’s say hello to them starting off with Amit.

Amit Raj 

I’m Amit Raj, the founder of TheLinksGuy. You can find this on thelinksguy.com. And with our link building agency, we do some ad hoc digital PR stuff as well.

David Bain 

Superb, thank you for joining us, Amit.

And thank you for joining us, Jeannie Hill as well here from Minneapolis. If you’re listening to us live, if you’re watching us live, try and ask a few questions, comment on what the panelists are saying we’ll try and incorporate as part of the discussion today.

Also with us today is Nick.

Nick Rubright 

Hey, I’m the founder of Ranko Media, and you can find us at rankomedia.com. We do SEO and digital PR full stack.

David Bain 

Superb thanks for joining us, Nick. And one of the panelists today is Eva.

Eva Cheng 

Hi, I’m Eva Cheng, I’m a digital PR Consultant, and I’m all pro-Digital PR link building.

David Bain 

Pro Digital PR link building and all against conventional link building? we will hold that thought and maybe find out more in a little moment after we’ve heard from Alex.

Alexandra Tachalova

Hello, everyone. It’s a pleasure being here today. So I run a relationship based link building agency that is called Digital Olympus. And I guess they are more on the side of a traditional link building, which means we’re sending outreach emails, and so on. But yeah, let’s see how things will go today and what kind of things we can discuss.

David Bain 

Absolutely, look forward to it. So, Eva, let the cat out of the bag in terms of what side of the fence you’re on. You’re on digital PR today, are you always on that side? Or are you just on that side for today?

Eva Cheng 

I think it’s because of the job that I’m in and what I do for a living. So digital PR is very much in my cup of tea and what I do day to day, whereas conventional link building depends on which part we talk about, but some of it I do as well. So it’s a bit of both.

David Bain 

And, Nick, I understand that digital PR is your cup of tea as well?

Nick Rubright

Yeah, I guess it depends on how you look at traditional link building. I would think of it as digital PR as well. I mean, you’re kind of trying to tell a story anyway, I’m just against paying for links or buying links kind of thing.

David Bain

Okay, so obtaining links that don’t necessarily tell a story is something that you would go for?

Nick Rubright 

I think obtaining links that do tell a story is what I would go for.

David Bain 

Okay. What side of the fence are you on today, Amit?

Amit Raj 

I suppose conventional link building. But I think my understanding of digital PR is maybe different. And, and I think some people have a different idea of what link building actually is. I think we’ve gone past the point of people talking about quality, I think everyone’s agreed that you need to go for quality and relevance and these kinds of things. So for me, I think the question is, do you want to talk to your media, or with conventional Link Building for me as more about sites that are like on the lower to modular authority or traffic label. And that’s generalizing because sometimes they do have pretty high traffic. But for me, that’s conventional link building. Whereas digital PR is like, talk to your media, and you’re not so focused on the industry, or the relevance in all cases.

David Bain

It’s interesting what you’re saying, your understanding of what digital PR is, because I guess different people have different definitions for that. We’ll come back to that in just a second. Just after hearing from Alex.So, Alex, are you a conventional link building person?

Alexandra Tachalova

Yeah, exactly. I’ve been doing this for more than eight years. And I don’t think traditional link building equals buying links. And I think we’ve already reached the end of there quite some time ago. Let’s say, like, call it SEO link building where people write or they acquire links. Or kind of exchanging links for money. We have never done so. I think the main idea behind acquiring any link is to build up a strong brand entity, right? And that is exactly why you need to acquire links from other brands. And that’s what we do.

David Bain 

A great definition there. And I was looking for the nods of other faces when you said that the mean definition of link building is to enhance that brand entity. But I didn’t get any nods. We’ll ask other people about that just in a second there. Eva, your profession is digital PR. So Amit was saying it depends on the definition of digital PR. So what is your definition of what digital PR is?

Eva Cheng 

I would say my definition is to utilize the news and current trends, whilst also to benefit link building for a particular client or for campaigns. So it’s essentially PR, and so it’s any news opportunities that come across.

Baby Reindeer is big on Netflix at the moment, if you had a client, who could talk about the mental health impacts of stalking someone, and all of that sort of stuff, or how to tell if you’ve started to become a little bit of a stalker, those kinds of things. And it’s a great opportunity of actually jumping on trends, and building links for a client.

David Bain

Nick, is there anything you’d add to that?

Nick Rubright  

I think to me, digital PR is just PR on the internet. I’d say even guest blogging would be some sort of digital PR, because that’s like a thought leadership type of thing but you can get links with it. So I think digital PR is just PR on the internet and you can get links with it, if you aim it right. But there’s an awareness factor that you can consider, if you’re doing media outreach, you can consider that maybe we should target media outlets that our customers are reading, versus just all of them. Maybe niche the story down a little more or have a different angle with it, while link building is really just about the SEO element of getting the link. So, I’m on the digital PR fence just because of the added value of the awareness factor and the potential to drive referral traffic and sales as well as links.

David Bain 

So is digital PR just link building with the audience in mind, rather than actually with the technical SEO aspect in mind?

Nick Rubright 

I think so. I don’t think of digital PR as link building necessarily. I think it’s used as a way to get links. But to me digital PR is literally just PR on the internet. So I can do PR and get someone on TV or a magazine, or on a blog, or in a digital magazine, but that one will come with a link. So it’s like I use PR focused on digital outlets to get links because links come with it. Credit links, links to the content, whatever. So I guess that’s how I define it, which is a little different..

David Bain 

It’s, I guess, marking it off as a success, whether you get a link or you don’t as long as you get the brand mentioned and that awareness, Alex, would your clients be satisfied? If they just received a brand mention and some return notoriety in their particular sector?

Alexandra Tachalova 

No, not really. So the thing there that you have, in my opinion, you have to define a little or kind of separate things. Just because the brand mentions they are very important, actually. And they’re an essential part of your online brand presence. What I mean, even though it’s quite hard, the problem here is that it is quite hard to tell a client what the exact value of them is.  So we can’t really tell. If we take 100%. Out of this 100%, 50% goes just to do follow links, 30% goes to no-follow links. And the rest goes to brand mentions.

If there was an exact formula that will kind of showcase how you’re reading a backlink profile how your winning online brand presence should look like. Then it will be very easy but people are very, very transactional if you know what I mean. So it’s very hard. It’s quite easy to talk about that especially whenever you have such a lovely panel of people and experts that understand the value of brand mentions. And they’ve been really doing it for quite a long time and they see how it works. But it’s quite hard trying to sell this to clients. But I think we are really moving in the right direction. We’ve been really seeing a lot of changes with how people are looking at links, evaluating links. Nowadays, whenever I say that it’s very important to look at branded traffic, no one is actually arguing about that. Because after Google’s helpful update, we see what’s happening with models that have no brand behind them.

David Bain 

Nick, are your clients still looking for links from authoritative domains? Or are they happy with other metrics?

Nick Rubright

I definitely think they’re looking for the link for sure. It is hard to sell the value of a placement without a link, unless there’s like a spike in organic searches of the brand. Or unless there’s some kind of referral traffic. If you get a story published about your brand, and people start searching for it, that’s a KPI you could sell to, but if they’re coming at you to buy the link, I may try a different approach to get the link, but it depends on who I’m selling to. If I’m selling to a CMO, or VP of marketing that really understands I need customers and the link is kind of a variable.

Then it’s easier to have a discussion like, ‘alright, we have to aim our outreach and fire and get what we get.’ But then there are definitely the more transactional customers, which are usually less experienced in marketing, and come from maybe an advertising background, and they want the link for whatever dollar regardless of what it seems as if it produces rankings or not. You can get one link and it does a lot or you can get a lot and it does nothing. I think it’s always a difficult discussion to have. But it’s more or less difficult depending on who you’re talking to. So for my company, I tend to focus on selling to people who are more educated about marketing practices, just because it’s easier for me to have success with my clients that way.

David Bain 

Okay, so let’s just try to define digital PR, and its value and the way that you go about achieving success.

What about more conventional link building? Amit, what would be an example of a conventional link that you would build for a client that they would be satisfied with that you don’t believe comes under the digital PR umbrella?

Amit Raj 

That’s probably what we’ve got something in common with digital PR agencies in terms of you want it to be as relevant as possible. So in an ideal world, what you want is you want the link to be, the site linking to you to be as contextually relevant to your content, to your business, or whatever you’re linking to. For instance, if you’re in the wedding industry, perhaps your audience is wedding planners, you want to go for organizations that are like professional organizations for wedding planners, would be one example. You want to try and get a link or a guest post and something like that. At the very least you want it contextually relevant at the page level, if it’s not the domain level, but like I said, that’s like the perfect link, it’s your target audience that is relevant to your content to your business, because it increases the chance of potentially getting referral traffic. But again, we don’t know, it depends on the page and the relevance of it.

And then also, Google will value that link, because it knows that’s relevant. I think Google is getting better at that. And we don’t really know what they’re going to do next. But I feel that’s going to give your link building an edge. And to be honest, probably your digital PR, because I think that’s the next thing to go look at. I think it was Bill Hartzer talking about the Link Graph on Majestic. I feel like it’s the next thing that’s coming in. But again, that’s just a theory, I have got nothing to back that up.

David Bain 

So, Amit, what metrics do you look at when you’re trying to establish whether or not you would want to link from a particular page?

Amit Raj 

Things like Trust Flow, DA and DR you want that to be high, but often have to educate the client that you can’t only focus on that. So it’s a very human metric, but the relevance is something we try to educate the clients about. What is relevant to their target audience, or what’s a sector that’s within close proximity to what they do. And as well as that you want the traffic to be a certain level, at least 1000+, but at the same time, using an SEO tool, it doesn’t measure all the traffic. So you have to use something similar but you have to go on what their social media following is, or the likelihood they have traffic from other sources. Some of this you can’t prove, you can’t define it in a hard metric. But you know, when it’s a legitimate business, or organization, or university, or school district, whatever it may be. There’s a high likelihood that that’s relevant, and it’s got relevant traffic.

David Bain 

Do you attempt to establish if the page you have in question is likely to have any significant volume of traffic? It’s all well and good for a website to have decent traffic. But we’ve all been offered the opportunity to have links from websites that are sub pages and highly unlikely to have any traffic whatsoever.

Amit Raj 

It’s difficult. There are SEO tools that measure things at the page level, but even they are not accurate. And sometimes search volume metrics are not accurate as well. I think we can measure it that way, at least gets you in the right ballpark. But the reality is, you’re never really going to know. One thing you can do if you’ve got your attribution set up correctly, as in Google Analytics, you can look at the referral traffic. And sometimes if you search for those domains, you’ll see click through traffic. So we’ve done it in that case, sometimes, it will drive referral traffic and may even drive sales, depending on where you got the link. But again, that’s useful, whether you’re doing link building or digital PR. So attribution, I think, is important because then you can convince clients to keep spending with you.

David Bain 

That’s a great tip there. So to be actively measuring traffic, and hopefully conversions directly from the page that you acquired the link on.

Amit Raj 

As well as the SEO benefits, of course.

David Bain 

So, Alex, same initial question to you. So how do you go about determining whether or not it’s worthwhile to get a link from a page that you’ve identified as a potential page to get a link from?

Alexandra Tachalova

That is a very good question. I think the problem there is more like, in the way we look at things. If we look at things on a metric side, we kind of overlay websites or pages just by using Majestic, Ahrefs, SEMrush. We look at domain ratings, Domain Authority, organic traffic, and so on. Or you look at a bit different metrics. How well Google understands the particular website as a brand entity? So let’s imagine you can get a link on a website that has quite a lot of traffic this year but the website itself is just a trash can. So you know, you kind of open it and you understand what I’m talking about. And we’ve been seeing these websites all over the place. So it’s not a problem to identify them. And then we have a website of a quite well known guy, a personal website. And this website might not have a lot of traffic at all. Might have so-so domain rating, but the person is speaking everywhere, has a lot of presence on LinkedIn, talking about the b2b space, and so on. So Google has a very clear understanding of this persona.

I would always go with the link on this website of a person that Google understands very well, rather than on the link of a website that doesn’t really have any solid online presence. But the question is, one more time, it’s very hard to sell this idea because links for me, is kind of an investment and you need to make good investments, because otherwise, those things won’t help you being recognized as strong brand candidates, and they won’t really send you an app signal, they will only work for a short period of time. And that’s the reason why we see a lot of sites have those ups and downs, just because they made wrong decisions. They decided to go with easy links, the one that has good metrics, but the one that can’t really generate enough trustworthiness, that type of signal. So that is my perspective on this, but we are not quite there yet.

David Bain 

So to summarize what you’re seeing Alex, what I got from it was, if you have a choice of 10 different pages on which to potentially have a link, you would probably choose the one that’s most likely to have an article that’s written by an authority in their industry, someone that’s perhaps a demonstrable personal entity online?

Alexandra Tachalova 

If it’s not associated with a particular person, then I will choose a brand.

David Bain 

Okay. So, I guess to summarize, what I feel has been discussed so far about what digital PR is about, and what conventional link building is about, it sounds to me that you would define digital PR as looking for a specific audience and driving traffic to your website, or client’s website, your own website. But conventional link building is looking to identify highly relevant pages based upon content and perhaps what a website is about overall, and getting links from pages that you feel search engines like Google would find particularly relevant. And hopefully, improving your rankings because of obtaining links from those particular pages. It sounds like your digital PR is on the audience side and conventional Link building is more on the technical SEO side. Is there an opportunity to do both at the same time? Or is it necessary for both these specialisms to sit in separate chairs and do their own things?

Nick Rubright 

I definitely think both at the same time is possible. Guest blogging is a perfect example of that, because you’re going after the link, and you can get some awareness if the website has readers. So I’ve gotten published on websites where I’ve gotten referral traffic and customers. If I get on a big enough marketing blog, but I also get a backlink I can sometimes get a backlink to one of my blog posts, and then it ranks better. If the site has readership, and to Alex’s point, it is a good brand, it may drive traffic. So that’s the digital PR side.

And then the SEO side is like you want the page to be authoritative and written by a good author and on a good domain. To make the page authoritative after it’s published, what I do is I reach back out to the webmaster and I suggest internal links, because then it passes page authority to my guest post. And then I get the SEO value on the guest post as well as this digital PR benefit. So I have super powerful links that are going to last a long time. In addition to focusing on websites that care about their audience for SEO and PR benefit now, it’s a value later because these websites grow.

I wrote for Toast, which is a restaurant point of sale system. It was like a DR 40 or something. Now it’s  in the 70s. They grow over time. So the links become valuable. And to Alex’s point, again about investment, it’s a good investment if you get on a good website. That’s how I see it with digital PR and link building are kind of the same, they live in the same world. And I think in the future, it’s going to be more audience focused. Because if you focus on the audience, the byproduct is good links. You get on websites your customers are reading. And then you get links from websites that your customers are reading. It becomes one and the same.

David Bain 

So they live in the same world, but they’re not necessarily the same person or the same types of people because digital PR has to really understand people and relationships and audiences and some technical SEOs love drilling down into data and not really thinking about audiences necessarily. So is it possible though, for those two mindsets to really understand each other and work effectively together?

Eva Cheng 

I would say so. I would say from my experience at the moment that we do actually consider more topically relevant kinds of sites. We don’t just target one publication, the main key publications that you think of, BBC or whatever. We do go for niche kinds of areas, which are probably more b2b and industry relevant kinds of publications. It really depends on your client’s overall strategy and the way they want to go with it with the keyword ranking. If there’s any particular area they want to focus on more, whether it’s b2c or b2b. The way that we do digital PR, you can change the campaign to fit the kind of area that you’re wanting to go with based on the targets.

David Bain 

What about the order that it’s done in? So if you’ve got a client that is fairly fresh, that launched a new website in the last year or so, maybe doesn’t have that much authority online. Is it right for them to focus more on traditional link building to begin with? Get those articles published on their websites to get search engines aware of what it does and what its brand is really about? Or for focusing on digital PR? Or is it really right at that stage to do both things at the same time?

Nick Rubright 

That’s definitely a ‘it depends’ question. Sometimes you have a website, an easy niche, and you can just do some guest blogging and get some rankings and then get some traffic and sales. But in some cases, digital PR would make more sense. I don’t know what everyone else’s process looks like. But for me, if I’m doing digital PR, I have this process where we do this kind of story research stage. And then we do content development. And then we publish a pitch. And we have like a massive list we download from Muck Rack.

With digital PR, you can use software to get a huge list of prospects pretty easily, 500 journalists or something, even if they’re at the same site, you can pitch them all, so with that, you can be faster with it. But with link building, you really got to dig for your prospects, you really got to go to Google and find a good one. And use Hunter or something similar to find their email address. With link building, you can have ongoing campaigns that last months. You build a piece of content, run like the skyscraper technique that Brian Dean invented, and that can last forever, as long as you have a huge bucket of prospects. Digital PR is like: ‘alright, we did it, not what?’. It can get a good amount of links up front, but it’s very iterative. Your story can fail, and then you have to do it again. That’s a hard question. I guess I’ll let someone else pick it up.

David Bain 

Amit, what are your thoughts on, I guess how you would sell to potential clients why they should use your services instead of perhaps a specialist digital PR agency?

Amit Raj 

Well, I mean, we’ve worked with clients that we knew were doing both. And that reason is we knew we had to do both. Some had done PR before. They had funding, they’ve done PR, they had all this coverage. But they were not ranking for specific keyword groups. They knew they were lagging with a lot of the content pieces, you might call it entities set things they were kind of falling behind. And that’s where they needed link building. It is almost like there are all these theories about people looking into the patterns about how this works. And I don’t really know but sometimes you need link building to get that topical authority that’s associated with that content, or that subject area. It seems that sometimes you need to do link building in those cases. And maybe it’s different for different brands. Probably some brands don’t need to do link building. There’s probably some brands that don’t need to do either, they probably don’t need to do the digital PR or link building but that’s a different story.

If I know that they’ve done PR, and they are lagging behind in certain areas, that’s probably why. So we do need to get more specific, as well as that with link building, you can still spread thought leadership messages and things like that. But it’s just different. For instance, we work with a company in the logistics sector. And we’ve done that and got links in the logistics sector, like industry publications in their sector, and it worked, because we had very specific stories in mind. But for me, I didn’t see that as digital PR, I just saw that as link building. But probably in digital PR, they would target the same publication as well.

Nick Rubright 

So you were kind of doing guest blogging?

Amit Raj

Kind of guest blogging, yeah. What you find with some industry publications, with link building, because you’ve done so much research, you then understand the topic and then you know that they’re going to like that idea. But at the same time, it might not work, it’s just one of those things.

Nick Rubright 

Yeah, that’s so true. You can do a lot of PR and still be in the link building if you need to rank for a specific keyword. WebEx hired us for link building and they have tons of PR. Big companies need it too. Because if the little guy can link build their way past you if they’re smart with it. I’ve done that. I’ve out link built past big companies. So it’s a good weapon to have, even if you’re a bigger company.

Amit Raj 

I think as well as that, probably Eva could know more about this, but do you not experience times where the news cycle is not making itself conducive to getting coverage? For instance, some big news comes out about the royal family, which has happened a few times. It is really difficult to get something published because journalists are not covering anything else. In most cases, it would have been good to have also been doing link building.

Nick Rubright 

If you’re doing digital PR, you definitely have to find a hook, you couldn’t publish a brand story because they’d be like ‘Get out of here’. When COVID was going on, we got a client on PCMag, because it was tech, and everyone’s talking about COVID. So we did ‘here’s how people are shifting their behavior during COVID on technology’. So it was kind of like a tie-in. We got links, we didn’t get any referral traffic or whatever from that. But it was like, let’s use what we can and get the links from it.

Eva Cheng 

I would add to that as well, just with you saying how the Royals were in the news. And it’s overtaking the news, and constantly there, I guess you would just try and find the campaigns that you have, or any articles that you have ready in expert comments, which can kind of maybe lend itself to that news, or target the journalists who don’t typically cover celebrity and royal news. So you can go for a more b2b kind of angle rather than the b2c angle. So you’ve got that other aspect covered, you are still building those links.

David Bain 

So it sounds like the panelists are being very nice to each other here and don’t want to disagree or tell the other person it is not a valid point.

Maybe, then we can talk about how we can really work more effectively together, and perhaps at the beginning of the year, establish some strategy that incorporates both digital PR and conventional link building and really make the optimum use of both different elements there.

Amit, I see you nodding away there, Alex there as well. Let’s go to Alex first, because I haven’t heard from you for a little bit. So how would you sit down maybe at the beginning of the year, or perhaps once every quarter, or however often you sit down with a client and define that strategy? And also incorporate elements of digital PR and more conventional link building into that?

Alexandra Tachalova 

I think the problem with links, starting from the very beginning, is that we have to remember that there is a reason behind any link. And in reality either you’re kind of streamlining this process, those things will be your kind of activity, or that might be something that the brand itself can generate. I think a lot of companies are quite successful at generating links on their own just because they have a strong marketing team. And I think that is ideally what all our clients want to have and what we are talking about with them is that they need to actually run their social media channels. They need to organize events. All those types of marketing that can actually help them connect their brand with a bigger audience. So the people will link back to them, because you can’t really link to something that you don’t really know, it’s not really possible. So first of all, you need to have a certain level of brand awareness. And when it comes to PR, it doesn’t matter whether it’s digital PR, or just a kind of traditional link building. I think the main question that everyone wants to solve is also an organic link flow.

Sometimes we also kind of experiment with this, sometimes we are quite successful with that. And we can help our clients create some certain type of content. For instance, like start pages. Also help this type of page rank quite high in Google SERP results. With the help of just traditional link building, email outreach, getting something back to these pages, and then these pages start to work on their own.

We used to have this client, we’re no longer working with them, but it’s a UK based social media agency. They’re not really well known guys, if I tell you their name, you wouldn’t know it. It’s quite interesting that we did with them together. We created a set of static pages around TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, and so on. More or less well known social media platforms and some of these pages they’re extremely successful in terms of their rankings. And these pages, they still generate tons of clients. So they have a lot of traffic, even though people don’t really know their brand, which is interesting, right? So people are linking to them just because editors are looking for something in Google search engine results, Twitter stuff, for instance. And they don’t really care much about linking back to the original sorry, they link back to their page, because it’s the first page they see. They are all lazy. That is very much how it works for them for more than three years. So, you know, they reached a certain point of visibility, but I think the problem there is that their brand is not as good as their link velocity. And that might cause a problem at the end of the day, but kind of indebted, the reason why we see a lot of fluctuations with their track. So it’s kind of a little bit of ups and downs. Just because from one side, they’re capable of generating links, from the other side, their brand entity is not so strong.

Nick Rubright 

I think that link thing might fix the brand too. We do that all the time, where we rank stat pages. So we have like our digital PR, we have a kind of content piece that we call the Trend Report. And our aim is to rank for trends keywords, because we do the story, we get like 10 links or something and then it ranks for whatever trends. And then we get passive links forever.

So we have one client that we ranked for sales follow up statistics in Google, IRC sales solutions. And we got links from HubSpot, Neil Patel, a brand mention from Entrepreneur, all because they, just like you said, go to the stat page, and they’re lazy, and they just take it as long as you’re referencing the source. I don’t think it’s always laziness. If you had a better looking website like these studies look ugly. I don’t want to go to PubMed and read a whole wall of text and find what they’re talking about, you know what I mean? I want to get the snippet, the summary, and then you source it accurately. So I think the journalists are just also being friendly to their readers, when they link to a good looking stat page that gives the accurate information, versus here’s an ugly wall of text for you to find what you’re looking for, find that evidence here. I hate that.

David Bain

Nick, in terms of establishing a strategy for a certain period of time, maybe a year? Do you start with a content audit?

Nick Rubright 

I look at their whole website, I have to ask about their business strategy. How are we gonna make money? How is this gonna make money for them? If they’re just trying to rank some content and I’m not convinced my work is gonna make them money, they’re gonna fire me. So I have to not do it. I want to have a continuous relationship. Clients come to us if they’re already in a product market fit, usually, they’ve already getting sales and they want more sales. So we have to figure out how to make our work make more sales? And are they already ranking in Google for things? Is their website healthy? Is their content well written? And who is their content team, maybe they need some consulting on the content end of things, it’s definitely important.

I think in general, if they are just ‘we’re trying to figure out all the other SEO stuff ourselves, we just need some links’, we can still do something, we could still put together a nice looking content piece on their website, even if all their other stuff is crap. And we can still get some links, because journalists, a lot of them, just publish the press release. And we can put the link kind of however we want in that press release, and then they’ll change the copy a little bit. But, you know, it can work fine, even if your website is still trash, if you’re doing outbound. The problem is, it’s not going to work with the passive links, and you’re not going to get the other value of people actually staying on your website. If your story does get some traction as far as branded searches, then that’s not going to do anything because you have an ugly website, and people are going to bounce.

David Bain

Eva, I’m sure that you don’t have any clients that have ugly websites or trash. But in terms of having conversations with clients, to establish what you should be doing, how do you determine that strategy through a conversation or through a planning process?

Eva Cheng

Yeah, so we basically, bit like Nick and Alex, we see what the client is looking for, what are they after? Is there any key areas that they want to focus on, as well as any key audiences that they’re looking to target because they might have a primary audience but they could also have a secondary audience, which could be another way to build more links for them and based on different types of publications. Following that we’ll do like a typical backlink gap analysis, see what their competitors are up to. See what their main competitors have built, where they’ve built links, and how we can close that gap between them, and then also build new referring domains for their site. It’s just about consistency of building those links, as well as new referring domains just to get ahead of the curve.

David Bain 

Amit, what sort of initial conversation do you have with clients?

Amit Raj

When it comes specifically to content, I think we’ve been kind of lucky in that a lot of the clients that come to us have, they’ve kind of addressed that. And then perhaps a lot of them have had content and hosts, which I’ve always recommended to a lot of clients and bring that in house as much as possible when you’re trying to create content with a certain level of expertise behind. Now, obviously, there’s agencies that specialize in that, and that works well also. But there’s some clients I would have advocated for them having that in house, or if they can build that team in house. We give high level advice in terms of what they should be doing with the content, things like stat pages, again, we’ve had clients who had that in place. That’s definitely a good way of earning links. Again, with those clients, sometimes you just find the lag behind with other pages. So that means acquiring links to those pages, but then you’ve got all these other pages, which are not acquiring links, so we are kind of helping them on that side.

David Bain 

Okay, five minutes to go. So let’s go round everyone, get their biggest takeaway, and just confirm where people can find you online. So we’re with Amit, let’s stay with Amit. And what would you say is the key takeaway that you would like to share from today’s discussion, and please remind the listener where they can find you?

Amit Raj 

I think I see value in both but I would say digital PR. I see it as for raising overall authority, amplifying branded search, and all those other benefits. It does help with SEO and things like that. But I think it’s hard to hold a digital PR to our very strict link KPI. It should be more about the relevance, basically.

David Bain

IS that a nice way of saying that conventional link building is better than digital?

Amit Raj 

Link building, or passive link building, I think is for you need very targeted links, you want hyper relevance, you want to build it, whether you call it topical authority or something else. I think links are good for that. You want to get links with very specific audiences and you’re not able to do that with digital PR, in some cases. So I think link building is valuable in that way.

You can find me on the agency thelinksguy.com. Or on Instagram, which is @thelinksguy, and Facebook as well.

David Bain

Superb. Thanks for coming on. And Alexandra, what would be your number one takeaway from today’s discussion and where can people find you?

Alexandra Tachalova 

In my opinion, digital PR is an essential part of anyone’s well being when it comes to well being online. That’s because through right digital PR you can get very influential brand mentions. So nowadays, even though technical link building, or whatever it is, whenever you build links to specific pages is still quite important. I think, what is way more important than my understanding is kind of streamlining the portion of link that you’re getting with your branded anchor text back to your main page. That’s where digital PR should be a great match. Because if you just get links, right back to specific pages, then the next Google update is going to devalue your links, that will happen. So you need to get enough links back to your homepage. That is very important. And that might not necessarily be right to follow these encoding brand matches. So that’s what I see as the main challenge when it comes to building links nowadays.

David Bain 

Where can people find you, Alexandra?

Alexandra Tachalova 

You can find me on LinkedIn – Alexandra Tachalova.

David Bain

Thank you for joining us, Alexandra. And, Nick, what’s your final takeaway?

Nick Rubright

I definitely think you need both. It’s like diversifying your investment. You have to diversify your link portfolio or profile. So, I think both can be done in the same kind of campaign, you can put something together to achieve PR objectives and link objectives at the same time. I think all four of us could accomplish that. That kind of thing. We all have heads, it seems we all know SEO, and it seems you all know how to do outreach, which is basically what PR is built with a press release.

So that’s my takeaway, and you can find me at rankomedia.com.

David Bain

Super, thanks for coming on, Nick. And Eva, what would be your number one takeaway?

Eva Cheng

My Number one takeaway would be that both can work together hand in hand. But I do believe that it needs to be done in a more organic way. So much like digital PR, it’s a very organic way of building a link, as long as the conventional Link building is going in a steady kind of way rather than a sudden influx of links randomly disappears. I would say that would benefit a site. And overall, just don’t pay for links.

David Bain 

Where can people find you, Eva?

Eva Cheng 

You can find me on Twitter, it’s @EvaChengPR and also LinkedIn, so it’s Eva Cheng.

David Bain

Thank you so much. You’ve been listening to the Majestic SEO panel. If you’d like to join us live next time, sign up at majestic.com/webinars, and of course, check out our other series at SEOin2024.com.

Previous Episodes

Follow our Twitter account @Majestic to hear about more upcoming episodes!

Or if you want to catch up with all of our previous episodes, check out the full list of our Majestic SEO Podcast episodes.

Back