Digital PR: Why it’s so important to earn good links and improve your company’s authority

 

Date: 16/07/2026
Written by: Ryan Walsh

Subject: PR / Link Building / Google EEAT

Digital PR is nothing new; it’s not a new-fangled subject or a hot topic of discussion in marketing companies. That’s because, well, it’s been around for decades in terms of helping businesses improve their search engine optimisation.

Basically, in a nutshell, when your business earns greater media coverage, you can obtain more links. Now, when you earn more links from trusted news websites, this generates greater brand awareness. However, it’s also more than that; it improves the business’s authority, which is a key part of Google EEAT. And when you want to improve your business’s rankings in the search engines, improving your business’s authority is always a good idea.

AI Search

This is what prompted us to write this article with a different angle. PR link building is now becoming much more widely used because of AI. LLMs such as Perplexity and ChatGPT now actively use brand mentions, even if not linked, to gauge how important a brand is relative to the galaxy of brands.

What is digital PR?

Digital PR, when done right, makes a splash, gets your business mentioned, increases “entity recognition”, plus a ton of high-domain-authority links can come off the back of it.

However, what on earth does that mean?

Well, in layperson’s terms, it means that if you generate something newsworthy that gets mentioned in the press, you will be talked about.

This conversation then lends itself to your brand being mentioned more. This also means more external links pointing to your website’s pages.

This means that as Googlebot does its job- roaming the internet, crawling and indexing- it will detect that your business is mentioned more.

It will notify you that you have new links. Now, if these links are sending bucket loads of link juice your way, this can mean that organic rankings start to nudge closer and closer to the top of Google.

PR has always been a thing for a very long time. However, some methods are more effective than others. Sometimes a business ends up mentioned on a local news website whose sole income comes from writing flattering articles that highlight what the business wants to say.

In essence, these news websites are just offering links for a fee, which is something Google has frowned upon for a very long time. You simply shouldn’t be buying links, as this goes against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. It’s spammy; it’s basically cheating by trying to improve your ranking by opening your wallet, which doesn’t work.

 

So, what PR work works?

Well, the PR that really works is when you roll up your sleeves and offer something insightful to the general public, newspaper reporters, or websites that mention your brand.

Let’s say you run a leading car dealership. You may put together a comprehensive report at the end of the year on the best-selling car brands.

Now, if this work is reliable, it will be useful and interesting to anyone interested in the automotive sector. Therefore, if you, for example, produce copyrighted infographics, this work could generate many brands mentions and backlinks.

 

But why does digital PR matter so much?

Google’s algorithm, as well as the LLM, uses links and brand mentions to understand your business. Talk to any good SEO boffin worth their weight in salt, and they will tell you that if you manage to get your business mentioned on important and influential websites, then this can uplift rankings. Plus, it’s not just about where you rank anymore in the 10 organic links; now you have to consider whether the LLM’s are citing your work. Now, LLMs such as Perplexity and ChatGPT can also send customers your way.

Why is digital PR so hard to get right?

As you can imagine, there are so many businesses out there beating their own drum. So many are handing over hefty sums to local news websites to say something nice and flattering about them.

Sometimes the article is not written by the journalist; the company writes it and then pays a local news company to publish it for a fee. Well, this is often not newsworthy.

As with everything in search engine optimisation, you have to generate real value; you have to think about the end consumer.

Will the story tell them?

Is it genuine news?

If it is, then you capture interest, and your statistics, or what you have achieved as a business, can get shared far and wide.

So, let’s return to our example of a major car dealer sharing the best-selling car brands in the U.K. Now, several motoring journalists might pick that up, the infographic could be used, and you could obtain a lot of do-follow backlinks. Then there are the social media mentions; such work is likely to be discussed across a wide range of social media accounts.

Now, expert marketing consultants understand how the semantic web works. What this means is that if your business is being mentioned a lot and generating links, this all helps improve organic search engine optimisation.

 

Digital PR and what this means for the LLM’s and AI Search

Now, in terms of LLM’s each one works slightly differently. Therefore, we do have to make some broad assumptions here. However, it’s safe to say that good PR generates more backlinks. This can translate into higher organic rankings on Google. Then, because your business is already ranked high in the SERP’s, this can then mean that the LLM’s are more likely to cite your work and brand more often.
Let’s get to it. How do you create a digital PR strategy that works?

 

Step 1: Define the goals

First things first, know exactly what you’re promoting and where the customer is most likely to read about that service or product. For example, let’s say that you manufacture the toughest and most durable tents on the whole planet.

You could create an article evaluating five tents and testing them in various ways, such as wind tests.

Now, if this is a super interesting piece, when you reach out to camping and outdoor journalists, they might be inclined to mention your piece.

They could have an article coming up for “The best camping gear for 2026 summer vacations”- this is where your in-depth article covering tough and durable tents might be mentioned.

 

Step 2: Keep in sync with current affairs

Quite often, the PR work which works the best is when you have “first-mover advantage”.

Now what we mean by that is simple, often the PR work which works the best, is when you are first at the table with a solution or article.

For example, an event in the news triggers say a mass of journalists covering a particular topic. If you are first to it, in terms of generating an infographic, or relevant statistics, then your work could be cited. For example, a huge increase in car repossessions could be highlighted in a major UK news story. If you’re the finance house, that’s published extensive research on that matter, your work could be cited and linked to.

Step 3: Make sure the data is reliable

The data presented in say pie charts or bar graphs, or just merely mentioned in your work needs to be super accurate. For example, you need to show how you’ve arrived at a concluded, the sample size in terms of how many people were asked. You need to showcase that the information is reliable, because otherwise the major UK news websites and other journalists often wont use that work. You therefore, need to produce robust data and statistics.

 

Step 4: Make it interesting

For example, if were to publish a article or a whitepaper with a huge number of statistics, and facts, often journalists haven’t got the time to read through this. Therefore, it’s always good to create an interesting article. Explain the data, but also to do that in a way that’s simple to read, and extract the main points.

What this allows is, for the information to be more readable. This could open up the opportunity for the work to generate more links, social mentions as the facts are more readable.

Step 5: Create press material

In an article, written by say a UK journalist, they may just want one statistic to cite to reinforce something they are writing. Therefore, it’s a good idea to create, say, an infographic where you can extract the data that they want. This is why many marketing companies create, for example, infographics which clearly highlight the information that you want to convey.

Also, if you for example, use good formatting in the article, you can often convey a lot of information, but also make the text readable and scannable.

Step 6: Know your journalists

• We would highly recommend contacting journalists directly to promote the work that you have published. You should pitch exactly why that website should mention your work. If the journalists do not want to use, say, the statistics that you have published, they will be aware of the research and may want to use and mention your work in the future.
  It also allows you to begin to build a relationship with journalists. What mean by that is for example, if they decline to use the work you’ve published recently, you could ask if they need help with any upcoming pieces.
  For example, they may be writing a piece a few weeks, where you could offer your opinions.

 

Step 7: Measure the results

Its important once your business has invested a lot of time into PR work to then monitor the results.

For example, you could monitor the following:

• How many backlinks have been acquired?
• Which businesses have mentioned your work?
• How much organic traffic was received by that page?
• How many times has the work been cited on social media?

Then when for example, that you have seen that you have acquired say 10 powerful backlinks, then what you can do is to see what effect this has on the organic rankings. For example, if major news websites such as Bloomberg were to mention your company, this would be a link from a website with very high DA score. All of that link equity, that would mean that the linking page is likely to rank high on Google. Your marketing team could then use internal links to funnel the link equity through to different pages.

Step 8: Has the PR work generated more sales, backlinks and mentions?

If after all of that PR work, you see more backlinks, more organic visitors, more brand mentions then all of that effort and expense was worth it. Therefore, often the internal marketing teams, and perhaps an external PR company can see what worked and what didn’t.

Then often it’s a case of repeating this process, to keep getting more brand mentions as well as more backlinks. The reason is, the brands which rank highest on Google for the most competitive keywords, these companies have extremely strong backlinks.

This is why some of the largest brands in the world are constantly working on their digital PR to keep improving their backlink profiles.

The large language models, such as ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Perplexity to name a few often use backlinks as a way of seeing how important a brand or business is. Now, this also stands true, in terms of for example, brand mentions. Now, with digital PR not only do you have the potential to improve the organic search engine optimisation, but now you can improve your brands visibility in the LLM’s.

Therefore, digital PR work is now more about improving brand awareness, brand visibility in the LLM’s as well as also improving your rankings in the organic search results.

 

 

FAQ regarding PR and how it can help you earn backlinks:

Are backlinks still even that important anymore?

The short answer is yes; backlinks are still important.

In matter of fact, backlinks are arguably more important now than any other period in time- let us explain why that is so.

Backlinks offer a way for the algorithms, plus the LLMs, to work out a business’s authority and importance.

Therefore, where some businesses and our clients were once solely focused on optimising their websites for Google, now they are optimising for LLMs as well.

This therefore means, to improve the businesses chances of being mentioned in the LLM’s such as ChatGPT you need more brand mentions.

Brand mentions and backlinks, therefore, allow the LLMs to gauge how important the business is, or how authoritative it is.

 

What topics should our business be covering in our PR articles?

You need to ideally be tapping into current events.

This way you’re covering something new, and therefore there’s often less competition for covering such newsworthy topics. Then also, often journalists will be covering the topic; instead of having thousands of articles and research to choose from, your work, which has been newly published, is more likely to be cited and mentioned.

 

What makes a good backlink?

A good backlink is one you haven’t purchased, its only one that comes from a domain name with a very high DA score.

If the DA score is in the 90s then you’re on to a winner.

Then the backlink needs to be relevant, so if you run a dental practice, the link would need to come from a dental related website. Whether that be dental awards, news or simply a website that offers qualifications in dentistry for example.

 

Why is PR more important than ever

PR is more important than ever, the reason is, businesses and marketing managers are under more pressure than ever to get businesses more visible and more widely cited on a huge range of AI platforms.

Key to this is improving the businesses authority- which comes from building links.

Why you shouldn’t be purchasing backlinks

Businesses shouldn’t buy backlinks, the simple reason is, this attracts Google penalties. It also flies against the face of the advice that’s set out in Google’s own Webmaster Guidelines. That is links shouldn’t be bought; they should be earned. Buying links, means that many other businesses are likely to have done the exact same, meaning that the domain is likely to be deemed as spammy. Therefore, if you gain links from that website, your website could be considered to be spammy as well.

 

Why you should follow white hat best practices

White hat search engine optimisation is the best method. This reduces the risk of incurring Google penalties.

Why does Google EEAT reinforce the point that good PR is needed more than ever

A key part of Google EEAT is “authoritativeness”- and to improve this you need links and more brand mentions.

As digital PR is all about generating more brand mentions and links, that’s why we would recommend using this method in white hat way.

 

How does Walsh & Partners implement high-quality PR?

We can create content marketing which is simply better than your direct competitors.
We can then direct relevant journalists and bloggers to this work.

Do backlinks make much of a difference to organic rankings?

Yes, is the short answer. Backlinks for a very long time, even from the days of Google’s PageRank formula backlinks have been important.

You can publish content marketing every day from now until the end of time, however, it sometimes will not get your business on page one of Google.

With more backlinks, this will then send more link equity to your website.

This will improve the authority of those pages.

This will help improve organic rankings.

 

Come to Walsh & Partners

Walsh & Partners is one of the U.K’s leading SEO businesses. We have SEO minds working for us that have over 14 years experience. We

know link building and SEO inside out, come to one of the best in the business.