The B2B SaaS Marketing Blog

Digital PR: Aligning Traditional PR and SEO Teams

by 

Areej Gutale

Last updated: February 11th, 2025

PR teams and link builders on the SEO team are executing essentially the same task – reaching out to journalists and bloggers to promote the brand. 

Yet these two teams have different agendas. Specifically, the PR team’s primary objective is boosting brand awareness, whereas the SEO team’s primary objective is earning a link.

If these two teams worked together to ensure each campaign earned both a link and maximum brand awareness from the right target audience, you could potentially double the ROI of each campaign.

In this post, we’ll share our step by step process for educating the traditional PR team on link building, including which types of publications are most beneficial from an SEO standpoint, creating link-worthy content, and the types of links to acquire.     

The Difference Between Digital PR and Traditional PR

Traditional PR is a marketing strategy designed to generate maximum brand awareness.

Digital PR is a marketing strategy designed to generate targeted brand awareness and boost SEO strength through link building. 

To illustrate this concept, the goal of a traditional PR campaign may be landing a quote in a large lifestyle magazine that reaches hundreds of thousands or millions of readers.

In contrast, a digital PR campaign’s goal may be earning a handful of link placements across several respected cybersecurity blogs. 

Yes, the lifestyle magazine might earn more total reach, but those readers likely won’t visit your website if there isn’t a link to it. Additionally, they might not be relevant prospects – especially if you’re selling enterprise SaaS products. 

In contrast, a brand mention and link placement on several cybersecurity blogs might earn less total reach, though it will likely send more relevant prospects to your website. The link itself will also boost SEO efforts.   

To further illustrate the difference between traditional PR and digital PR campaigns, here are some metrics used to measure each.

Traditional PR Metrics:

• Total views
• Engagement
• Third party mentions

Digital PR Metrics:

• Domain/Page Authority
• Traffic 
• Link type
• Leads/signups 

Should Every Traditional PR Campaign Align With SEO Efforts?

The answer to this question depends on the company’s goals. 

If the company is purely interested in brand awareness among the masses, aligning traditional PR efforts with SEO efforts may not make sense. However, most enterprise SaaS companies are not selling to the masses.

If the company’s primary goal is to drive more signups, trials, and revenue, aligning traditional PR teams with SEO is in everyone’s best interest, as traditional PR teams can tailor campaigns to send links to high-converting pages. 

In many cases, the only adjustment a PR professional must make is simply asking the publisher to include a link in the publication – a simple request that can deliver significant value to the SEO team and increase the total ROI of each PR campaign.  

While traditional PR teams are often weary of technical link building metrics, there are a few simple ways PR teams can align with SEO teams to maximize the benefit. Similarly, SEO teams can learn outreach strategies from the traditional PR team, as PR professionals are often more skilled at building genuine relationships with publishers.  

How To Align Traditional PR With SEO Teams 

Simply scheduling a monthly or quarterly meeting to discuss goals might sound like a good start, but without actionable tasks, it won’t lead to effective change.     

Instead, we align PR and SEO teams by providing a four part checklist for both SEO and PR teams. 

If both teams are using the same metrics to measure campaign success, you’re much more likely to successfully align both teams and ultimately achieve the company’s overarching growth goals. 

Step 1: Link Prospect Evaluation

The first step to aligning PR and SEO teams is using the same criteria to evaluate and choose partnership opportunities. 

As PR teams traditionally measure campaign success based on brand awareness and reach, they often prioritize high traffic websites. However, not all high traffic websites are credible or drive relevant traffic. 

Earning a link from a high traffic website with low credibility (like a foreign news website) likely won’t provide as much of an SEO boost as a link from a smaller yet more trusted and authoritative website (like an industry-relevant blog). 

Similarly, the traffic from a foreign news site likely won’t drive relevant prospects to your website – especially if you sell enterprise SaaS software. 

To ensure PR and SEO teams are aligned and targeting opportunities that are credible and generate relevant, substantial traffic, this is the four part checklist we use to qualify link partnership opportunities.

This checklist is separated into two categories: domain and page-level metrics.

Domain-level metrics evaluate the entire website, whereas page-level metrics evaluate the specific page you’re aiming to earn a link from.

Domain Level Metrics:

• Domain Rating (DR) (measures a website’s credibility): This is a third-party metric from Ahrefs based on the quality and quantity of links pointing to that website, which provides a snapshot of the domain’s overall credibility. A link from a high DR website will boost your website’s authority (and therefore, SEO rankings) more than a low DR website. 
• Domain Traffic (measures a website’s traffic): This metric measures the entire website’s total traffic. 

Page Level Metrics:

• URL Rating (UR) (measures a specific page’s credibility): Similar to domain rating, this measures the strength and authority of the specific page you’re aiming to get a link from. Pages with a high UR have a high quantity of quality links and, therefore, pass more authority to your website.  
• Page Traffic (measures a specific page’s traffic): This metric measures the total traffic the specific page you’re targeting receives. Obviously, a page with more traffic is more likely to send you more referral traffic than a page with less traffic.

After creating a list of potential link opportunities that match this criteria, manually evaluate each for thematic relevance. For example, if you sell a cybersecurity enterprise SaaS product, eliminate general lifestyle publications and instead prioritize trusted cybersecurity blogs.

Evaluating websites for thematic relevance is important for earning relevant referral traffic. Links from relevant websites also help search engines understand that your website is an authority on that topic, which can help it rank higher for industry-related keywords. 

For example, if search engines see many cybersecurity websites linking to you, they’ll realize your website is an authority in the cybersecurity industry and boost rankings for cybersecurity related keywords.

Once you have a list of thematically relevant websites that meet the domain and page level criteria, prioritize them first by domain level metrics and then by page level metrics. 

Step 2: Targeting and Content Strategy

Bloggers and journalists only link to other resources if they add value to their existing content. For example, if a piece of data allows them to prove a point or a unique opinion from an expert adds additional insight to their content, they often mention the source and link to it. 

The first step to earning links is therefore creating content or data that provides new insights that would improve the quality of a blogger or journalist’s work.

What Is Linkworthy Content?

Many PR teams create broadly appealing graphics that appeal to the general masses. 

For example, a PR team for a sales software company might create a visual and dynamic infographic of the most famous salespeople in history. This broad visual might be published in a general lifestyle magazine or another generic publication, and it likely will earn a high quantity of links. 

However, it likely won’t be published on a page that’s topically relevant (e.g., a blog post about the top sales software on a sales blog). Unfortunately, links from websites that aren’t topically relevant won’t meaningfully boost rankings for sales related keywords. 

Instead of creating broadly appealing content, look at your list of link prospects and create content that would meaningfully increase the value of those specific pieces of content. 

For example, we recently acquired a link from a page on WordStream discussing PPC for B2B SaaS companies. We had recently published a webinar on LinkedIn where our founder, Dev, discussed his unique point of view on a subtopic of this subject. 

We reached out to WordStream and asked if they wanted to include an extra paragraph, including Dev’s unique perspective on the topic. 

They agreed because they thought it was an original idea and would elevate the quality of their content. Within the pitch, we also mentioned that, if we helped them refresh their content, it might help their page rank higher because Google typically prioritizes fresh content.

Some specific types of link-worthy content include:

• Unique opinions from experts
• Unique data on popular industry topics
• Case studies and examples to support the writer’s points

In addition to creating new content, we also identify pages that are already effective at converting prospects and build links to these pages. 

For example, we may build links to bottom of the funnel blog posts that have proven particularly effective at driving demo signups. 

The tricky part is crafting a pitch that makes it valuable for link prospects to link to those pages. 

Step 3: Outreach Principles

Many PR professionals are excellent at building genuine relationships with journalists and bloggers, though they don’t always leverage these relationships to earn links. 

As building new relationships takes time, start with low-hanging fruit – identify journalists/bloggers your team has worked with to earn mentions yet hasn’t included a link to your website. 

Reach out to them and ask if they can also add a link to the brand mention. 

Another opportunity is to identify no follow links. No follow links don’t pass any SEO authority to your website, so simply reach out to the blogger/journalist/publisher you already have a relationship with and ask them if they can swap it for a follow link.

You can also reach out to publishers who organically mentioned or included a no follow link to your content and ask them if they’d consider adding a follow link.

For example, we found an unlinked mention on Forbes for our client, Elastic, and the publisher ultimately agreed to give them a follow link.

To improve your response rate, include something helpful to further incentivize them to swap the link for you. This could be updating a passage of the post or providing a quote with new insights. 

 Finally, if you notice a website has links to other content that is dated yet covers a similar topic as your fresh content, reach out (with a refreshed paragraph) and ask if they’d consider swapping it. In the pitch, mention that refreshing the content can help it rank higher in search results.  

After tackling these low-hanging fruit opportunities, reach out to new link prospects you identified in the previous steps. 

PR professionals are excellent at building genuine relationships, so simply ask them to request a followed link from the publisher. They don’t necessarily need to ask for a link on the initial outreach message, though they should request the link before the brand mention is placed on the website.  

It’s also important to provide an anchor text recommendation during the link placement negotiation. Anchor text is the word or phrase that contains the link to your page, and including keywords within the anchor text can help search engines better understand that your content is related to that keyword. 

Finally, be sure to specify the specific page you want the link to lead users to. While a link to your homepage can help boost the overall authority of your website’s domain, a link directly to a specific high value page on your website will help that specific page rank higher and is therefore more impactful.

This is why one step within our content promotion process is dedicated to carefully selecting the most impactful pages (e.g., those that produce the most conversions/rank for critical keywords) to send links to.

Step 4: Link Placement Score

Rather than using brand awareness and traffic as the primary metrics to measure the success of PR campaigns, we use the following link placement scoring system to align PR and SEO teams.

Here’s how it works:

• Mentions = 1 point: A mention is great for brand awareness, but won’t send people to the website. 
• Backlink (no-follow) = 2 points: A no-follow link doesn’t provide any direct SEO value, but it can send people to the website.
• Backlink (follow) = 3 points: This is excellent for SEO and sends traffic to the website.
• Relevant anchor text = 4 points: This is perfect. It’s a do-follow link to a relevant anchor text, so it passes SEO value to a targeted page and gives search engines context for what that page is about.

This scoring system makes it easier to align the PR and SEO teams and ensure they’re both working towards the same goal. 

Get More Help Aligning PR and SEO Teams

The process mentioned above is the step-by-step process we use to help our clients align the PR team with SEO goals and maximize the value of each PR campaign. 

However, execution can be challenging as it requires not only getting the PR team on board, but also educating them on the importance of this process and guiding them through the first several campaigns. 

If you want more personalized assistance aligning the PR team with SEO incentives, reach out to Powered By Search today and we can help you execute this strategy. Our team members can also help you discover low hanging fruit opportunities and lay out a full SEO roadmap for the coming year.