Digital PR

Beyond the Link: Crafting Digital PR That's Both Link-worthy and Helpful

1 week ago

How to create content that’s both link-worthy and helpful

As digital marketing continues to evolve, the quest for quality backlinks remains a crucial component of a successful SEO strategy.

However, to remain competitive in 2025, it's not enough to simply chase links.

At Aira, our Digital PR team always strives to make the content we produce work harder.

I’m a firm believer that you can build creative content that earns links (both proactively and organically) but can also rank and bring traffic to your site. You just need to get the fundamentals correct.

In fact, I gave this exact talk at PRMoment’s The Intersection of PR & SEO webinar. You can view the presentation here.

Firstly, it’s important to note that not all Digital PR campaigns are made to rank and not all Digital PR campaigns are made to be overnight successes. After all, the main goal of these campaigns is to help build authority into other, usually ‘money’, pages to help those rank higher. And that’s fine. But if you’re working in a space where you can create content that delivers both, this is where magic happens.

So, how do you strike a balance between building authority and improving organic performance? Let's explore how to create digital PR campaigns that are both link-worthy and genuinely helpful.

Creating content that’s both helpful and link-worthy

Leveraging expert commentary - becoming a trusted source

In Google’s helpful content guidelines, they list that ‘trust’ is the most important factor in assessing whether your content is ‘helpful’ and stands a better chance of ranking in the SERPs.

Trust, therefore, is crucial. And it can be utilised in the following two ways:

To demonstrate trust to our own readers. This can be in the form of showing expertise on a topic, commenting on your data’s findings or providing insight and tips to a problem or concern your content is addressing.
To land media coverage. Journalists are always on the hunt for true experts in their field and getting your client's spokesperson in the media builds up the brand credibility and trust.

For example, if you work for a pharmaceutical company and you have a guide on how to stop hayfever, this should be filled with a wealth of comments from a pharmacist at the brand.

These tips can help both your readers to take away information, as well as be shared with a journalist, who in turn can share this with their readers. It will then give you the chance to build links back to the landing page as credit.

Data-driven insights

The most common form of a ‘digital PR campaign’ is using data and insights to form stories. This style of content has been around for years, and with good reason - it works.

Focusing on data sets that are close to your brand allows you to form stories relevant to the press for your target publications.

But how do we ensure this data can work harder?

When it comes to creating content that’s helpful, and ultimately ranks, we need to think about what data can be cited organically.

The dream for us is to create content that drives links organically over time, with no time spent on proactive outreach. To do this, we need to think of data sets that answer common questions, will be useful to journalists and in an ideal world, have some search volume behind them.

For example, statistics pages. Here at Aira, we’re big fans of statistic pages. Focusing on our client's speciality, we can create pages that include a range of stats that could be useful for a journalist to cite.

Let’s go back to the pharmaceutical client. You could create the following pages:

Hay fever statistics in the UK
Prescription statistics in the UK
STI statistics in the UK

Spoiler alert: We created these pages.

These landing pages can be filled with statistics, data, design and expert commentary forming a ‘report-style’ content piece.

Money.co.uk demonstrates great examples here with their business statistics pieces, which are updated regularly and cited by journalists from across business media.

Key takeaways

By combining these strategies, you can create digital PR campaigns that not only generate valuable backlinks but also establish your client as a trusted and authoritative leader in your industry.

If you’re interested in creating content that’s designed to rank and grow site authority, get in touch!