The Evolution of Digital PR: From Links to Brand Authority
In 30 seconds
· Digital PR has evolved from a simple link-building tactic to a sophisticated discipline that builds brand authority across multiple channels.
· We trace this evolution through three distinct eras: the link-building years, the content revolution, and today's integrated approach which gave us Bottle’s Fame, Findability, and Fulfilled (3Fs) model
· Discover how the 3Fs approach to digital PR drives business growth by connecting brand building, search visibility, and customer conversion into a single coherent strategy.
Bottle has always been a PR agency – maybe one of the few who recognised, more than ten years ago, that our PR skills could serve two roles; the ‘traditional’ brand awareness objectives, and the emerging ‘PR-for-SEO’ objectives.
For a long time, these objectives, and the clients who targeted them, remained quite distinct.
But as the channels and media habits of audiences have changed, and as marketing teams have recognised the connection between Content, Brand, PR and SEO disciplines – so digital PR has evolved.
The relationship between PR and search has fundamentally changed. What started as a tactical partnership to build links has evolved into something far more strategic - and it's transforming how brands approach both PR and search visibility.
At Bottle, we've had a front-row seat – maybe a driving seat? – through this evolution. As one of the early PR agencies to recognise the dual role of PR in building both brand awareness and search visibility, we've shaped our approach as the landscape has changed. Here's what we've learned, and why it matters for brands today.
Join us in the wayback machine, not for nostalgic time travel, but to learn the lessons of that evolution - and have a look at where digital PR is heading next.
The Link-Building Era: When Quantity Ruled
In the early 2010s, digital PR emerged as primarily a link-building tactic. Success was measured in link quantities, with SEO teams working separately from PR teams. We saw this firsthand while working on early briefs.
Our first foray into digital PR was for a healthcare client, back then, who extended our ‘traditional’ PR brief to support their digital team. We quickly discovered that our success would be measured entirely in the volume of backlinks we could earn. Their SEO agency worked in parallel to us, creating and optimising the onpage content. In reality, they had primacy – there was little or no joint planning, and we needed to learn ways to create stories that flexed their content for editorial media, in a way that could earn backlinks.
And when we say ‘content’ – back then, pretty much every campaign was anchored on an infographic. Infographics were big. Literally. Full-scroll pillars of facts and figures, like a trojan horse to sneak in the keywords.
In time, we started working in a more joined-up way – and we began to brief the content ideas that had media value, and a reason for journalists to link. But it was a bit of a struggle to get SEOs to think this way.
SEO-led approach starts to creak
This model started to show some strain around ten years ago. First up, Google got a whole lot smarter about link quality, and some of the granular goals for link-building were waving red flags. Exact-match anchor text link? Red flags. The guest post farms? (Not us, btw, we didn’t even know what they were). Penalised. The irrelevant-but-high-DA links? Not shifting the search visibility dial.
Nevertheless, more pure-play SEO agencies were beginning to add their own digital PR offering – although we were getting signals from journalists that they were getting a lot of formulaic pitches with unrealistic insistences on link-cramming.
It was also around ten years ago we started to get briefs that were actually ‘Digital PR’ briefs. They were still a rarity, but it was an early sign that the concept of a dedicated PR strategy with measurable results aligned to online outcomes was catching hold.
Digital PR was beginning to shift from a niche SEO-led add-on, to a more in-demand proposition.
The Content Revolution: words and numbers and pictures
Around 2015-2018 we saw – and were hopefully part of – a shift. That the onsite content should be something that people actually want to read, and real journalists would really want to link to.
That it was naturally connected to the media story – in other words, that the content and the story were created together. Two parts of a whole.
In most cases for us, we were increasingly delivering both, joined-up at source. Like us, agency content teams were growing, and adding to their capabilities.
Interactive content evolved from simple clickable infographics into genuinely useful digital experiences. We're talking about fairly sophisticated data visualisation tools that let users explore datasets on their own terms. Calculators and tools that actually solved real problems for users started appearing.
Numbers get crunchy
To fuel our media stories with data – always a strong PR tactic – we needed to move beyond the paid-for survey to 2,000 people, or the promise of rich client-owned data that sometimes struggled to materialise.
More third-party data was becoming available, for free, online – ONS, published reports and other studies – if you had the skills to work it into new insights for media. And Freedom of Information (FOI) requests were becoming a powerful tool, uncovering genuine news behind the veil.
PR teams like us began investing in proper data journalist capabilities. Crunching the numbers in excel for correlations and newsworthy headlines.
We wanted to add these as new capabilities at Bottle, to be able to holistically service the increasing demand for content, and to incorporate the analytical and SEO skills and join-up the value-add of digital PR. We added two new teams to support our PR teams:
Data-savvy Planners
We built the data capabilities into a new Planning function – who could support three areas:
- get to a great strategy from the data in a suite of martech tools like SEMrush and ahrefs and Sistrix - and give us the SEO capabilities to connect our digital PR plans
- develop and capture the measurement data for our work, to report more effectively and inform the shifts in strategy
- double-up as the data journalists for the PR team (whose media skills didn’t necessarily twin easily with excel spreadsheet manipulations).
Content Creators
At Bottle we formed a team who could work alongside PR specialists from story conception to visualise the possibilities for content solutions. And then originate the content, for an increasing span of platforms.
Onpage content and media assets might have been the primary uses – but quickly we were integrating the digital PR with social too.
In fact, they have evolved to be full idea-starters in that storyplanning process, and a vital lead on the creative process for bigger fame-building concepts.
This organisational evolution reflected a broader truth: whether you organised into three teams, like us, or not - success in digital PR required:
- creative storytellers, connected to the culture and the media
- adaptable content makers who could design graphics and storyboard video
- technical expertise to maximise and direct the search effectiveness of media stories
- strategic marketers, who can diagnose the problems and opportunities, and align the digital PR efforts within a wider brand marketing context, and measure impact
- excel-lent spreadsheet skills for data understanding, to make stories with statistical veracity.
It was a long way from the PR generalist skillset in the early days of Bottle.
Full-funnel integration and the 3Fs
This evolution has led us to develop our 3Fs framework - Fame, Findability, and Fulfilled. It's a recognition that digital PR strategies can be applied to the whole marketing funnel – ‘The Long and the Short of It’ (as Binet and Field described the top-and-bottom of the funnel) and the ‘messy middle of it’ (as Google had begun referring to the bit in-between.
Fame: Building the brand recognition that both journalists and search engines respect and generating future demand with the vast majority of your audience - who may not be ‘in-market’ (yet).
Findability: Ensuring your brand appears when and where it matters, for audiences who are ‘looking’ – searching for the answers for which your expertise is the best solution.
Fulfilled: Converting that search and media visibility into clicks and sales-driving traffic, when audiences are in ‘buying’ mode.
Today: brand and search are becoming inseparable
The most recent evolution reflects a crucial insight: brand recognition is becoming a critical ranking factor in a changing search landscape.
Recent revelations from ‘Google Leaks’ in 2024 appear to show that brand signals are a ranking factor for SEO.
And the rise of AI in search is making brand authority more important than ever. LLMs like ChatGPT value distinctive brand sources for their assembled responses.
As search engines get better at understanding content, they're increasingly using brand recognition as a key signal for the sources they cite.
- Strong brands have an advantage in search visibility
- PR coverage builds valuable authority signals
It confirmed a strongly-held belief at Bottle – brand matters in digital PR. That thinking about audiences – like marketers - rather than second-guessing the algorithms, is the sustainable way to grow the impact we can make.
Increasingly, it’s the strategies that unite fame and findability will add the most value.
Key Takeaways for Brands
1. Invest in creative storytelling that builds genuine authority and attracts audience attention.
2. Integrate brand PR and search strategies from the start.
3. Measure impact across both brand and search metrics.
Looking Forward: the next stage of evolution
The Marketing Funnel is one of the oldest, and most enduring models in the whole profession – and our 3Fs application of it, for Digital PR at Bottle, will continue to serve the strategy for clients. But we will continue to learn and adapt the specific tactics that achieve fame, findability, and fulfilled goals in the ever-changing environment.
We are exploring the way we measure impact will adapt, as we learn how the virtual circle of fame and findability drives the brand growth results.
Audience behaviour has always shifted over time – how and where they spend their time and attention – and we have moved with those shifts to ensure that our clients’ brands are earning that attention.
We’ll be staying close to the rise of AI platforms – how and how much they are used – to update our tactics. But as we maintained through the early phases of Digital PR’s evolution, staying aligned to audiences – and believing in the value of brands – is the surest North Star.
