Link building is pretty straightforward and has been for a very long time. We would know we’ve been at it for a very long time. The classic model is to find a relevant site that makes sense for your site to be on, and pitch content to earn a relevant link. Over and over again, a thousand times, it's not glamorous, but it is effective. However, it’s 2026, and we now have more tools, including Digital PR.
Digital PR is a different animal.
Instead of chasing placements one by one with endless emails to webmasters and editors, we help you create something that targets journalists, which in turn they cover in their content. We work with you to create a study that leads to us creating a newsworthy dataset. A story backed by real numbers that didn't exist before you went looking for them. Something truly unique. You get a reporter at a real news outlet quoting your study and linking back to your content, all because you developed content worth sharing.
That's the core of it. Everything else is execution.
Here's what that looks like in practice.
Step 1: Topic Ideation
Topic ideation is a science more than an art.
The goal is to combine and find the perfect balance between what your brand or service finds interesting and what journalist will find worth pitching to their editors. It's to develop something your audience cares about, the twist being that when it comes to Digital PR, your audience is the reporters you're trying to pitch.
That means we need to work together to think like a reporter. Some good questions that start this process include: What's timely? What's counterintuitive? What's a number nobody has put on something everyone already suspects? A good Digital PR topic makes a journalist's job easier, not harder. It hands them a story.
This step is more underappreciated than almost any other part of the process. Get it right and everything downstream is easier. Get it wrong and it doesn't matter how good the survey is or how polished the graphics are. Nobody's going to bite on a story that was never really a story.
We spend real time here before anything else happens.
Step 2: Build the Survey
Once the angle is locked, we craft a survey with you.
This isn't about asking a lot of questions for the sake of asking questions. It's finding the right questions that will yield findings and results that will move the needle in a journalist's inbox. Every question is written with the end story in mind and the goal of potentially finding a little nugget of gold. What do we need respondents to tell us to make this piece land?
Once we’ve worked together to develop the survey questions, we take it from there and handle the survey design, the sampling, and the data analysis. When responses come in, our data analyst will cross-reference the data to identify unique angles and ideas that will attract journalists.
The data has to earn its way into the story. If it doesn't, we go back and look harder.
Step 3: Build the Asset
Raw data doesn't get covered. A well-built asset does.
This is where the research becomes something a reporter can actually use. Our design team takes the key findings and builds graphics that are clean, clear, and pull-ready. The kind of visuals a journalist can drop directly into their piece without any extra work on their end.
The written asset lives on your blog first. It's a full editorial piece, not a press release. Bylined, sourced, and built to hold up to scrutiny. When a reporter links to it, they're linking to something that looks like it belongs on a real publication, because it does.
Step 4: Publish and Pitch
Once the asset is live, the outreach begins.
Our outreach team will build a targeted media list of journalists who are likely to cover your content. These are journalists who've written adjacent stories and whose beats fit within our angle, so they may have a stake in caring about your results. The pitches are customized, not blasted. We're treating their inboxes like they matter, because a lazy pitch to the right reporter is still a wasted pitch.
From there it's follow-through. Responses, conversations, placements. Links from real outlets that made an editorial decision to cover your story.
That's what you're paying for. Not a link on a list. A journalist deciding your research was worth their readers' time.
Why does it matter for SEO?
Because Google still uses links to rank your website, earning high-quality news links is a great addition to any balanced link profile. With the rise of AI answer boxes, AI search, digital PR converage helps generate brand awareness, which is proving to be a very important metric for those AI-generated answers. It’s always good to build your website’s link profile, and Digital PR is a wonderful addition to your strategy and overall link profile.
