What digital PR actually is, and how it earns links

There is a phrase that turns up in agency decks and gets no closer to meaning anything each time: digital PR. Sometimes it describes genuine press work. Sometimes it describes buying links from sites that exist only to sell them. The two could not be further apart, and a client cannot easily tell which one they are paying for.

So here is the version from the other side of the desk. I spent three decades as an editor receiving pitches, and the mechanics of what works have barely changed. What changed is that a successful placement now carries a second payload — a link, and the search authority that comes with it.

What is digital PR?

Digital PR is press relations aimed at online publications, where success is measured both by the coverage itself and by the link it leaves behind. The pitching, the story judgement and the relationships are the same as traditional PR. The difference is that the result is measurable, and that a link to your site is part of the goal.

How it differs from traditional PR

That last row is the one agencies forget. Nothing about this work removes the editor from the process. If the story would not have run in print, it will not run online either. The link is a consequence of the coverage, never a substitute for deserving it.

How it differs from link building

This distinction is worth being blunt about, because the gap between them is where clients lose money. Link building, as commonly sold, means paying a site to host a page that points at you. Digital PR means giving a publication something its readers want, and receiving a link because the journalist chose to credit the source.

Google's own guidance treats a link exchanged for payment as something that must be marked with rel="sponsored" or nofollow, which is to say it is not supposed to pass authority at all. Buying links unmarked is a policy breach, not a clever shortcut. Beyond the risk, it simply does not work the way it is sold: a link from a site nobody reads carries the authority of a site nobody reads.

A useful test: if the publication would have run the piece with no link at all, it is PR. If the link is the only reason the page exists, it is a purchase, and you should price it as advertising rather than as earned coverage.

What actually earns coverage

Original data nobody else has

This is the most reliable route, and the most underused. You do not need a research budget. Most businesses sit on numbers that nobody outside has seen — what your customers ask for most, how prices in your category moved over three years, what proportion of enquiries come from where. Aggregate it, anonymise it, write it up plainly, and you have given a journalist something they cannot get elsewhere.

Data gets cited, and citations are links. It also keeps earning them. A dataset published once can be referenced for years, which is why one good piece of research outperforms a year of announcements.

Expert commentary, offered fast

When something happens in your sector — a regulatory change, a market move, a company failing — reporters need somebody credible to explain it before the day is out. If you can be that person, reliably and quickly, you become a name in a contacts book. That is worth more than any campaign.

The requirement is speed and plain speech. A quote that needs editing does not get used. A quote that arrives the next morning does not get used either.

A genuine news hook

Funding, a senior hire from a name people recognise, entering a new market, a product that does something nothing else does. These are real stories, and most companies have perhaps two a year. Treating every minor update as one is how a sender becomes a sender who gets deleted.

Something useful you give away

A calculator, a template, a guide that saves somebody a morning. Publications link to tools their readers can use, and so does everybody else who finds it. This overlaps with content work rather than press work, but the link outcome is the same and it compounds for longer.

The pitch itself

1. Send it to a named journalist who covers this specific subject. Not to an inbox, and not to forty people at once.
2. Put the story in the subject line. Not your company name, not “Press Release”.
3. First sentence: what happened and why it matters to their readers. If it needs a second sentence to become interesting, it is not.
4. Give them the facts, the numbers and a quote they can lift without editing.
5. Say what else you can provide — data, an interview, an image — and then be available.
6. Follow up once. Not three times.

Everything above is also true of a press release sent by post in 1996. The format changed; the judgement did not. There is more on the structure itself in how to write a press release journalists will actually use.

What this looks like for a business in Mumbai

The trade press here is more reachable than most founders assume. Sector publications covering advertising, finance, healthcare and technology are small teams under constant deadline pressure, and a well-targeted pitch with a real number in it stands out precisely because so few arrive that way.

Start narrow. One trade publication that your actual buyers read is worth more than a national daily that they do not. Local and sector coverage also tends to be the easier first link, and those links are what make later national coverage findable in the first place.

If you work in a regulated sector, the compliance boundaries come first, not last. Investment communication sits under SEBI's advertisement code, and medical claims under the NMC rules and the Drugs and Magic Remedies Act. We write about what that means in practice on our BFSI and fintech and healthcare pages.

How to measure it honestly

• Placements — how many pieces ran, in which publications, with names and dates
• Links — how many placements actually carried one, and whether it was followed or nofollowed
• Referral traffic — visitors arriving from those pages, in your analytics
• Branded search — whether more people searched your company name after coverage ran, in Search Console

What to refuse: “potential reach”, “advertising value equivalent” and any figure in the millions. These are derived from a publication's total audience, not from anybody who read your piece. They exist to make a modest month look enormous, and no editor has ever taken them seriously.

What to avoid

Earned coverage cannot be guaranteed, because the decision belongs to an editor who does not work for your agency. Any month can be quiet. An agency that never has a quiet month is not pitching.

Do you need a digital PR agency in Mumbai?

Hire one when you have a story and no time, or when you need the contacts. Do it yourself when the story is strong and you can write plainly — a founder emailing a journalist directly often gets further than an agency, because the reporter gets the source rather than an intermediary.

The honest position is that the work is slow and uncertain at the start, and then compounds. The first placement is the hardest. The fifth is easier, because by then a few journalists know your name and know you answer the phone.

Our side of this work is on the PR and press releases page. If you are reading this because links keep coming up in SEO conversations, the wider picture is in what SEO services in Mumbai actually involve.