Why Digital PR Should be the Focus in Building Domain Authority (DA)

And Five Things We’ve Done to Prove it

Where your website is concerned, all roads lead to Rome – or at least they should do, if your domain authority (DA) is in a good place.

Your website needs a good DA. It’s the metric used to measure its perceived authority and potential to rank well in SEO results. And guess what? If you want to attract visitors, which turn to leads, which generates sales, you need to get on board.

There’s so much going on these days that requires constant attention and nurturing, but here’s the good news: if you focus upon digital PR, and make it original and relevant, your DA will rise, along with your chances of generating and converting new business opportunities.

Digital PR backlinks are increasingly becoming the preferred and most successful route to boosting DA, because search engines such as Google reward you for placing unique content across other high authority sites, such as the trade publications, and local and national news sites you strive to be in.

The evolution of domain authority and PR

Over the years, the factors influencing DA have evolved alongside Google’s algorithm updates which kept early digital marketing adapters, who’d set off at pace, on their toes. In the early days of SEO, around the early 2000s, there was a clear focus upon link quantity over quality, and websites with a high number of backlinks, regardless of quality, were often ranked higher.

Google got wise to this in 2012, and first introduced its Penguin Update to crack down on spammy linkbuilding, effectively penalising those with farmed or low-quality backlinks. At this point, the focus shifted back to quality over quantity.

Meanwhile, us PR professionals were happily plugging away generating print and digital coverage based purely on editorial merit, unknowing that some day in the future we’d be the ones making it all make sense…

Fast forward to 2018, and E-A-T becomes key (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) with an additional E (Experience) added four years later to bring in E-E-A-T, which meant backlinks from reputable and relevant sources carried more weight in determining DA.

Fast forward again to today to digital PR as we now know it, with content reigning supreme. Why? Because digital PR is the glue that binds SEO and linkbuilding to ensure DA is moving in the right direction.

Here’s an example of how digital PR helps build DA

Take our client, Parking Facilities, who wanted to raise awareness of security issues facing a number of different sectors, and boost both reputation and DA at the same time. We agreed to secure a first-person feature across high-profile industry websites, such as Fleet News, Building Better Healthcare, and SourceSecurity, among others, resulting in valuable backlinks from websites with a high domain authority.

Google and other search engines see these backlinks pretty much as one website vouching for another – high domain authority websites, such as the above publications, linking to a lower domain authority website, such as Parking Facilities’, significantly boosts the latter. It tells search engines that the content on the page linked to is valuable, thereby increasing DA, and, as a result, improving search rankings and SEO in general.

The strategy worked, because we delivered:

  • High-quality content – It was well-written, informative, and relevant to the target audience and considered valuable by search engines.
  • Backlink generation – importantly the feature included a link back to our client’s website as a call to action; a key factor in boosting domain authority.
  • Industry relevance – securing features on websites that are well-regarded within Parking Facilities’ target markets provided even more credibility and impact on DA.

In addition, the average DA from publications’ websites averaged very high (between 60 and 80), the copy contained industry-relevant key words, and was placed across eight vertical markets in total, with 12 pieces of coverage / links. 

Five ways digital PR will boost your domain authority

Seems like an obvious place to start, but digital PR helps you acquire backlinks from authoritative sources, such as industry publications, news websites, and high-traffic blogs. These links improve your site’s credibility and signal to search engines that your content is valuable and relevant.

2 – Author bespoke, high-quality content

Publishing first-person opinion pieces, securing quotes in publications, and participating in industry discussions such as round table debates can establish your brand as an authority in the markets you’re striving to penetrate. In addition, make sure your press releases, guest posts, and other PR materials are valuable and newsworthy to attract media attention and backlinks.

3 – Create newsworthy content and intellectual property (IP)

Developing data-driven reports, expert insights, white papers, or compelling stories can lead to natural backlinks from reputable websites. We find the most effective way to secure backlinks is to embed your IP – such as a white paper or survey findings – into a wider, industry-led feature.

4 – Target high authority, and relevant, publications and websites

This brings us back to the ‘quality over quantity’, debate. While it’s true, momentum will start high when you engage with us for a digital PR campaign, designed to drive traffic and boost your DA. But over time – once your brand has established a foothold – you’ll see a greater focus upon exclusive content, created solely for the most authoritative websites and publications.

That’s where the greatest impact is delivered, in both reputation management and in boosting your online presence.

5 – Maximise social media, and engage with micro-influencers

Repurposing content through social media channels, and collaborating with micro-influencers or bloggers within your niche sectors will increase engagement, drive traffic, and result in more organic backlinks.

Final Thought

If you really want to give your DA a boost, and generate more leads that have a greater chance of conversion, focus on digital PR. In fact, if you create content, and it’s newsworthy or educational, desirable, and relevant to the markets you’re selling to, the rest will fall into place, because reputations are no longer just admired by humans, search engines such as Google, and generative search engines such as Gemini and ChatGPT are also sitting up and rewarding robust online reputations with better rankings, and an enhanced DA.

If you’d like to know more about how Catalyst PR can turn your stories into news, and news into an improved DA in touch.