Digital PR

Collecting backlinks — links other sites point at your pages — is normally a one-at-a-time ask. You shortlist blogs and publications covering your subject, send email, and three replies out of a hundred counts as a reasonable round.

Pagedeck started there. A full month of that work produced four links. Then, in the same quarter, a funding announcement ran as an article, and the outlets that picked it up added nine links over nine days. Nobody had been asked.

Digital PR is the practice of producing that difference on purpose. Instead of asking for links, you make material a journalist has a reason to write about, and when one article runs the links arrive with whoever cites it. Under off-page SEO, the work of building reputation outside your own site to raise rankings, it's one of three activities.

One piece takes two or three weeks, in five steps.

1. Make the material. A journalist has to have a reason. Shipping a new feature isn't a reason; a fact that means something outside the company, like raising funding, or research you ran yourself is. Ask 500 product managers and come back with "six hours a week goes into writing meeting notes" and that number is the raw material for an article on its own.
2. Shortlist where to send it. Order the list by domain authority, the estimated score for the trust a whole domain has accumulated. For the same effort, contact a publication estimated at 70 before a blog at 20.
3. Ask for the link up front. Articles very often name the company without linking to it. Put the request for a link to the source in the press release itself, and gather the quotable tables and charts onto one page of your own site.
4. Sweep the outlets that picked it up. Once an article runs, citations spread over a few days. Email the ones that named you without linking. This step is what doubles the link count.
5. Count what arrived. Count where it came from, not only how many. One link from a publication the industry actually reads moves rankings more than fifty from personal blogs.

"Once this survey runs as an article, the links will follow."

Explaining the sequence: make material, collect links.

"Did you put the source-link request in the press release? A name with no link leaves us nothing."

Heading off the state where you get exposure and no link.

"I found twelve places that mentioned us without linking. Let's email those first."

Proposing to harvest links from mentions that already happened.

At Pagedeck, Ravi produces the material and Sofia brings the numbers out of customer stories. Grace goes out only for funding or company-level news; everything else goes out under Ravi's name.