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Legit PR Pros for Earning Valuable Coverage

Written by: Adrienne Kmetz Tags: pr, future of seo

Published: Jun 18, 2025

Digital PR is IN, baby!

Wait.. Was PR ever out?

No. Don't believe anyone who ever said "backlinks are dead". We've got a naming issue, where digital PR means many things to many people depending on their experience. And as we are a community of varied experiences, we encourage you all to share yours in The SEO Community.

At its core, a few truths remain:

1. Earning coverage is valuable with or without a link. 
2. Links pass authority to the destination URL. 
3. We want coverage (aka mentions) and we want backlinks. 

The value of a link goes far deeper than the SEO value of the backlink; to PRs it was always about the earned coverage for the brand first, and the link being a part of what makes that coverage valuable. 

Now we're hearing how prominent, descriptive, mentions could be what's helping LLMs make recommendations to searchers. Cue the screech of 1,000 SEOs pivoting from pumping out content to pumping out coverage. 

We don't yet know how reliable this correlation (more menchies = more recommendatinons of your brand) will turn out to be, because we know that LLM conversations are completely tailored to the person, their location, and available contextual information. 

Traditional PR 

Gets your brand into magazines, books, radio shows, and the local newspaper. They might even help you organize and publicize a stunt, sponsorship, or partnership. They think about your brand and its relationship with its community. They wonder if you need a Chamber of Commerce membership. They get you a ticket to that fundraiser where the potential new partner will be. 

Digital PR

Would you believe, it's all the same stuff! Just online?! Who would have thought. 

I welcome others' experiences, because from my vantage point in the 2010s, I watched digital PR grow through SEO-led organizations because traditional PR was not always evolving fast enough. Traditional PRs working online, focused often on reputation management, because that's visible and real. We had not yet fully realized the revenue potential of investing time and energy into doing constant online outreach, but the linkbuilders knew and the successful clients knew. 

So digital PR was born like a miracle to SEO, instead of to Brand. 

Linkbuilding

To be clear, building links is not a form of public relations — without the coverage part, you're just paying for a link, and that is entirely an SEO exercise. 

Once it became clear how important P1 was to revenue, and how important links were to earning P1, we stripped digital PR of the PR part, and isolated the work to its core: Just build links. 

So they came from anywhere: Guest blogs, paid sites, directories.

Bland and brand-less, like a Pepsi, you can tell it's not "the real thing."

Mentions were always important 

Measuring, scoring, and highlighting mentions has usually been a part of digital PR reporting. 

By 2015, I was in an organization that would repeat the tagline "that's okay, mentions are just as important!" every time we had a down month in links and higher in mentions.

Now it is 2025, and the more things change, the more things stay the same: Earning spots in listicles, dedicated articles about our latest survey, and speaker slots for our CEO are still the table stakes.

The link is the cherry on top, and when you're making high quality content that earns that kind of coverage, the link — and the mention — will be easy to get and that much more valuable due to its authenticity and relevancy. 

The thing that makes the mention important, is the narrative surrounding it — this is coverage

Sure, a link creates a connection from another site to yours, but without the narrative that explains the link, it's just a link. 

Mentions are like coverage because they come with context, real estate, and information about your brand. Words on the page dedicated to your product or topic. 

Backlinks are still as important (or more) than mentions, if they come with the mention part.

Since it's usually easier to get a nod than a link, you might find that for every backlink you earn, you get X mentions. The goal is a strong narrative and a strong link, so report on monthly mentions, mentions all time, monthly backlinks, and backlinks all time. 

If your goal is to build mentions, then circle back to digital PR as a holistic strategy: 

1. Build timely content or a perspective (like commentary from the CEO) that is worthy of someone else writing about. 
2. Build authentic relationships with experts and journalists in your field. 
3. There're many approaches to pitching your content or product to that media list. 
4. Follow up and personalize, refine, and improve your outreach over time. 
5. Record mentions and links so you can track them against a hit list. 
6. Expand your hit list to include other legitimate link-building tactics like pitching for listicle inclusion, broken/inaccessible/old links for updating, or content marketing collaborations.

Focus on builing authentic relationships first and coverage will become a natural extension of that

According to Cision's 2025 State of the Media Report, journalists want: 

• 89% want folks to first reach out by introducing yourself "over email & tell me why you want to connect" – without a pitch. 
• 96% (basically everyone) prefers to receive pitches over email instead of social, phone, or text. 
• 28% (the highest amount after "it depends" want you to keep it to 100 - 200 words.
• And in North America, 69% want you to follow up only once, and 24% never. 

Tracking and scoring coverage

We could debate all day about the value of a high-DA link to a homepage, versus a low-DA but high relevancy link to an internal page with great anchor text, and how much a mention is *actually* worth. 

Okay, "porque no los dos?"

We do want both! We can score them based on:

DA + relevancy + height and prominance of mention + anchor text + page it is linking to

If you use a scale from 0-3, it will be a much more holistic view of a natural coverage-building program, versus one that tries to exploit the easiest route or loophole to any link, versus "good" links. 

It will also be able to reveal areas where you can balance coverage that provides link authority, and coverage that's a great look for your brand with or without a link. 

How to compare PR pros

1. Decide if you'd rather work with an agency, an experienced freelancer, or hire someone to be in-house. Agencies can be very expensive but can handle big accounts and projects. Independents may have trusted individual relationships with journalists that go way back, and someone in-house can build a compounding strategy for the long term.
2. Know how much coverage you likely need to make progress and translate that into a budget for services. 
3. Compare services and price ranges and choose an option that will fill the most functional gaps for you in the scope of work. IE. If you're missing reputation management, consider an organization like Good Brothers that does all kinds of PR. If you don't have a content creator that can write newsworthy headlines, they'll need to be able to handle that too as part of their services. 
4. Support the work as much as you can by being available for reactive PR and to make investments in campaigns when necessary. 
5. Record, track, report and reflect on progress, so you can incorporate learnings and solidify your new media relationships. 

More tips: 

List of exceptional digital PRs that can help you earn authentic coverage

Outreach can be many full time jobs if you want it to be. Or, you can hire a pro and make an intentional investment into your brand's substance with some outside help. Like social media, I've heard leaders brush off digital PR as being as easy as sending a five minute email. 

Dear reader, we know good outreach does not take five minutes to craft if you're following the recommended practice of researching, personalizing, and positioning your emails. 

These PRs were sourced from The SEO Community slack group — who would you add to this list? Let us know! 

Name: Jolly SEO
Website: https://www.jollyseo.com
Services: Digital PR, outreach, link building
Why it’s legit: Recommended by SEO pros for securing placements in high-DA publications like Business Insider.

Name: Good Brothers
Website: https://www.goodbrothers.digital
Services: Campaigns, surveys, brand strategy
Why it’s legit: Creative campaigns, traditional PR capabilities like crisis comms and reputation, award winning.

Name: Britt Klontz
Website: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brittklontz/
Services: Independent Digital PR, content strategy, media relations
Why it’s legit: Veteran PR strategist with a track record of high-quality placements and strong editorial instincts. Follow her on Linkedin for consistently good takes on digital PR. 

Name: Jo O’Reilly (Freelancer at MerseySearch)
Website: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jomarieoreilly
Services: Digital PR, link building, outreach
Why it’s legit: Well regarded freelancer known in the SEO world for effective reactive campaigns and strong independent relationships.

Name: Richard Gargan
Website: https://www.gargan.com
Services: Digital PR, AI outreach, multichannel
Why it’s legit: Richard is well respected around innovating outreach through AI and multichannel (Linkedin + Email) approaches — surround sound, anyone?

Name: William Beutler
Website: https://www.beutlerink.com/ 
Services: Wikipedia, brand content, crisis comms
Why it's legit: William ("Bill" if you're on the level) works with household name Fortune 500 companies to tell their brand story in a way that expands their reputation and their authentic Wikipedia content.

Name: Linkby
Website: https://www.linkby.com
Services: CPC-based editorial distribution
Why it’s legit: Used by major brands to get content placed in premium digital publishers. While links are typically tracked and may not pass SEO value, it’s effective for content visibility and if it's excellent; could generate its own organic coverage.

Name: Stacker Studio
Website: https://studio.stacker.com
Services: Syndicated content and digital PR
Why it’s legit: Stacker creates news-style content and distributes it through a media network that includes MSN, SFGate, and local TV station sites. Used by large content teams to build authority at scale, though not every placement comes with a backlink.

Name: Roxhill Media
Website: https://www.roxhillmedia.com
Services: Media database and journalist outreach tools
Why it’s legit: Trusted by PR professionals to find and pitch journalists. Not a service provider, but a powerful tool used by legit agencies to build real earned media relationships.