AuthorSacha Mooney
LinkedIn
How to sound like a Digital PR
Much like any other industry, digital PR has its words that only digital PRs or those in the digital marketing sphere will know, I mean if you didn’t work in digital PR and I said ‘journo request’ or ‘Ahrefs’ would you know what I was on about? Let’s be honest, probably not. After all, as a PR, when someone asks what you do for work and you say ‘PR’ their usual response is ‘what’s that?’ or something similar.
So here is an alphabetical rundown of some of the words you should probably know and understand if you work in, or want to work in digital PR.
A
Ahrefs – A well-known SEO tool with a large database of backlinks and keyword data.
Affiliate links – An affiliate link is a unique link assigned to an affiliate partner by an affiliate network. Brands use these types of links to not only monitor the traffic coming in but to know exactly where it has been driven from.
Anchor Text – The clickable text used in an HTML hyperlink.
B
Buzzstream – An outreach platform used by PRs to pitch to journalists.
B2C – This refers to ‘Business to consumer’ where products and services are sold from a business to a consumer.
B2B – This refers to ‘Business to Business’ where products and services are sold by one business to another.
Backlink – A backlink is a link from a page on one website to another. As an example, if my client’s website gets a link on an article on the Daily Mail website, my client would now have a ‘backlink’ from the Daily Mail. Similarly, this bit links to the Daily Mail so now they have a backlink from NOVOS.
C
Coverage – This refers to the content that we manage to get placed on online publications. If a campaign gets featured on a site, that would be considered one piece of ‘coverage’.
Case study – This is the in-depth study of a particular subject or topic, with a real-life context. This is normally in the form of a person’s real-life experience and often used as a supporting element to gain media coverage for campaigns.
Content – Content is the information that is directed towards a specific audience via a medium such as writing, speech or any other types of arts. For PRs, content comes in many forms such as listicles, infographics, visuals etc.
Campaign – A piece of content that has been planned to meet a specific goal, in our case, to build a number of links into a clients website. Campaigns tend to be larger pieces of content that have much more research and data to support them.
D
DA – Short for Domain Authority, it is a metric developed by Moz (ranging from 1 to 100) that predicts how well your website will rank on search engines. It measures a website’s relevance for a specific subject or industry. As such the higher the relevancy, the higher the DA will be.
DR – Short for Domain Rating, it is a logarithmic value (from 1 to 100) developed by Ahrefs that measures the strength of the site’s backlinks profile compared to other websites. This value is widely used in digital PR to assess the health of a website’s backlink profile.
DoFollow Link – A DoFollow link passes the authority of the origin site to your site, meaning is offers the maximum SEO benefit. This type of link allows search engine bots to follow your site. The more follow links you get, the more your site is recognised by these search engine bots, and the higher your site will appear in the SERPs.
E
Exclusive – In PR terms, an exclusive is allowing a media publication to cover and publish a campaign, story or piece of content you have given them before any other publications.
G
Google Trends – A Google tool that allows you to analyse the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across various regions and languages.
H
Hook – This is the part of a campaign that makes editors and publications want to feature it. Without a good ‘hook’ your story or campaign is unlikely to be covered.
I
Ideation – This is the first part of any campaign creation. An ‘ideation’ is a session where you and other members of your team will work together to come up with the ideas for your campaign.
J
Journalist – A journalist is someone that collects and collates information to create newsworthy stories and shares them with the public via newspapers, magazines and online publications. There are the people you want to be sending your press releases and mailers to!
K
Keyword – This is the word that describes your content the best and is also the word you want to rank highest on Google for, so when someone searches for this keyword, your content appears first.
KPI – This stands for ‘Key Performance Indicator’ and refers to a type of performance measurement.
L
Link – A HTML object that allows you to navigate between pages on the internet.
M
Mailer – A mailer is a smaller piece of content used to gain media coverage, often put together within a few hours, as opposed to campaigns that can take weeks or months.
Media List – This refers to a list of people and publications that a PR plans to send their campaign or story to in the hopes that they will cover it.
N
NoFollow Link – NoFollow links do not fully pass the authority of the origin site to your website; however, they provide Google crawling bots with hints about your website relevancy and purpose, which influence your website indexability (see Sponsored and UGC links for more insight). From a brand awareness perspective, they drive relevant traffic to your website.
Newsjacking – This is a tactic used to gain media coverage, by jumping onto current and breaking news stories. You can do this by offering up your clients as experts to offer comment on news stories that related to their industry.
O
Open rate – The open rate refers to the rate at which your emails are opened by its recipients.
P
Press Release – A press release is a written document that is sent out to editors and publications as a means of summarising and selling in a campaign or a news story.
Q
Quotes – Pretty much what it sounds like, however, a quote in DPR terms is normally from a client that has something interesting to add to a piece of content written by a journalist. Quotes are a great way for PRs to gain coverage for their clients!
R
Response Source – A tool used to connect journalists and bloggers with PRs and vice versa. Journalists can post requests for product samples, expert comments and anything else they might need to put a story together and PRs are able to put forward their clients.
S
Sponsored Links – A sponsored link is a type of NoFollow link that has been classed as an advertisement. These links are usually identified as sponsored as they have been exchanged for some sort of remuneration, such as a gifted product or payment. These are relevant to an eCommerce backlink profile in moderate quantities as they signpost that your website is a business.
SEO – Search engine optimisation. This is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines.
SERP – SERP stands for Search Engine Result Page. This is what you see when you input a query in the search bar and hit enter. The more relevant and better ranking websites will appear at the top of the SERP.
Syndication – This is when a piece of content is shared across multiple sites or publications that sit within the same network
T
Twitter – Twitter is a really great tool for PRs, not only is it a good method of networking with other PRs and journalists, but you are also able to find hard to find journo contact details and pitch stories to them via direct message if you are unable to find an email address for them. Twitter is also great for finding journalists who are looking for input on stories (usually using the Journorequests hashtag) they are working on and is a good way of seeking out potential coverage opportunities for your clients.
Tactics – This refers to all the different methods used to acquire links and coverage for our clients, for example, link reclamation, resource page link building, Q&A’s, content marketing, discount codes etc.
Tabloid – A tabloid is normally half the size of a newspaper page and is a news outlet that often contains more sensationalised news stories.
U
User-generated content – abbreviated to UGC for short. It is used to refer to any form of content, whether that be images, videos, text, or audio, that has been freely posted by users online. This content could be posted on social media platforms and forums.
UGC Link – A UGC link is a type of NoFollow link that is usually found in forum comments and social media posts when an unpaid user links back to your website. These are great for building your brand awareness, and Google uses them to measure the trustworthiness of a website. The more users talk about you online, the more Google will see your eCommerce platform as trustworthy.
V
Vuelio – This is a tool used by many PRs to access contact information for a range of publications and individual journalists.
W
Whitepaper – This is a report or guide that informs readers concisely about a complex issue. It is meant to help readers understand an issue, solve a problem, or make a decision.
So there it is, the A-Z (well A-W) of digital PR jargon that you should know. For the more seasoned digital PR professionals, many of these words might seem a little basic, but for those of you starting out in the world of digital PR, they are absolutely key! There is of course plenty more you will pick up along the way, but this list is a really great place to start.
