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When it comes to forming a digital PR strategy for your client it can be easy to default and go straight to thinking about implementing quarterly campaigns.
Although campaigns can be a hugely beneficial part of a PR strategy, they aren’t necessarily right for every brand, especially if you own an eCommerce brand.
Why is that?
Well, as a company working within the eCommerce space, your goals are naturally focused on product performance, which means when it comes to digital PR, you really want to be putting a lot of emphasis on building deep links.
What are deep links and why are they important in SEO and digital PR?
Deep links are links from external websites that point straight to your client’s product landing pages (PLPs) or product description pages (PDPs), rather than the homepage, blog, or an optimised campaign landing page, for example.
They are extremely useful for eCommerce brands in particular because they can:
- Help you to rank higher for transactional keywords
- Drive referral traffic straight to a page where consumers are more likely to convert
- Aid a seamless user journey
Building deep links as a key part of your strategy that can mean great results, here’s a look at it in practice.
Case study: An eCommerce-first digital PR strategy for Swyft Home
Newly launched D2C startup, Swyft Home, came to our small startup agency (fewer than 10 people at the time!) with the aim to skyrocket their new website with SEO.
From the onset, we identified the fundamental role of a solid Digital PR strategy to support our overall SEO strategy for Swyft. Implementing an eCommerce-first PR strategy, we have been able to successfully launch Swyft into a highly competitive market that has been dominated by billion-dollar companies such as DFS.
What did we do?
We built the backlink profile of the site from 12 to over 200 links, with 37% being deep links.
Instead of relying solely on the success of larger production campaigns, we deployed an always-on product-focused strategy to digital PR. Making sure we were building a varied backlink profile, targeting interior websites for that all important relevancy, industry titles and national/regional press.
Our strategy has played a huge role in the success of the brand’s growth journey into becoming one of the top two leading players in the country’s ‘sofa-in-a-box’ market and recording 600% YoY growth.
Key results
- To date, we’ve directly built 243 links to the Swyft website.
- 73% more dofollow links than Swyft’s number one direct competitor
- Directly, backlinks have increased by 87%
- Indirectly, total backlinks to the website have increased by 5,675%
- Directly, referring domains have increased by 101%
- Indirectly, total referring domains have increased by 1,438%
Within the 243 direct links we’ve driven the below results:
- Over 7,500 sessions driven through referral traffic
- Number of deep links increased by 205%
- Types of coverage (including print and unlinked mentions):
- 98 pieces of product coverage
- 16 pieces of campaign coverage
- 64 pieces of expert comment coverage
- 63 pieces of UGC coverage
- To-date, links secured have an average DA of 68
- 80% of links achieved are in top tier publications with a DA of 40 or over (194 links out of 243)
When to introduce campaign work into your PR strategy?
You’ll see from the above results breakdown that we have secured some campaign coverage for Swyft. Six months into working with Swyft, once we’d launched the brand into the market and built their backlink profile up, we revisited our strategy and diversified our tactics.
By this point, journalists and consumers had a greater awareness of the brand, which signalled to us that they have the relevance and credibility to start rolling out larger campaigns.
Here are some good indicators that campaign work could be right for your client:
- You’re beginning to exhaust all the product placement opportunities
- Your brand hasn’t launched a new product in a while
- The media landscape – it’s more challenging to secure coverage, or generally more competitive
- You’ve identified a key topic that’s prevalent in the media that your client is well placed to comment on
If you want to learn more about PR tactics for eCommerce brands, read here on why you shouldn’t be turning away from no-follow links and how they can benefit your overall website.
