How We Elevated HEAL's Authority, Performance & AI Visibility

Strategy

HEAL’s biggest challenge as a business is not the quality of their products or the brand heritage, but an authority gap within a hugely competitive sofa category. 

NOVOS developed a Digital PR strategy with the specific focus of closing the authority gap to key competitors. The focus of the strategy was on securing coverage across top- tier publications with the aim of sending the right trust signals to Google and to LLMs. Key industry publications, such as Ideal Home, are consistently cited by LLMs and, most importantly, are trusted by consumers when they’re at the consideration stage of purchasing. 

Rather than treating the Digital PR strategy as a volume exercise, the strategy prioritised publications that delivered quality, relevance and, in terms of AI citations, consistency. By securing repeat coverage on a small, but highly targeted, set of high-authority domains, we were able to build strong authority and consensus across AI models over time. Fundamentally, this increased the chances of HEAL’s being recognised as a credible and go-to source within AI search for the topic of sofas. 

Critically, all coverage was aligned with commercial intent, with all links directed to the priority sofa category and/or priority product pages, ensuring that improvements in visibility were tangible for the brand. 

The approach allowed HEAL’s to strengthen its authority across both organic search and AI search results, positioning the brand more competitively in a category and marketplace dominated by huge retailers.