@webhivedigital

If SEO is part of your marketing strategy but PR isn't, you're doing it wrong. I'm at Cannes Lions with Semrush at the moment. This is something that everyone is talking about.

In a nutshell, backlink building is out and third party authority building is in. Because this is how you increase your mentions from AI Search. And I'm not just talking about ChatGPT and Claude.

I'm also talking about Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode. They're looking way beyond your website now. So it isn't actually about whether your website is linked to and how much authority that site has.

It's about brand mentions. You don't even need a link. And the best way to do that is with a digital PR campaign.

We're talking consistent messaging being everywhere that your brand should be. So if there are industry specific websites, for me, it could be things like Search Engine Journal or Search Engine Land. But it also includes sites that have got user generated content.

So obviously you've got things like socials, but also review platforms. Because when someone asks AI, like who is the best brand to buy t shirts from, AI is gonna look at the review platforms to see who's got the best reviews, what customers are saying about them, and ultimately that is gonna give them a much more informed answer than whether or not you've got like a million back links to your t shirts page. That's just not how this is working anymore.

So if you're currently investing budget in link building, the best thing that you can do is take that budget, invest it in PR. Either get an SEO team that know what they're doing with PR, or hire a PR team too. This is just how it works in search now.

And if you don't adopt it, you're gonna get left behind.