“Digital PR” and “link building” often get used as if one replaced the other. They did not. They are different tools that happen to produce the same artefact, and choosing between them is mostly a question of what you have to work with.
What each one actually is
Traditional link building goes after specific pages you have identified as worth a link: a resource list, a supplier directory, an outdated citation, a broken link on a relevant page, an unlinked mention of your brand. It is targeted, repeatable and largely a numbers-and-persistence exercise.
Digital PR creates something newsworthy — original data, a survey, a genuinely useful tool, an expert who can comment on a live story — and pitches it to journalists. You do not choose which sites link to you. You choose what is worth writing about, and coverage follows or it does not.
What each is good at
Link building is reliable. For a given amount of outreach you can forecast roughly how many placements you will land, and you can aim them at the exact pages that need authority. That makes it well suited to a specific commercial page that has stalled just outside the top few positions.
Digital PR is the only one of the two that reliably produces links from sites you could never have pitched directly. National press, large trade publications and well-known blogs do not add you to a resource page. They will cover a genuinely interesting finding.
What each costs
The cost profiles are very different, and this is usually what decides it.
- Link building costs a steady amount every month and produces a steady trickle. Stop paying and it stops within weeks. The risk is low and so is the ceiling.
- Digital PR costs a lot up front — the research, the data, the asset — before you know whether it will land. A campaign that works can produce more authority in a fortnight than a year of outreach. A campaign that does not lands nothing at all.
How we decide which to run
We generally start with traditional link building. It is cheaper to test, it produces a baseline quickly, and it surfaces the unlinked mentions and broken links that are effectively free authority sitting unclaimed.
We move to digital PR when three things are true: the site already has a solid technical and content foundation, the client has access to something genuinely newsworthy — proprietary data, an unusual vantage point, a credible spokesperson — and there is budget to absorb a campaign that does not land.
Running digital PR before the foundations are in place is the most common way we see money wasted. The coverage arrives, points at a site that cannot convert or cannot be crawled properly, and the effect fades.
The honest answer for most businesses
Most small and mid-sized companies get further with consistent, unglamorous link building than with one ambitious PR campaign a year. The compounding is slower but far more predictable, and predictable is what a marketing budget needs.
If you have something genuinely interesting to say, though, digital PR is the fastest legitimate route to authority that exists. The question is whether you have it, not whether the tactic works.
Both sit inside our off-page SEO service. If you are not sure which your site needs, ask us and we will tell you honestly.