Editorial coverage in publications your customers already read. The kind of link you can never be penalised for, because you earned it.
You have probably bought links. Most ecommerce brands have. And you probably have a quiet, nagging sense that you are not sure what you got for the money.
A fee, an article, a link. The most common form of link building sold in the world today.
Thin traffic, generic names, a suspiciously broad range of topics.
They work well right up until the network is caught, and then every linked site is hit at once.
The bottom of the barrel, still sold to store owners as off-page SEO.
If Google spends that much effort detecting manufactured links, what is the thing all those fake links are imitating? A genuine, editorial link. A real journalist, at a real publication, choosing of their own free will, with no money changing hands, to link to your business.
Digital PR is simply the discipline of earning that link on purpose, at scale, and on repeat. It is the one approach that gets safer the more aggressive Google becomes.
A good campaign does not do one thing. It does six, and they stack.
Authority flows through internal links to categories that were never mentioned in the coverage.
The gap between a national masthead and a guest-post farm is a difference of kind, not degree.
Readers who followed a recommendation inside content they trusted, not an interruption.
Ads stop the day you stop paying. Coverage keeps working a year, two years, three years later.
People read about you, then search for you by name a week later. Demand that did not exist before.
As featured in, on your product pages and checkout, lifts conversion on every visit after.
There are flashier formats. Most are expensive, inconsistent, and more about winning awards than winning coverage that moves a business.
A credible, named expert offering a point of view journalists and their readers find useful. No dataset required. The expert must be real, named and verifiable.
Original research or a ranked index. Journalists trust numbers, and a geographic ranking gives every regional outlet its own local angle.
A story breaks and your expert is ready with a useful comment while it is still hot. Coverage in hours where a planned campaign takes weeks.
Journalists do not care about your products, and it is their job not to. Good digital PR is the genuinely interesting story that sits near what you sell. We work at three distances from your business.
Tightly relevant coverage. Links land on pages that matter, authority accrues to the catalogue you want to grow.
Wider catchment across more desks. More coverage, slightly looser commercial relevance.
A story your brand still has a legitimate right to tell. Loosest commercially, biggest reach and syndication.
Run one tier and you have half a strategy. Run all three and they compound.
*Reported on ongoing programmes, where there is enough time and volume for these numbers to mean something.
No journalist writes about a pet tracker just because it exists, so we built Maven Pet's campaign around something dog owners already worry about: ticks. We ranked every US state by searches for tick bites, removal and treatment, adjusted for population. Maine came out top. Launched as tick season started, it ran on PetHelpful, AOL, Weather.com and Yahoo, and a state ranking gave every regional outlet its own headline.
No product pitch. Just a story dog owners wanted to read, with Maven Pet's name on the data.
We agree a target of 5 or 10 editorially earned links before any work starts. What we will not do is pad that number with placements nobody chose to give you. A handful of genuinely good links today is worth more than a hundred manufactured ones.
No, and nobody honest can. Editorial control sits with the journalist, which is the entire reason the link is worth having. What we commit to is your agreed link target and the calibre of outlet we aim for.
Coverage typically lands within weeks of the pitch going out. The SEO benefit is slower, because authority takes time to flow through to rankings, which is why we plan campaigns backwards from your trading peaks.
It helps enormously, and most ecommerce businesses have more than they realise. We also build campaigns from public datasets, freedom of information requests, search trend data and commissioned surveys.
Someone real from your business, usually the founder or a genuine in-house specialist. We will never invent a spokesperson or borrow a rented one. The press has grown sharply more sceptical about fabricated experts, which has turned a genuine named human into a competitive advantage.
Come with your brand and your goals. We will tell you honestly whether there is a strong digital PR programme here, and if there is, what it would look like.
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Searchant is an AI SEO and digital PR agency for ecommerce brands, based in North Yorkshire, UK.
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