Why links from news coverage carry so much weight
Google has spent two decades learning to tell the difference between a link someone chose to give and a link someone arranged. A link inside a national news article, a piece on The Guardian or the Daily Mail say, sits in read content, on a domain that earns its authority every day, placed by a journalist with no stake in your rankings. That combination is very hard to fake and very hard for a competitor to copy. Grade the publications by third party metrics if you like, the range runs from the DA 40s for a solid regional or trade masthead to the mid 90s for the biggest national newsrooms, but we'd rather you graded them by readership.
Most link acquisition works the other way round: directories, marketplaces and paid networks treat the link as the product and the content around it as packaging. We start with the coverage. Find a story journalists want, and the links arrive as the by-product. That distinction separates a link profile that compounds from one that needs constant replacement.
Anchor text in news coverage
When a journalist links to you, the anchor is usually your brand name, your bare URL, or a phrase like 'according to new research'. Nobody at a news desk is going to link to you with a commercial keyword phrase, and thank goodness for that.
A profile dominated by branded and natural-phrase anchors is what an authoritative site looks like. Profiles stuffed with exact-match commercial anchors are the fingerprint of manipulation, and Google's systems have been trained on that fingerprint for years. PR for SEO produces that natural anchor distribution as a matter of course.
PR links age better than almost any other kind
News articles stay published. A piece that covered your research three years ago is still live, still indexed and still passing authority, with no invoice keeping it alive. Rented placements disappear when the payments stop; earned coverage simply sits there working.
Strong stories also syndicate. A piece that lands with the Mirror or the Daily Express often travels through their regional stablemates, appearing across dozens of local titles, each a separate publication on a separate domain. And journalists reuse good sources, so one campaign often seeds mentions and links you never pitched for, months after the work finished.
Where the links point, and how we handle it
A truth many agencies gloss over: journalists link to homepages, research pages and data pieces. They will almost never link to a product or category page from a news article, because that would read as an advert. Pretending otherwise leads to campaigns that fail quietly.
We design around it. Campaign assets such as a data study or an expert hub are built to merit coverage and to sit properly within your site architecture, so the authority they collect flows to commercial pages through internal links. Coverage lifts the domain; your site structure decides where the lift goes.
How a PR for SEO engagement runs
Every PR for SEO campaign moves through our five stages: Insight, where we research your business, market and public data for a story; Angle, where we shape it for a news desk; Asset, where we write the release or data piece; Pitch, where we approach the right journalists individually; and Coverage, where secured pieces are reported with links and reach.
For search-focused engagements, the Insight stage also covers which pages need authority and which topics connect your commercial goals to a story a journalist would run. Results are reported as linked coverage and measured, never as ranking promises, because no one can make those. Retained campaigns start from £4,500 per month, each with a defined number of placements.