Digital PR is a key tool to elevate your financial services brand by improving your online visibility. By securing quality backlinks from trusted sources, Digital PR strengthens your Google rankings— a crucial factor in how search engines assess and prioritise content. This also drives valuable referral traffic and enhances your brand’s reputation, helping you engage new clients and shift perceptions among existing ones.
When executed strategically, Digital PR can deliver impressive results.
This article delves into how blending public relations with digital performance offers more to your financial brand than just backlinks. We’ll explore the importance of Digital PR in your marketing strategy, how it complements traditional PR methods, and why it’s so much more than a modern-day link-building tactic. We’ll also examine ways to measure its impact, so you can determine if it’s a worthwhile investment and whether to allocate more resources toward it.
What is Digital PR?
At its core, Digital PR uses online-focused strategies to boost brand visibility. This includes earning coverage on the digital versions of major financial publications, appearing in niche blogs, or gaining attention on social media. Unlike traditional PR, which leans heavily on print, TV, or radio, Digital PR prioritises online mentions and backlinks that enhance your brand’s digital footprint.
Digital PR professionals craft compelling, newsworthy stories for clients that resonate with financial journalists, bloggers, and influencers. These stories often centre on unique data, industry insights, and statistics that drive engagement and clicks.
The rise of Digital PR is tied closely to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), reflecting the increasing importance for financial institutions to rank highly on search engine results pages (SERPs). While the goal remains to have your brand featured in the most credible and relevant outlets, our focus is primarily on the online realm, as this provides the all-important link back to your website.
How do we measure Digital PR?
Unlike traditional media, the effectiveness of Digital PR can be accurately measured through tools such as AhRefs, Semrush, and Google Analytics. These platforms enable you to track the number of visitors driven to your website by a particular link and assess how much business revenue has been generated as a direct result of those clicks. In contrast, with print, TV, or radio, you’re often left relying on estimates of audience size, which provide far less concrete data.
Take The Financial Times, for instance, one of the leading publications in the UK financial sector. It has a significant print circulation, but how can you be sure that the readers who purchase the newspaper are engaging with the content that mentions your business? Some copies might sit unread in waiting rooms, or be skimmed over entirely. On the other hand, a print edition could be passed on to colleagues, potentially increasing readership but with no measurable way to track this.
In contrast, Digital PR secures high-quality backlinks that contribute directly to boosting your organic search rankings. These earned links from trusted, authoritative financial websites are what off-site SEO, link building, and link earning are all about. They are vital for improving your site’s credibility with search engines, driving both traffic and trust.
Think of Google as a credibility test— the more reputable and relevant the websites linking to your own, the more Google recognises your brand as trustworthy, pushing you higher up the search engine results pages (SERPs). In financial services, securing a backlink from a reputable site like Bloomberg or The Wall Street Journal will significantly boost your online presence. On the other hand, if your site receives a link from an unrelated industry blog, it may confuse Google’s understanding of your business, potentially lowering your rankings. Relevance is key to ensuring these links add real value.
Proactive or reactive?
In financial services, a strategic Digital PR approach should prioritise quality over quantity. That’s where we come in. As a specialised Digital PR agency, our role is to secure the most relevant and high-value backlinks for your brand, using a combination of proactive, reactive, and campaign-based tactics:
Proactive PR
This involves actively promoting your brand through newsworthy stories. For a financial services firm, this might include press releases about company growth, new product launches, or thought leadership from your internal experts on market trends or regulatory changes. We distribute these stories to major financial publications, much like traditional PR has done for years. For instance, we could position your executives as experts by providing commentary on economic developments to key financial outlets.
Reactive PR
In this approach, journalists reach out to us, either due to existing relationships with our digital PR team or through industry-specific journalist request services we subscribe to. When they need expert opinions or financial data to support an article, we provide it on your behalf, securing a backlink to your website and a brand mention. Additionally, our Digital PR team keeps a close watch on daily financial news, with alerts set up for your competitors and relevant keywords. When emerging trends or significant market movements occur, we act quickly to position your brand at the forefront, ensuring your commentary appears just as the story breaks.
Campaigns
Unlike the ongoing services of proactive and reactive PR, campaigns are typically more sporadic and require more time investment. For financial services, this could involve a data-led campaign that provides unique insights into market behaviour, a survey on industry sentiment, or launching a new financial tool or calculator on your website. These campaigns aim to generate a significant number of high-quality links and media coverage, positioning your brand as an authority for months to come. By offering fresh perspectives and in-depth research, these campaigns can reach different audiences at various points in the year, keeping your brand relevant across multiple channels.
The benefits of investing in Digital PR
Beyond earning high-quality backlinks that build your domain authority— which improves search rankings, drives more organic traffic, and ultimately generates enquiries— there are several other key benefits to investing in Digital PR for financial services:
Referral Traffic
Links in well-respected financial publications can be a valuable traffic source. Readers click on these links and are taken directly to your site, driving engaged visitors to your landing pages. When you’re featured in leading industry publications, referral traffic can become a highly effective channel.
For example, one of our financial clients was featured in The Financial Times as part of a thought leadership piece on market trends. This single feature generated significant referral traffic, boosting leads and delivering a measurable return on investment. When combined with other high-quality mentions, referral traffic alone can more than justify the investment in Digital PR.
Brand Building
The more visibility your financial brand gains through PR, the more familiar your audience becomes with your proposition. Over time, this helps fuel long-term, sustainable growth. A key benefit here is that more people will directly search for your brand— a traffic source that is typically lower cost and higher converting.
Search engines are increasingly focused on brand signals to evaluate trustworthiness and authority. Google’s EEAT criteria (Expertise, Experience, Authority, and Trust) heavily influence how well your brand performs in search rankings. A well-executed Digital PR strategy helps to strengthen your brand’s EEAT scores, as backlinks and citations from authoritative sources play a key role in building trust with both search engines and potential clients.
As AI-driven search evolves, these trust signals— through backlinks and mentions from authoritative financial publications— will become even more critical. While AI may simplify some aspects of SEO, such as technical optimisation and content creation, Digital PR remains a human-driven process that can’t be easily replicated by algorithms. This makes it an essential part of any robust digital marketing strategy moving forward.
It’s also important to note that product or service round-up lists, such as “Best Investment Platforms” or “Top Wealth Management Services,” often rank highly for your target keywords. Having your financial services featured in these types of guides on respected platforms like The Independent or The Times can give you top Google rankings for competitive search terms without needing to rank your own website directly.
Conversion Rates
Being featured in reputable editorial content can also improve your conversion rates. When your brand is endorsed by a trusted financial publication or an industry authority, potential clients are more likely to trust your services.
Google’s 2020 study, The Messy Middle, examined consumer purchase behaviour and highlighted that “authority bias” (the influence of expert recommendations) is a powerful factor in the decision-making process. When someone influential endorses your brand or services, it can greatly increase the likelihood of new clients switching to your firm. Read our deep dive into the Messy Middle here.
That’s why so many companies proudly display “As featured in…” logos from leading publications on their websites. These endorsements serve as strong social proof, providing potential clients with the confidence they need to choose your financial services over a competitor.
Improving other digital channels
The insights gained from Digital PR can significantly enhance your overall marketing strategy and boost ROI across other digital channels.
By identifying which financial publications your target audience frequents and understanding which ones drive the highest quality referral traffic, your paid media team can use this data to refine targeting in Google Ads or social PPC campaigns. Additionally, reviewing which types of content resonate most with journalists and generate the most engagement can inform your broader content strategy. This can lead to better-performing blog posts, email campaigns, and social media content.
In essence, Digital PR provides a clear picture of what your audience values, helping you create content that engages them across multiple touchpoints.
Measuring results and attributing value
Digital PR offers the dual benefit of enhancing both brand visibility (“fame”) and website performance (“fortune”). While organic social media can raise awareness but may not directly increase sales, and conversion rate optimisation (CRO) can improve financial results but doesn’t bring traffic to your site, Digital PR bridges the gap— driving both brand awareness and measurable traffic growth.
A well-executed Digital PR campaign will increase brand recognition, improve referral traffic, and enhance organic rankings, making it a cost-effective investment over time.
Fortune, or tangible results, can be measured through clear metrics such as:
- Organic Traffic
The primary reason financial services brands pursue Digital PR is to improve SEO. As your search engine rankings rise, you should see an increase in visitors driven by organic search.
- Domain Rating/Authority
While not a direct Google metric, tools like Ahrefs or Semrush use a domain rating scale (1-100) to assess the quality of your backlinks. The higher the score, the better your backlink profile. It’s easier to move from a rating of 0 to 10 than from 80 to 90, where the competition is much stronger. For example, a link from The Financial Times would significantly boost your authority.
- Referral Traffic
Monitor the amount of referral traffic coming from high-quality publications. This is a direct way to measure the impact of PR mentions.
- Leads and Sales
Ultimately, the goal is to turn increased traffic into new business. While Digital PR may not directly generate immediate sales like other channels, its indirect impact on brand credibility, traffic, and trustworthiness can lead to a higher conversion rate over time.
Fame, on the other hand, is harder to quantify but still crucial. You can track fame-building through:
- Social Mentions
As your financial services brand is featured more by journalists, bloggers, and influencers, you should see an increase in conversations about your brand across social platforms.
- Media Coverage
Gaining mentions in prestigious financial publications means greater exposure to your target audience. Readership data can give you an idea of how many people have encountered your brand.
- Brand Searches
Track whether more people are searching for your brand, specific financial products, or services. An increase in branded search queries is a strong indicator that your Digital PR efforts are raising awareness and interest in your offering.
Setting primary and secondary goals
Setting Primary and Secondary Goals
When developing a Digital PR strategy for financial services, it’s essential to differentiate between primary and secondary goals, acknowledging that some metrics are directly influenced by Digital PR, while others are more indirectly impacted.
Primary goals are those that can be more immediately attributed to the success of Digital PR efforts, such as:
Quality of links
Securing backlinks from high-authority financial publications.
Relevance
Ensuring the links come from publications closely aligned with your financial niche.
Domain rating/authority
Improving your website’s authority by gaining links from trusted sources.
Quantity of links
The total number of backlinks acquired.
Number of referring domains
The variety of different websites linking to your brand.
Referral traffic
The amount of traffic being driven to your site from these links.
Referral revenue
The sales or leads generated from referral traffic.
Secondary goals, while still important, tend to be influenced by a combination of PR efforts and other factors, including SEO, branding, and content marketing. These may include:
Keyword rankings
How well your website ranks for important financial keywords.
Organic traffic and revenue
The increase in organic search traffic and conversions over time.
Social mentions
How often your brand is mentioned across social media platforms.
Brand searches
The volume of searches for your brand, services, or specific financial products.
Choosing the right approach
Whichever goals you choose to prioritise, they must align with your overall marketing strategy. Equally important is setting realistic KPIs – Digital PR takes time to yield significant results. While you might see an early boost in referral traffic, rankings and brand searches will typically build momentum over a longer period
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach in Digital PR. Each financial services brand has unique needs and challenges, even within the same sector. Your strategy should be bespoke, considering factors such as:
- How do you compare to competitors in terms of backlinks, link quality, and rankings?
- How well-established your brand is, and the likelihood of securing media coverage.
- The potential value of referral traffic for your business.
Additionally, consider the roles and resources on your side:
- Content approval
Do you have team members who can quickly sign off on content and respond to journalist requests?
- Proprietary data
Do you have unique financial insights or research that can be leveraged to create compelling stories?
- Journalist reviews
While financial services don’t typically provide physical products for review, can you offer services, tools, or exclusive reports for media analysis?
- Technical SEO
Are you investing in the technical side of SEO and implementing recommended site improvements to maximise your Digital PR efforts?
- Coordination with traditional PR
If you have a traditional PR agency or in-house team, are they aligned with your Digital PR strategy to ensure both online and offline efforts are integrated?
Overcoming PR hurdles
Digital PR is currently in an interesting position. On one hand, it’s experiencing rapid growth, with demand for high-quality backlinks surging over the past few years. This has led many agencies to add Digital PR to their service offerings, while specialised Digital PR-only firms have emerged.
However, as with any booming market, quality can vary significantly, and financial services brands need to be cautious when selecting a provider. Some agencies now offer guaranteed numbers of links, but this approach can be problematic. The success of a Digital PR campaign depends on several factors, many of which are beyond the agency’s control.
When agencies offer guaranteed links, they may become desperate to meet targets when things don’t go as planned. This can lead to the generation of lower-quality, irrelevant links or even the purchase of links, which is against Google’s guidelines and could harm your website’s rankings.
Even if you partner with a reputable agency that prioritises quality over quantity, proving the value of Digital PR can still be a challenge. Many of the benefits are intangible, building brand reputation and authority, making it difficult to convince financial decision-makers of its worth, especially if they’ve heard about low-quality providers in the market.
To overcome this, it’s essential to work closely with your Digital PR agency to set clear, measurable KPIs that align with your business objectives. These KPIs should reflect the goals of your financial brand and provide a meaningful way to track success.
Another common challenge is the concern, “I already have a PR agency”. Many financial services firms have traditional PR agencies or in-house PR teams, and this can lead to resistance to investing in Digital PR. However, the two disciplines serve different purposes. While traditional PR focuses on shaping brand perception and raising awareness, SEO is about improving search rankings for key financial terms, with backlinks playing a critical role.
Digital PR sits in the middle, contributing to both brand awareness and search engine optimisation. By working alongside your existing PR efforts, Digital PR helps ensure your financial brand appears in front of the right audience both in terms of search visibility and media exposure.
Agencies like ours can complement your traditional PR team by handling the digital aspects, optimising landing pages, advising on anchor text, and auditing competitor link profiles for new opportunities.
If you need to explain the value of Digital PR to your board, existing PR team, or other stakeholders, you might say: that traditional PR raises brand awareness, SEO boosts search rankings, and Digital PR bridges the gap by enhancing both, making it a key part of any digital marketing strategy for financial services.
If you want to talk to us about Digital PR, just complete the form below and we’ll be happy to discuss what we could do for you.
