Digital PR and traditional link building can lead to the same result: another website links to yours.
Before comparing them, it helps to understand what each one means.
Digital PR is about getting a business, its information, or its story mentioned in online publications. A business might give journalists original research, useful data, expert information, or a story worth writing about. When a publication uses that information, the article may also include a link to the business’s website.
Traditional link building focuses more directly on earning backlinks. This can involve finding relevant websites that could potentially link to your content and contacting them about a possible link opportunity.
So both approaches can earn backlinks, but they begin in different places.
With traditional link building, earning a backlink is usually one of the main goals from the beginning. With Digital PR, you are first trying to give journalists or publications something useful or interesting enough to include in an article. A backlink may then become part of that article.
Here is the difference in simple terms:
| Digital PR | Traditional Link Building | |
|---|---|---|
| What do you start with? | A story, research, data, or useful information | A page or resource you want other websites to link to |
| Who might you contact? | Journalists or online publications | Relevant website owners, editors, or publishers |
| Is getting a backlink the main goal from the start? | Not always | Usually |
| Who decides whether a link appears? | The journalist or publication | It depends on the method and the website |
| Can you be mentioned without getting a backlink? | Yes | Being mentioned is usually not the main goal |
| Can both approaches earn backlinks? | Yes | Yes |
How Digital PR Can Create Backlinks
Imagine a company conducts a survey about how often people check their phones after waking up.
The company publishes the results on its website and tells journalists who write about technology or everyday habits about the findings.
A journalist finds the results interesting and includes one of the statistics in an article. The journalist may also link to the company’s original survey so readers can see where the information came from.
That link is a backlink.
This is how Digital PR can lead to backlinks without the process beginning with a simple request for a link. The company gave the journalist something useful for a story, and the journalist decided whether a link to the original source would help the article or its readers.
How Traditional Link Building Can Create Backlinks
Traditional link building starts more directly with the link.
Suppose you have created a detailed guide on your website. You find another website with an article about the same subject and notice that your guide could provide useful additional information for its readers.
You might contact the person responsible for the website, show them your guide, and explain why it could be useful in that article.
They can then decide whether they want to link to it.
This is a simple example of outreach, but traditional link building can include other methods too. Guest blogging, for example, involves contributing an article to another website and can sometimes include relevant links within that content.
Who Has More Control Over the Link?
With Digital PR, you might send a journalist your research and hope they find it useful. The journalist may write about it, but you usually do not decide exactly what they say, which page they link to, what words they use for the link, or whether they include a link at all.
They might even mention your company without linking to it.
Traditional link building can sometimes give you more influence over the opportunity because you are approaching a website specifically about a possible link. But that does not mean you control the final result. The other website can still reject the suggestion or decide how a link fits its content.
So the difference is not no control versus complete control. Traditional link building simply tends to focus more directly on the link you are trying to earn.
Is Digital PR Better Than Traditional Link Building?
Not automatically.
It can be tempting to think that a backlink earned through Digital PR must be better because a journalist chose to include it. It is equally easy to assume that a traditionally earned backlink is weaker because link building was the original goal.
Neither conclusion works as a general rule.
A Digital PR campaign might result in a useful link from a relevant article, but it might also result in a simple brand mention with no backlink at all.
Traditional link building can also produce links that fit naturally into useful, relevant content. The result depends on the particular website, page, link, and circumstances rather than the name of the method alone.
This is why the comparison should not be reduced to “good links” and “bad links.” Both approaches can create useful backlinks when the link makes sense in the page where it appears.
For a closer look at one side of the comparison, you can read about how Digital PR helps earn high authority backlinks.
Which Approach Makes More Sense?
The answer depends on what you have and what you are trying to do.
If you have original research, expert knowledge, useful data, or a genuinely interesting story, Digital PR may give journalists something they can use while also creating opportunities for backlinks.
If you already have useful pages on your website and want to find relevant websites that could link to them, traditional link building may offer a more direct path.
You also do not necessarily have to choose only one. A website can use Digital PR when it has something journalists may want to write about and use traditional link building when it has useful pages that could make sense as links from other websites.
