How to Demonstrate Your Value as a Digital PR in 2025

Since starting out in PR almost eight years ago, there’s no doubt that the industry has changed significantly. Marketing budgets are being squeezed, journalists have faced widespread layoffs, and AI has moved to the forefront of conversations, where we’re actually beginning to see changes to how we work on a day-to-day basis.

Alongside these changes, conversations with clients around the impact of the work we’re delivering have also shifted. As Digital PRs, we’ve moved on from the usual questions of focussing solely on ’how many links have you secured?’ and ‘have we hit our link KPI?’. Now we are increasingly answering questions such as ‘How can I see tangible impact from these results?’, ‘how can you prove this was from Digital PR efforts specifically’, and ‘what is the financial gain of these backlinks?’

Over the last few years, answering these questions has brought great positives, such as creating a more upskilled, SEO and sales savvy team within Digital PR, but also some negatives, which includes losing clients because we haven’t been able to prove the value of our work as much as we’d have liked to.

Proving value continues to be a work in progress and something we are always building on, but here are some top tips to get you starting to feel confident when communicating ROI to your clients:

1) Education 

For Digital PRs, client stakeholders can vary from Digital Marketing Managers, SEO Managers and Traditional PRs. As a result, ensuring the whole team understands the significance of Digital PR from both a brand and ranking perspective is crucial to being able to deliver impactful work. Sometimes, it has taken multiple workshops for the teams we work with to feel fully confident in understanding the benefits of Digital PR. Whilst it might seem obvious and simple, this is an extremely important and powerful tactic, as ensuring your stakeholders can understand and confidently explain the value of Digital PR to other members of their business and potential stakeholders is crucial in getting your client on your side and demonstrating impact.

It can also be beneficial in a situation where other factors may be harming the benefits of your hard-earned backlinks. If your client understands the various pieces that make up the SEO puzzle, they will be able to both recognise the benefits of Digital PR, as well as the challenges it can sometimes face around ROI. 

2) Understanding the client's bottom line and goals from the beginning

Every client is slightly different in terms of what they want to achieve from Digital PR efforts. However, they all tend to have a bottom line and they all have goals they are working towards internally.Understanding the bottom line and looking beyond the link KPI is key to delivering work that will have a lasting impact. These goals should always be intertwined in the narrative and analysis of your reporting documents to ensure the client really feels like you are working towards a shared goal.

3) Create a tangible and measurable strategy using SEO-backed insights

Digital PR and the placement of high quality backlinks is typically part of a wider SEO strategy to build visibility in the SERPs as well as in the public eye. As a result, conducting key SEO analysis at the beginning of a scope is crucial to creating some measurable targets that go beyond links. For our clients, we run an SEO audit and work closely with our SEO experts as well as the client to determine the right strategy and measurables. Some of these measurables include keywords positioning, and target pages they want to focus on - tracking ranking performance and visibility of these two areas across a scope allows you to demonstrate impact, whilst also pivot your strategy if something isn’t working.

4) Using SEO insights to demonstrate financial ROI

More and more, clients are looking to find out the financial benefits they will receive from the results we get. One way of doing this is by working closely with your client to find out their average order value and conversion rate to then demonstrate the results they could gain from increasing their visibility for certain keywords and pages. As you continue working together, monitoring the changes in impressions, clicks and leads and using graphs to demonstrate the correlation between your work and any improvements can be extremely effective at getting buy-in from senior stakeholders.

5) Including PR-focussed goals and reporting to help prove brand awareness metrics

Digital PR is capable of driving SEO improvements whilst also raising brand awareness and altering public perception. With this in mind, including more traditional PR metrics is something we should look to include. For example readership audience numbers of publications, the engagements we’re receiving, social media changes and trends, etc. 

When working with internal PRs, these metrics can be extremely effective. One way we can target both SEO and PR measurables is speaking to the team about their dream publications they want to land on, whilst also providing competitor backlink insights to determine the gaps and opportunities that will drive the most value.

6) Transparency and honesty

Speaking regularly with your clients regarding the progress of Digital PR and if we’re seeing impact is crucial to building trust and coming up with a strategy that gains results. We don’t always get it right the first time, so keeping an open dialogue of communication with your client is key to making the adjustments you need that will then drive results they are happy with. Simply asking your clients what they need to see can be beneficial in ensuring you’re on the same page. Building this relationship will also help with challenging conversations around performance, where perhaps Digital PR has performed, however is hindered by other ranking factors that haven’t been addressed.

7) Creating content that isn’t just for backlinks but is actually useful

Digital PR is a powerful lever to support organic growth through securing backlinks. However, we also want our content to work harder so it’s not only there to gain links, but is content that people engage with, share, talk about and find useful. For example, proving ROI to clients may take the form of seeing your client / client representative become the media expert in a certain area that leads to constant journalist enquiries and interest in your content and story, for example.

With these tips, you should be equipped to navigate those ROI questions from your clients with a little more confidence.