Digital PR is just a fancy way of saying we’ll get loads of links to your website and increase your brand awareness. It’s the skill of juggling journalists and supplier relationships, as well as creative and reactive campaigns, all while targeting audiences and media that didn’t know they needed your business.
Like any good marketing channel, the results are tangible, can be benchmarked and understood by all. Focus can be given to your most important objective – high domain authority links, brand mentions, traffic flow, conversions, or engagement. We utilise our extensive journo network to secure you the coverage that builds returns and hits your targets.
Manchester is the home of Digital PR agencies. Dark Horse is the home of Digital PR on the Manchester Metrolink map. We aim to drastically improve a company’s brand presence, fame of services all the while making a commercial impact to SEO results.
We do this by increasing your online exposure with results that would make Dirty Den blush. Our services generate coverage, create clever campaigns and generate more links than you will find with Tory peers and PPE companies. Digital PR is a huge part of our dedicated SEO service and we do it to make you money. We get publications and journalists to feature your company, products and service to bring you new customers and mega returns.
More relevant links, more coverage, more authority, more traffic, more influence, more leads and more money. We will let other digital PR agencies in Manchester take home the “vital” three points of Domain Authority increase. We go again.
Traditional PR is all about maintaining a positive brand image and building your brand awareness. Edina, Patsy and lots of quaffed bubbles. People who look like they have been wiping their nose on very flowery bread.
Digital PR helps with that brand image too, but it also works to improve your website rankings and page authority by acquiring links that point back to your website. It’s the links effect.
You need to turn your PR efforts digital for one simple reason: the quality, relevancy and quantity of links that point to your website is a Google ranking factor. It often means the difference between page 3 and page 1. Between getting crushed – or crushing your competition. Gone are the days where prosecco lunches at the country club with balloon arches made any sense for marketing. Don’t waste budget.
Primary focus: Generating links and brand mentions to increase on-site performance and rankings in search results.
Targeted publications: Online news sites, industry-specific websites, blogs and video platforms.
Success is measured through site performance and rankings.
Primary focus: Generating brand mentions and features to increase brand awareness and engage target audience.
Targeted publications: Traditional media channels, including printed press and social media.
Success is measured through impressions, reach and bolly darling.
Our Digital PR team takes SEO link building seriously. We’ve hired the best brains from the Manchester digital scene to form a strategy that delivers you links and supports overall commercial goals. See how we can help destroy your rivals.
To get the best out of your Digital PR, you need to know and use every trick in the book – it’s not just one press release every couple of months and hope for the best. It is expertise and knowledge that is carefully crafted alongside Content and Technical SEO, and always playing three moves ahead. Dark Horse leaves nothing chance.
Here are some Digital PR services Dark Horse offers:
Like any worthwhile SEO strategy, Digital PR conducts a forensic analysis to determine the strength of your backlink profile. We need to know how many links are pointing to your website, how many different websites are linking to you, what authority those links carry, if you’ve lost any relevant links and whether any links are harming you. Oh, and we need to know how you fair vs your biggest rivals. It makes it all the sweeter as you rise above them.
Every next step is meticulously planned to take down your competition.
Our Digital PR consultants will tell you this is a little reductive, but DPR essentially comes down to one key thing: link building. Their primary aim is simple: get as many relevant websites with a high domain authority as possible to link back to your website. Proactive and reactive campaigns, link reclamation and journalist outreach – we use any (honest) means necessary to deliver for our clients.
Whether it’s looking ahead to mental health awareness week, Black Friday or the release of a new blockbuster, every Digital PR strategy should proactively anticipate what media outlets will be talking about and have pitches ready to go. Needless to say, we’ve got you covered there.
Tired of splashing out money on Digital PR campaigns that add no value? Or worse, wasting money on a so-called SEO agency that doesn’t even offer DPR services? We secure you the coverage that builds returns and hits your targets. If it’s going to make you money and help towards your targets, we will go down on any amount of journos and hacks to get the job done and secure the right coverage.
Link reclamation involves finding broken or lost links to your site and repairing or replacing them with a new URL. It might not sound as flashy as building new ones, but we take those broken links and learn to fly again. It maintains your rankings and gets the most out of your backlink profile, helping you soar in Google.
If you’ve updated a URL on site that has been linked to, we contact the relevant outlet and ask them to update the link. If you’ve lost a link, we find out why it was removed and ask for it to be added back in or offer an alternative. Another tactic? We look at the links your competition has lost and, if any are relevant, we create an equivalent page on your site, contact the journo and ask them to link to you instead. Hear that screaming? It’s your competition’s pitiful cries as they realise their mistakes. We’ll pull any loose threads to get the win.
Most of the links that point to your site will be classed as ‘good’, helping to build your website’s authority and domain rating. However, some links, including shady links and spam purchased en masse by lazy SEO agencies who still live in the 2000s, will have a negative impact on your site. It’s simple: if a link doesn’t look organic, search engines will penalise you for it.
When we perform a backlink audit, we’ll analyse the quality of each link to identify those that come from spammy-sites. Then, our team will upload a disavow file to your site to essentially tell search engines to ignore the links from those domains, so they don’t negatively affect your ranking in search results. It’s a wanky expression, but it’s low hanging fruit that can quickly benefit your site.
Perfectly packaged and ready to spin into an article, journalists love a good PR story. That’s why they’ll often reach out to agencies requesting comments or data on given topics. If your Digital PR agency aren’t utilising that and fostering relationships with journos, you need a new agency.
Our Digital PR consultants have spent years cultivating close, healthy relationships with journalists across a range of industries so we can always get our clients featured in the best online news outlets out there. Getting an insulation company featured in GQ Italia? Completed it.
Whether there’s a breaking story hitting all news outlets or a new feature story that’s only relevant to your industry, your Digital PR agency should be capitalising on it and producing reactive campaigns that will bag you loads of links.
At Dark Horse, our team are always ready to pounce. Whether it’s writing tips about how to sleep better during a sudden heatwave for a mattress retailer or sharing a report on the safest places to work following the release of a new survey for a health and safety specialist, our team know how to deliver reactive campaigns at their finest.
Ready to terrify your competition? Our industry experts give your backlink profile a shakedown and turn it on its head checking for spam, lost and broken links that are giving your rivals the upper hand. Take back what’s yours. Dominate or die.
If it’s not clear by now, we’ll be blunt: we know what we’re doing. We focus on interesting and newsworthy campaigns that we pitch to industry-specific and large profile media. Our philosophy is simple – high domain authority, highly relevant sites. Don’t believe us? Here’s a list of some of the media we’ve got our clients featured in:
Top tier
BBC
The Guardian
The Telegraph
The Times
The Sun
The Mirror
The Scotsman
The Daily Record
Yahoo
Metro
Daily Post
Tech
Forbes
TechRadar
Wired
MSN
Gizmodo
Lifestyle
Glamour
GQ
Hello
OK!
Real Homes
Stylist
Ideal Home
The Spruce
House Beautiful
Grazia
Bustle
Homes and Gardens
Industry specific
DIY.com
HR News
SHP
FinTechTimes
Horticulture
We’re a Manchester Digital PR agency that won’t waste your money sending meaningless emails to websites no one has heard of. We assess your sector and work to get a mix of top tier media and industry-relevant websites.
Lies, lies and damned statistics. Not every number you read is data supplied by an honest Digital PR agency. Somewhere out there in a Manchester office, there’s a junior DPR Exec named Freddie plucking numbers out of thin air to make their data sexier and more appealing to some unknown regional. Sending it out, with your name on, to “media” that won’t do jack for you. With. Your. Name. On.
Then, we’ve got the link building strategies that are basically mummy blogs, vegan bloggers, travel insta-stars and other paid-for cretins circling the internet. It sounds easy enough to give a Love Island wannabe some of your tea, ask them to add a post to their website and then beg for a follow link… but do you have the money and patience for that? Could you live with yourself knowing you have supported Love Island? Neither could we.
Our Digital PR agency doesn’t do made-up data or make-believe stories – we remember Volkswagen and their clean diesel… not all PR is good PR, we only deliver the positive stuff. Overpriced Manchester bloggers that no one’s ever heard of isn’t our thing either. Digital PR outreach is the fine art of generating interest and awareness for your brand, leading to valuable links that beef up your backlink profile and increase the value of your website in the eyes of Google. It requires finesse, research, diplomacy and elite level Digital PR services to get those follow links. No mummy blogs, no fake data. Just strategy and relevant links.
If you’re looking to partner with a Manchester Digital PR agency that grows your backlink profile, increases your domain authority and makes you a ton of money – send us a sign.
The rule of three – omne trium perfectum – apparently means that whatever comes in threes has some ultimate power. We may not be Latin speaking monks, but we do know that magic happens when Content marketing, Digital PR and Tech SEO (three distinct disciplines that need three wildly different skillsets: coding, copywriting, creativity, marketing, data analysis and more) work together to increase sales and make a website shine. SEO is a team game and has to be. We have never met a freelancer or tiny agency who covered all bases. All audits we have compiled for websites using freelancers have been frankly turd.
For great SEO, and to make a dent in your margins, you need specialists across the range. A team of highly skilled brains that will get their hands dirty and check under the hood of your website to find the issues, fix the gaps and start making you money.
Sounds too good to be true? It’s not, it’s the Dark Horse SEO trio. Let our Dark Horse SEO masterminds rip your website apart and show you where you could be. Seriously, book a consultation, shoot us an email, send us some smoke signals and let our team audit your website for free. No strings attached, just brutal honesty.
Dark Horse SEO audits include:
There is no room for mediocrity in the future. We will forensically retire your incumbent agency. Piece by ickle piece individually wrapped in powerpoint slides.
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They haven’t got mortgages so why not take their savings instead of Netflix. Paid Social so startingly revolutionary that it could make Gen Z vote Tory with Kirsty Allsop as PM.
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The only thing you will get from page 3 is going blind. Law professional, Tracey 23, from Skegness says "No sales below my favourite position - number 1 of course!"
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PPC results to make you cry tears of joy. PPC results to make your competition cry. Period. Make a Martini out of them.
Learn MoreThe below scratches the surfact of Digital PR but it does give us a platform to put some internal links. We’re taking it.
Backlinks, also affectionately known as inbound links, are links from one website to another. Think of an online article published on Yahoo News about a new treatment that links back to the trial data published in an online medical journal. That link will be a backlink from Yahoo to the medical journal. You scratch one back, they’ll backlink yours.
A backlink profile refers to the collection of links from other websites that point back to yours. Some will have been engineered with a Digital PR strategy, others will happen organically. We tick both boxes with our smart strategies and top-notch content.
The value of each individual link within your backlink profile will be based on their domain authority, relevance, type and anchor text ratio – but more on that below.
Link building is the process of getting other websites to link back to yours. It’s all about acquiring backlinks to boost your online visibility and authority. Think of it like the cool kids vouching for you so Queen G takes notice.
The links acquired from your linking building strategy act as trust signals, telling search engines that your site is valuable and authentic. When those links come from websites with high domain authorities, the transferred link juice increases your own authority and thus your rankings in search results – or at least that’s the complicated explanation you’d get from our Digital PR experts.
In simpler terms, links are like digital friends. If Google likes your friends and your friends are vouching for you, then Google is likely to like you too. The more likeable friends you have, the more Google will value you. Though those awful hormonal high school anxiety days of appearing popular were long gone? They’re back.
Link juice, or link equity, is a term used to describe and measure how much authority one site passes on to another by linking to it. The link juice flows from the linking site into the linked-to site through hyperlinks. The more reputable the site, the bigger boost of link juice the linked-to site gets. A deep, thirst-quenching drink to soothe your shrivelled, dried out DA. A term mostly used by people to avoid at parties.
A dofollow link is backlink that search engines can crawl, and that passes authority from the linking site to the linked-to site. These are the links you ideally want to acquire through your link building efforts, for it’s a jolly dofollow which nobody can deny.
It looks something like this:
<a href="http://www.penisland.com/">Link Text eg Big Fountain Pens</a>
A nofollow link occurs when one site links to another site but embeds a piece of code into that link to tell search engines not to follow that link or pass on any authority to the site it’s pointing to.
It looks something like this:
<a href="https://onlyfans.com/" rel="nofollow">Link Text</a>
If you receive a nofollow link, you won’t get the full benefit of the link but it’s better than no link. Think of it as a subtle nod, a quick smile, an inconspicuous wink.
While your link building efforts should always focus on gaining dofollow links, a link is still a link, and will help grow your backlink profile and authority regardless of whether it’s dofollow or nofollow. We advise having a healthy balance of each. It’s more important that the link is relevant and has a high DA than that it’s dofollow. It’s all about quality over quantity.
Links are important to SEO because they’re a ranking factor. The more (valuable, of course) links you have, the more authority you gain, the higher you’ll appear in search results, the more traffic you’ll get to your site and the more money you’ll make.
Domain Authority (DA) is an SEO scoring system first developed by Moz, an SEO analysis tool, that predicts how likely a domain is to appear in search engine result pages (SERPs) compared to its competitors on a scale of 1 to 100. The higher a score your website achieves, the more likely it is to rank higher in SERPs. It basically works to predict how Google will perceive your website, based on the quality and the quantity of links that point back to your website. We don’t like sucking up to Google, but we’ll go down on any amount of journos to secure the right coverage.
Similar to domain authority, domain rating (DR) is an SEO scoring system (developed by AHrefs, another SEO analysis tool) that shows the strength of a website’s backlink profile relative to all other websites. The higher the domain rating, the stronger your backlink profile – and that’s exactly what you should be aiming for. You want to be comparing, we know size matters, is your DR bigger than their DR?
To increase your DA and DR, you need to improve your backlink profile by disavowing harmful backlinks, reclaiming lost links, and gaining more links from websites that have a higher DA than you. You need to get as many quality links as possible. You need a Digital PR agency that knows what they’re doing. You need Dark Horse.
Almost every campaign we run aims to do one thing: acquire backlinks. But the benefits of Digital PR doesn’t end there. We measure (and report on) success based on:
We hate the term but we love the concept: a holistic approach. Our Content and Digital PR team work together to maximise our in-house resource, make best use of your investment and hours available, and get you the best results possible. Let’s say our content team writes a great blog, why wouldn’t we then repurpose it to increase visibility and reach? We know what the media like and how to spin a blog post into a media pitch.
At Dark Horse, we always let the data do the talking and drive our strategy. We start by performing a backlink profile audit, looking at the number, quality and history of your backlinks. Do we need to reclaim lost links? Disavow toxic ones? We get to the bottom of it all. From there, we move into the ideation phase, developing a proactive campaign before outreaching it to journalists and media outlets. As the campaign develops, we’ll track the number of links and brand mentions it generates and report on it. In the background, we also answer ADHOC media requests to get you as much coverage as possible. After 12 weeks, we review our strategy, building and adapting it based on performance data.
Luckily for you, it can be either. If you signed an SEO retainer with us, you get Digital PR services as part of it. Let’s not forget, backlinks are a ranking factor. We also offer Digital PR as a standalone service, including backlink profile audits, proactive campaigns and ideation, and link building and outreach.
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Digital PR has such a positive impact on SEO. It generates backlinks, increases brand awareness, increases brand mentions, drives traffic to site, improves keyword rankings, increases relevance and brand authority, and improves brand reputation.
Building a strong backlink profile requires a specific set of skills and the right level of know-how. Our Digital PR team are experts in their field and have extensive knowledge of how to build external links for SEO across multiple industries. See how they can help you gain more digital friends.
