How to choose a digital PR agency (and what to ask)

Digital PR is one of the easier places to overspend and under-earn, because coverage is easy to dress up and links are easy to fake. A few direct questions will separate an agency earning durable authority from one selling volume. Here is what to ask, and the honest answers to expect.

Do you earn links, or buy them?

The right answer is earn, every time. Bought links are a risk on your domain, not an asset. An agency worth hiring earns coverage from sources that genuinely cover your sector, and treats a paid link scheme as the thing to avoid, not a shortcut to hit a target.

Who actually does the outreach?

This is the question most agencies dodge. Be direct about whether the journalist outreach is done in-house or through a partner, and do not accept vagueness. We are straight about our own model: we own the strategy, targeting and analysis in-house, and the outreach itself is delivered by a specialist partner under our management. That is a legitimate way to work. Pretending to have an in-house newsroom you do not is not. There is more on how we run it in digital PR that earns links, not just coverage.

How do you report, and on what?

Ask what numbers they report and how often. You want referring domains earned, coverage quality judged honestly, assisted ranking movement and citation lift, reported the same way each month. Be wary of a report that leans on raw coverage volume or vanity metrics, and of any agency that celebrates a mention with no link as a win.

Will you tell me when there is no story yet?

A good agency will. If you have no data, expertise or point of view worth publishing, the first job is creating something worth covering, and an honest partner will say so rather than running a campaign that was never going to land. No angle, no campaign, is a feature, not a limitation.

Will you quote me a link count?

A careful agency will not, because earned coverage is earned and nobody controls exactly how many links a campaign wins. What they should commit to is the campaigns, the angles and the outreach, and then report exactly what landed. A guaranteed number is a red flag, usually met by buying the difference.

Does it feed the rest of my marketing?

Authority that sits in a PR report is wasted. Coverage should be routed back into your SEO so it compounds against the pages that matter. Digital PR is the authority layer under good B2B SEO, and the two should be run as one system, not two invoices that never speak to each other.

A quick scorecard

If you want to keep it simple, score each agency out of six as you go: one point each for earning rather than buying links, being straight about who does the outreach, reporting on referring domains and quality rather than volume, telling you honestly when there is no story, refusing to guarantee a link count, and routing coverage back into your SEO. An agency scoring five or six is worth a longer conversation. One scoring two or three is selling you activity, not authority.

Watch how they handle the awkward questions as much as the answers themselves. A confident, specific reply, even when it is a no, tells you they have run this work before and respect your budget. Vagueness, deflection or a rush to a guaranteed number tells you the opposite, whatever the case studies say.

It is fair to ask for the mechanics of a recent campaign in the abstract, too: what the angle was, how the asset was built, how targeting was decided, and what actually landed. You are not asking them to break a confidence. You are checking that there is a real method underneath the pitch rather than a template and a bought media list.

If those answers matter to you, the digital PR service page explains our approach in full, and our pricing shows how digital PR sits inside a tier rather than being sold as an open-ended add-on.