The Importance of an Integrated Digital Marketing / SEO & PR Strategy

Note I've broken some URLs below.


There is a recent well-known (award-winning) digital public relations (aka DPR / DigiPR ) case study. The agency behind it did research relating to what was the current value (in 2023) of a class of digital assets (an “asset” which boomed during Covid). You remember the 'good old days' with digital drawings of monkeys selling for many millions? That's the one – and the bubble has since popped. The creators claimed the circulation of the research lead to the following (impressive) results including :


      This campaign reached me too (via me reading the Guardian website) and if I recall correctly I shared the coverage of this research on both Twatter and Linkedin...

    Out of interest I recently looked at the current rankings of the "igaming" (a.k.a gambling to speakers of plain English) website which had been the focus of the digital PR campaign and to my surprise what I saw was a website that was (for all intents and purposes) no longer visible on Google...

    Before this campaign was launched the site in question had recently ranked on Google for as many as 3K phrases in the top 100 results on Google globally in June 2023 (semrush.com data).


    However the time the PR campaign was launched (c. Sept 2023) there was already a downward trend in the number of phrases in the top 100 results on Google globally (semrush.com data)...


    Now (in July 2024) even with backlinks from 3.3K domains ( including 'dofollow' links from the likes of the Guardian, The Verge and Le Figaro) the site only ranks for it's brand name globally on Google (semrush.com data)! See below for their current USA Google rankings (semrush.com data).


     Why is that (*scratches head*)? What went wrong (even before the wildly successful  Digital PR / SEO campaign was launched)? 

   It must be noted that some eminent SEO experts do not consider Digital PR-type links to be that powerful: https://ahrefs. com/blog/viral-seo/ . It appears that Google may have taken some sort of action on the site: there may have been a manual penalty around February 2024 as their visibility swiftly declined around that time. The fact that the site now only ranks for it's brand name may indicate some kind of formal penalty or algorithmic action. 300 pages from the site remain indexed by Google from a check in my browser. There are a number of possibilities:

    There are not any "money keywords" in their top 10 anchor texts of their backlinks (possibly because in part of the success of the DPR campaign), but as you can see above around at least 1/10 of the total number of linking domains have 2 example money keywords in the anchor text...


 2.   It is possible there are (multiple) issues with their content as they have a lot of casino reviews. As an affiliate website it is debatable whether they have beneficial purpose (Google says "high quality pages serve a beneficial purpose and achieve that purpose well") in the first place.  In July 2023 Google updated their product ratings policies on automated AI content in reviews :https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/13791493?hl=en but from my 'blink analysis' (including viewing historical content using https://web.archive.org/) there may be been issues with their content with reviews & author profiles (since updated) that may NOT have demonstrated that "reviewers are knowledgeable about what they are reviewing, nor show that reviewers are experts" very well . I can't find any 3rd party reviews about their service nor a business address on the Google Map which might affect Google's 'trust' rating of this website. The Crypto and gambling market are both "Your Money / Your Life" (YMYL) areas thus you might expect / hope Google's Quality Rater staff to be paying close attention to this sector.

      The above DPR work was a great brand building exercise and surely brought significant traffic (and the DPR agency continues to talk about this work to this day). But there appear to be no long term benefit to this work.

        However in my analysis the lack of a (long term) holistic strategy (including the lack of link building work's compliance with Google guidelines which looks to be a potential main reason for the ranking drop from my analysis) has made all their SEO effort a very limited success as the site no longer ranks at all (apart from for their brand name) globally on Google from the semrush.com data.