Reverse PR: Get 4x more backlinks from your PR campaign

DEEP DIVE

Reverse PR: Get 4x more backlinks from your PR campaign

SEOs, agencies, and digital PR specialists are leaving a lot of link juice on the table each time they run a campaign. They’re so focused on that initial burst of coverage they completely miss the long-term opportunity.

Think about it. What happens after you get those first 10, 20, 50, or even 100 links? If you're like most, you move on to the next campaign.

Instead of letting your PR campaigns collect dust after the initial push, optimize your PR content for what journalists are actively searching for.

Let's walk through a couple of examples.

(h/t to BuzzStream and their digital PR examples article).

Example #1: AI Industry Analysis

Writerbuddy ran a campaign back in late 2023/early 2024 and initial coverage was great. The page jumped from 0 to 350 backlinks as a result.

The problem? That’s basically the end of the story. Writerbuddy went on to produce new campaigns. 

Now the page attracts four to five passive backlinks per month, but when I looked at other AI statistics pages (this one to be precise), I found it was getting 20+ links per month!

(Note: This is only counting links coming from sites that have a DR > 40 and Traffic > 10,000.)

Imagine making a few small tweaks to your page and then you multiply the number of links you get each month many times over? And not just any old links. 

Links from the biggest publications on the internet.

What’s more, Writerbuddy already has 300+ backlinks pointing to its page, so ranking for “AI statistics” is very doable.

Example #2: Couples’ Sleeping Positions

Another fascinating case is a PR campaign by Casper about couples’ sleeping positions. The original piece got decent coverage and attracted about 26 referring domains.

That said, I found a similar article on Sleep Foundation about best sleeping positions that is passively attracting ~200 new referring domains each year—simply because the page is optimized for what journalists regularly cite and link back to.

If the folks at Casper were to tweak their page and take over this keyword, they wouldn’t know what to do with all that link juice.🧃

The beauty of this strategy is that you don't need to create new content—just optimize what you already have. 

Your existing PR links give you the authority to rank for these journalist-focused keywords, creating a passive link-generating machine.

How do you find keywords to optimize your PR campaigns for?

First things first, review data heavy sites that passively attract backlinks each month. Start with the heavy hitters:

• Statista

• Pew Research

• Our World in Data

Next, find relevant pages on those sites related to your PR campaign.

For that Writerbuddy example above, here’s what I would search:

• site:statista.com ai statistics

• site:ourworldindata.org ai statistics

• site:pewresearch.org ai statistics

Once you find a few pages, you need to verify the link potential:

• Drop promising pages into Ahrefs.

• Look for steady, consistent growth in referring domains.

• Check if they're still getting recent citations.

• Look at a one-year horizon to calculate monthly link velocity.

The “Artificial Intelligence (AI) Worldwide” article in the screenshot above has gone from 321 to 607 referring domains in the past year. 

That’s an average of 23 links per month.

The graph above indicates a slow rise in referring domains over time, e.g., passively getting linked to each month. You NEED to find this sort of link growth. 

Once you find pages passively getting backlinks that are relatively close to your recent PR campaign, tweak your page to optimize for their keywords:

• Update the title tag.

• Update the H1.

• Update your data.

• DO NOT update the URL.

That’s it! 

You now know how to optimize your digital PR campaigns so they continue getting backlinks each and every month. 

Have campaigns that you need help optimizing? Click the button below to schedule a call with me and we can walk through them together.

Your next steps

Reading articles and theory is cool, but you know what will actually move the needle for your business?

Action.

Don't just read this.

Implement it or send it to a team member.

Here's what to do next:

1. Pull up your last successful PR campaigns.

2. Look at the topic and identify which journalist search patterns it could target.

3. Update your PR content to target keywords.

4. Schedule a call with me if you need help.