Optimize Digital PR with Niche Keywords & Strategic Outreach

Digital PR is constantly becoming more competitive. Brands are competing for comment opportunities, online coverage and SERPs rankings with hundreds of other companies in the same space.

Using PR to explore niche topics and opportunities can help you to break away, earn links from new domains and reach new audiences.

Your starting point, as with many PR strategies, is keywords.

Keywords are spoken about all the time with PR, as they are absolutely vital to both onsite copy and offsite content, working hard to build your site’s backline profile.

These are the words customers will search for in order to try and find your service or product, so identifying them is essential to success in SERPs.

By understanding and incorporating keywords into your PR content, you can optimise your company’s visibility. This can help to attract a targeted audience, and establish thought leadership in your industry. Keywords are crucial in PR to help shape a positive narrative and show your expertise.

Think about what keywords are specific to your sector, service or business. The most searched for keywords will usually be the most competitive on search engine rankings, so finding keywords without huge volumes of searches is the key to your new niche.

Low VS high competition keywords

You can start to explore niches by finding low competition keywords with high business potential.

Some of the most competitive industries for keywords and online coverage include gambling, insurance and business.

If your company is working within an industry with super competitive keywords, you must be able to branch out into other categories and niche areas while still focusing on your product or service.

When establishing a PR strategy, you may look at some of your most competitive keywords. For example, if your product is business insurance, your main keywords may be ‘business insurance’ and ‘professional liability’.

These can be described as high competition keywords, as they are the terms all of your competitors in the business insurance space will likely also be using within their online marketing and PR materials.

Finding niche keywords

To find some more niche options for your online marketing and PR efforts, you must look for unique keywords.

The easiest way to search for unique and useful keywords is through ChatGPT. Searching something along the lines of ‘give me 20 words and phrases related to business insurance’.

Now, you have a list of keywords including some less targeted by competitors, including ‘employment practices liability’, ‘cyber insurance’, ‘commercial auto insurance’, ‘umbrella insurance’, ‘ malpractice insurance’ and ‘errors and omissions insurance’.

You can keep requesting more options from Ahrefs until you land on a good range of solid keywords to inform a new strategy for your PR.

Pop some of your favourite keywords or phrases into a keyword tool, like Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, then go to a keyword ideas report and sift through the results to find inspiration for content ideas.

Most of the keywords should be close to your business products or services. Making sure keywords are relevant to your business is essential, as this forms a trusting relationship with journalists and encourages them to come back to you for further expert comments and content.

Relevancy is also essential when it comes to success in SERPs.

Match your searchers’ intent

Search intent is the reason behind an online search for a user - usually search intent can fall into one of the three categories.

They want to learn something
They want to buy something
They want to find a specific site

When choosing your niche high / low competition keywords, you want to make sure you are able to produce content which aligns with the searchers’ intent. If you are unsure of intent around a range of niche keywords, research other top ranking search results around this and use it for inspiration.

Use keywords for new domain success

Align these keywords with your business and product in order to find new ideas for PR success. You can also use this keyword research to find new target domains for your digital PR outreach.

This will help to diversify your backlink profile and improve your search engine rankings.

Interrogate information found on sites like Ahrefs in order to identify any competitors in the niche spaces and decide what good and bad PR looks like for this range of publications and domains.

Creating new media lists and targeting content to journalists can help form new relationships and put your products in front of new potential customers.