Digital PR and link building in London

Link audit and target list

Where your links come from today, what the sites above you have that you do not, and a named list of publications, sites and organisations worth earning a link from.

Digital PR campaigns

Stories built from your data, your expertise or original research, pitched to national, trade and London titles by people who write the pitch for the journalist, not for the algorithm.

Expert comment

Your people positioned as sources for journalists covering your sector, with quotes drafted, approved and placed.

London and local links

Borough business groups, business improvement districts, local press, event listings, sponsorships and community organisations that make sense for where you trade.

Partner and supplier mentions

The suppliers, clients, membership bodies and professional directories that already know you and have a reason to link.

Linkable content

Guides, tools and data pages worth citing, planned with the content team so the site has something to earn links to.

Clean-up where needed

Review of risky or bought links from previous work, and a disavow file only where one is warranted.

Link-by-link reporting

Every link and mention listed with the page, the date, the source and whether it is followed, alongside the referral traffic and rankings it supports.

How we do it

Audit first, because not every link is worth having

We start by reading your link profile and your competitors’ by hand: which sites link, whether they are relevant, whether they look bought, which pages the links point at, and where the gap is for the searches you are trying to win. Many London businesses inherit a profile from previous agencies that includes directory spam, guest posts on irrelevant blogs and sometimes worse. We tell you what we find, and we recommend a disavow file only where there is a real risk. Most sites do not need one.

Stories journalists want, built from what you already have

The links that move rankings come from publications with readers: national and trade press, sector sites, local London titles, industry bodies. Journalists link to stories, not to businesses, so we build stories: original data from your own operations, surveys run properly, expert analysis of a change in your sector, a London angle on a national topic. Each campaign is planned with you, produced with our content team, and pitched personally to named journalists who cover the subject. We write the pitch for the journalist, not for a mail-merge, and we tell you honestly which stories are strong enough to pitch and which are not.

Expert comment, consistently

Journalists need quotable experts on deadline. We position your people as sources for the topics they genuinely know, monitor requests from journalists, draft and clear quotes quickly, and follow up to make sure the mention links where it should. Over a year this builds a profile of coverage that a single campaign cannot.

London and local links that make sense

For a business that trades in a particular part of London, the most relevant links are often the least glamorous: the borough business group, the business improvement district, the local newspaper, the community organisation you sponsor, the event you host, the college you take apprentices from. These links tell Google where you are and who you are connected to, and they support the local search work directly. We build these relationships rather than buy their equivalent. The same thinking applies to the suppliers, clients, membership bodies and professional directories that already know you and have a reason to link; most businesses are leaving dozens of these on the table.

Something worth linking to

Outreach fails when the site has nothing worth citing. We plan linkable content with the SEO content team: guides that answer a question better than anything else available, data pages that journalists can quote, tools people use. A link earned to a useful page keeps earning; a link to a thin page does not.

What we will not do

We do not buy links, rent links, place links on sites built to sell them, run private blog networks, trade links, or pay for editorial placements presented as independent coverage. Where a placement is genuinely sponsored, it is labelled as such and carries the sponsored attribute, in line with Google’s link spam policies. We do not promise a number of links at a given authority score; those promises are only keepable by buying them. The guide to link building explains the difference between earned and bought links and why it matters.

What changes, and when

Links take longer to show their effect than most SEO work. A campaign takes four to eight weeks to research, produce and pitch before the first coverage appears. The rankings those links support usually move in the range we quote for competitive terms: six to twelve months for competitive London head terms, with local search changes often showing within one to three months where the links are local and the site is otherwise sound. Technical fixes made alongside are usually re-crawled within two to eight weeks. These are typical ranges from our own work, not a promise for your site, and we report every month so you can see which range you are in.

What you will hold month by month: a list of every link and mention earned, by name, with the date and source, and a growing body of coverage you can show to customers as well as to Google. What we will not promise: a number of links, an authority score or a ranking. Nobody can guarantee what a journalist will publish or what Google will do with it, and we say so before you sign.

How it is measured

Every link and mention is listed in the monthly report with the linking page, the date, the source, the page it points to and whether it is followed, sponsored or a mention without a link. Beside that we report referral traffic from the links in GA4, the movement of the searches each campaign was designed to support in Search Console, and the coverage itself. We do not report a single authority score as if it were an outcome; it is one indicator among several and it is easy to buy. At 90 days we review the whole programme with you and decide together what to continue.

On proof: we have not yet published a digital PR or link-building case study, and this page says so rather than borrowing a result from elsewhere. If you would like to speak to a client about how we work, ask us for a reference call. Across the agency the method is the same one described on every page of this site: real work, named people, figures with sources, and nothing claimed that cannot be checked.

What it costs to find out

Before any quote, an SEO specialist reviews your site for free. The free SEO audit is a written review delivered within two working days: where the site shows up today for the five searches that matter most, how your authority compares with the two sites that outrank you, the content gaps that explain it, and the three fixes that matter most, written so you could act on them yourself. No automated score, no call required, three fields on the form. Digital PR campaigns are quoted individually against an agreed plan; the number of earned links or mentions included in each retainer tier is on the pricing page.

Get your free SEO auditSend your web address and an SEO specialist reviews the site by hand within two working days. Three fields, no call required, no automated score.

Common mistakes we see on London sites

• A link profile bought from a previous agency: guest posts on irrelevant blogs, directory spam, links from sites that exist only to sell them, all pointing at the home page with the same anchor text.
• Judging a link by a third-party authority score rather than by whether the site is real, relevant and read.
• Outreach with nothing to pitch: asking for links to a services page nobody has a reason to cite.
• Data the business holds and has never used, while competitors with less publish quarterly reports the press covers.
• Sponsorships, memberships and partnerships that are paid for but never linked.
• Press coverage earned by a PR agency that mentions the brand and links to nothing, because nobody asked.
• A disavow file submitted on the advice of a tool, removing links that were doing no harm.
• Expecting links to rescue a site that is slow, thin or badly structured; authority amplifies what is there.

How it fits with other services

Links are one of the three things an SEO retainer works on, alongside technical foundations and content, and they only pay when the other two are in place. SEO content produces the guides and data pieces that earn coverage; technical SEO makes sure the pages the links point to can be crawled and are fast. Coverage in reputable publications is also one of the strongest inputs to AI search optimisation, because AI systems draw on the same sources journalists do. For a business with a reputation to protect, the same monitoring and media relationships support reputation management. Larger organisations with several sites or brands usually run digital PR within enterprise SEO. Owners who want the fundamentals first can read link building explained and the guide to Google penalties and recovery, which covers what happens when links are bought.