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PR terminology in focus: These 10 digital PR terms seem to leave pros most baffled

by | Jul 10, 2020 | Public Relations

It’s never a bad time to come to terms with the terms driving the PR industry now. Working in PR is stressful enough, especially for junior staffers, without being tripped up by the many terms and phrases batted around the office. Consequently, Elstree, UK-based Reboot Digital PR Agency conducted a survey of British practitioners to find out which digital PR key terms baffle them most.

The firm surveyed 2,746 people to find out if they would be confident in understanding terms that are commonplace in the world of digital PR, to judge if the average newcomer to the British PR industry would be able to make it. After all, the industry currently employs 86,000 people and is fast becoming crucial in the success of a business, so it might come in handy to brush up on everything from more recent terms such as “backlink” to classics like “pitch.”

The results:

  • Syndication (76 percent didn’t understand)—Syndication is a method of republishing existing content on other websites in order to reach a broader audience.
  • Backlink (71 percent)—A backlink is a link created when one website links to another.
  • SEO (65 percent)—Search engine optimization is the process of growing the quality and quantity of website traffic by increasing the visibility of a website or a web page to users of a web search engine.
  • Anchor text (63 percent)—Anchor text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. In modern browsers, it is often blue and underlined.
  • Trust flow (54 percent)—Trust flow is a number predicting how trustworthy a page is based on how trustworthy sites tend to link to trustworthy neighbors.
  • Placements (47 percent)—Media coverage of a press release, which can be in the form of a magazine, online blog post, or any other media outlets that will be viewed by a wide audience.
  • Outreach (38 percent)—Press outreach is the process of “pitching” information about your product/service to journalists, bloggers and influencers.
  • Nofollow (33 percent)—Nofollow is a value that can be assigned to the rel attribute of an HTML, it instructs some search engines that the hyperlink should not influence the ranking of the link’s target in the search engine’s index.
  • Pitch (26 percent)—A media pitch is a brief letter, email or phone call offering a news story to a journalist or editor at a newspaper, magazine, radio or television station. The aim of the pitch is to create interest in the story and to find out if the contact is willing to use it.
  • Press release (23 percent)—A press release is a written document prepared for the media that announces something newsworthy.

“Being in the industry, you sometimes forget how baffling digital PR terms can be to small business owners, or those just starting their career in an agency—especially considering that digital PR is a relatively new strand of PR,” said Reboot’s creative director Abby Chinery, in a news release. “However, I feel that thanks to the growing importance of digital PR in becoming a successful business online, more and more entrepreneurs will come across these key terms and understand their meaning given time.”

PR terminology in focus: These 10 digital PR terms seem to leave pros most baffled

Richard Carufel
Richard Carufel is editor of Bulldog Reporter and the Daily ’Dog, one of the web’s leading sources of PR and marketing communications news and opinions. He has been reporting on the PR and communications industry for over 17 years, and has interviewed hundreds of journalists and PR industry leaders. Reach him at richard.carufel@bulldogreporter.com; @BulldogReporter

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