At its core, a PR report is about presenting the impact of your hard work.

While day-to-day PR reports get into the nitty gritty of media monitoring, periodic reviews and campaign washups take a step back, looking at wider context, learnings, and next steps.

Let’s get into examples of both…

Here are five real-world PR report examples that stand out for their clarity and focus.

The “Exec-friendly one-pager” PR report from Rise at Seven

The “PR supplement” report from Cedarwood Digital

This PR report example from Cedarwood Digital gives a quick snapshot of digital coverage, showcasing the campaign’s success in terms of links and authority.

The “supplement” report is great for clients who don’t need full PR play-by-plays—either because they’re more invested in other channels, or because reporting is regular enough that they’re already up to speed.

This is an example Digital PR report that we attach to our SEO report – we find it’s quite top level – but it works well for our clients.

The “monthly deep-dive” PR report from Distinctly

This is a solid example of a monthly PR report from Lauren Field, Senior Digital PR Manager at Distinctly, offering the exec summary and next steps up front, followed by a deeper-dive into campaign activities, organic visibility, media coverage, and competitor analysis.

It’s clear from the content that the Distinctly team reports on results across multiple channels, and throughout the entire sales funnel. If you’re looking to report holistically on your PR performance, get inspiration from the full report here.

The “campaign wrap up” PR report example from Kaizen

This PR report from Shakira Sacks, PR Lead at Kaizen, is a great example of a well-structured campaign wrap-up.

It follows a logical and easy-to-read flow, moving through Campaign Overview > Results > Wider Impact > Next Steps.

High-level performance summaries, paired with the right amount of context, make this report ideal for mid-level managers or clients.

For more inspiration, check out the report in full here.

The “live coverage” PR dashboard from Escherman

This live reporting dashboard, built by Andrew Bruce Smith, Founderof Escherman agency, integrates cross-channel PR metrics like coverage authority and social shares.

PR dashboards don’t tend to give the recipient a whole lot of context. As such, they tend to be better for internal teams, or clients who prefer regular updates and minimal hand holding.

Different audiences will be interested in different ways of measuring goals. For example, on-the-ground teams are more likely to care about granular KPIs like the number of dofollow links.

C-suite or Directors, on the other hand, will want to see the top-level impact of your strategy.

They’ll prefer overarching PR KPIs like share of voice uplift across a number of campaign-relevant terms.

Or even site-level share of voice uplift vs. competitors.

That’s why a lot of PR pros go for more visual tools like Looker Studio or Canva.

If your audience is a senior exec, they’ll typically want a well-designed report featuring top-level summaries, carefully curated stats, and performance headlines.

Clients usually expect a white-labeled report with a healthy amount of context on deliverables and results, given they’re not involved in the day-to-day of it all.

And on the ground PRs or internal teams (like you) need live, granular reports, to iteratively review and develop strategy. In-platform data, spreadsheets, and Looker dashboards are format favorites for these bread-and-butter PRs.

Ahrefs’ new PR reporting dashboard is a great example. It gives you a live overview of link and search performance based on your Content Portfolio (ie. your own specified list of URLs).

Here’s what it looks like:

There’s a tendency in PR to over-report. Carving out a clear narrative arc will keep you on track.

The best PR reports I’ve seen stick to this loose formula to deliver healthy insight:value.

• Exec summary (goal and campaign overview)
• Top wins
• Expectation vs reality (carefully curated charts that guide the story)
• Recommendations and next steps

PR campaign report template

Ready to create your own PR report? Here’s a simplified template you can customize for your campaigns…

Grab the template here

Ongoing media coverage template

This next PR report template comes from Digital PR Lead, Alice Walker-Gibbons, from Embryo Digital.

If you’re analyzing the impact of your ongoing media coverage, this Google Sheets example will give you some key metrics to consider in your PR reporting.

Grab the template here.

Quarterly PR report template

Alex Jones, Head of Digital at Cartwright Communications, has developed a follow-along template that reflects his team’s approach to PR reporting.

Here’s what he has to say:

For digital PR reporting, we often split our monthly and quarterly reports into the following Primary Owned Goals:

• Volume of links
• Quality of links
• Relevance of links
• Domain Rating
• Trust Flow

We also add in the share of voice and sentiment analysis if these contribute to the client’s goals. We then split our reports into Secondary Shared Goals (SSGs):

• Keywords/rankings
• Traffic/sessions
• Conversions
• Revenue growth

Essentially, we want to analyze ranking and keyword changes in line with links acquired and then the impact on traffic and sessions. This can also tie back goal completions and any revenue driven as a result.

Wrapping up

This week’s Ask an SEO column comes from an anonymous asker:

“What should a backlink profile look like, and how do you build good backlinks?”

Great question!

Backlinks are a part of SEO as a way to build trust and authority for your domain, but they’re not as important as link builders claim.

You can rank a website without backlinks. The trick is focusing on your audience and having them create brand demand. This can be equal in weight to backlinks but drives more customers.

Once you are driving demand and have created solid resources, backlinks start occurring naturally. And when you have an active audience built from other channels, you can survey them to create “link worthy” pages that can result in journalists reaching out.

With that said, and when all else is equal, having the trust and authority from a healthy and natural backlink profile can be the deciding factor on who gets into the top positions and who gets no traffic.

A healthy backlink profile is one that appears to be natural.

Search engines, including Google, expect a certain amount of spammy links from directories, website monitoring tools, and even competitors that spam or try to do a negative SEO attack. These are part of a healthy backlink profile.

What is unnatural is when your website or company has done nothing to earn an actual link.

When there is nothing noteworthy, no original thought leadership or studies, or something that goes viral and the media covers, there’s no reason someone would ever have linked to you.

Having backlinks for no reason would likely be considered an unhealthy link profile, especially if they’re mostly dofollow.

Healthy link profiles contain a mix of dofollow, nofollow, sponsored, and mentions from actual users in forums, communities, and social media shares.

Unhealthy backlink profiles are where a website has links from topically irrelevant websites, when the articles have mentions of big brands and “trustworthy” or “high authority” sites, and then randomly feature a smaller company or service provider with them.

It’s an old trick that does not work anymore. Unhealthy link profiles also include private blogger networks (PBNs), link farms, link wheels, link networks, and where the sites have a high domain authority (DA), Authority Score (AS), etc.

Bonus tip: DA, AS, and other metrics are not used by search engines. They are scores that third-party SEO tools created and have absolutely no say when it comes to the quality of a website or backlink.

If someone is telling you high DA is good and Google trusts these sites, they’re selling you snake oil.

Although backlinks are not as important as they used to be, backlinks still matter. So, if you’re looking to build some, here are a few strategies to try, avoid, and tread lightly with.

Scholarship, Grants, And Sponsorships

These don’t work. Google knows you’re offering them to get .edu links, and in rare cases .gov links. And definitely from charities and events.

It’s easy to map back to who paid or bought them, and these likely won’t count for you SEO-wise.

If they make up the majority of your links, you should expect them to be neutralized by the search engines or to get a manual action against your site for unnatural link building in Search Console from Google.

If you’re doing a sponsorship, ask for the website being sponsored to place “sponsored” instead of “nofollow.”

And if you’re doing a scholarship or grant, feature the winner on your site, provide a full education and follow up about them, and have them share their story for the next few years in a monthly or quarterly column on your blog.

If you genuinely want to do good, share their story and progress. Otherwise, it was just for getting backlinks, and that works against you.

Citations And Broken Links

When you get mentions in the media, or a competitor has a naturally occurring link to a study, but it goes to a broken page, this is a good way to build a natural link. Reach out to these sites and ask them to link to your study instead.

You can mention their visitors are currently hitting a dead page if it’s a broken link, and present your study or resource, which is of equal or better value. Or share that yours has been updated where the current source is outdated and no longer applies.

For citations where nobody has a link, try letting the website owner know it saves the user a trip to a search engine to find another answer. And when they have a good experience on the website, they’re likely to come back for more information.

Topically Relevant PR

I’m a big believer in PR to acquire backlinks naturally. But you have to do things that make sense for your business.

• Local stores and service providers should get links from local news stations, local bloggers, and niche websites in their industry.
• Service providers need to focus on trade publications, industry-relevant blogs and publications, events, and social networks.
• Stores will do well with niche and audience-relevant bloggers, communities, publications or media websites, and mass media coverage that is not affiliate links or in an affiliate folder.

Think about what is newsworthy that you can do or provide that these groups would want to cover.

PR and SEO agencies that work with content will be able to provide ideas, then you can choose which ones you like and run with them. Not every campaign will work, but hang in there – the right one will happen.

You can also try surveying your audience for original data points and studies, and then publish them. And that goes to the next tip.

The publications must be topically relevant to you in order to help with SEO and avoid penalties.

If your customers and users are not the reader base of the website or publication, the link and coverage will appear unnatural and you’ll eventually get penalized or a devaluation.

Press Releases

Press release backlinks and syndication backlinks work against you, not for you. But that doesn’t mean they cannot help with link acquisition. For this strategy to work, provide enough data to gauge interest.

Share some of the data points from the study as a teaser and give a way for editors, journalists, and industry professionals to reach out to you.

Don’t charge for the study. But ask them to source and cite the data on your website, or reference your company as the source of the information.

But keep in mind that if your talking points are the same as your competitors, and you have the same type of data, there’s no reason to add another citation or to cover you.

What can you discover and share that hasn’t been covered and will enhance the publication’s articles in a new way? Put yourself in the reader’s shoes and think about what is missing or what questions were not answered.

If comments are enabled on the publications, look for questions and build a resource backed by data that answers them.

You can then reach out to the editors and make a strong case to either add you or create a new post about the new topic since the previous one did well.

Bonus tip: Even if you don’t get a backlink, being cited can go a long way, as you may be able to use the company’s logo in your PR bar as a trust builder. You can also reach out to the PR or brand team and ask for the link using the citation strategy mentioned above.

Blog And Forum Commenting

This does not work. Search engines know that anyone can go and spam these, use a bot, or pay someone to do this.

They will work against you, not for you. Just don’t. Let the communities and site owners link to you naturally.

If your customers are on the blog or in the community, join the community and participate. Use it to acquire an audience and build trust for your brand.

Not for backlinks. The backlinks and community mentions will eventually happen. And this is how they can become natural.

Social Media Profile Links

This does not work because anyone can create an account and get the link.

Links for SEO must be earned. Social media is about building an audience and bringing them to your website.

The backlinks are useless for SEO, with one exception. Some search engines crawl and index accounts.

If you struggle to get crawled, an active social media account that gets crawled and indexed fast may be able to encourage spiders to find your website and pages more easily.

Focus On Being Worth Linking To

There’s no shortage of ways to get backlinks, but not all links are good. If the link can be purchased or acquired by anyone, like a directory, it won’t help you with SEO.

If your customers are not on that website, and the majority of the website isn’t topically relevant to you, chances are the backlink will work against you.

Healthy link profiles have a mix of good and bad, natural and unnatural. If your company hasn’t done or shared anything link-worthy, there are no backlinks that can bring you long-term success.

Focus on being worth linking to, and the backlinks will come naturally.

More resources: 

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal

In a recent discussion on Reddit’s r/SEO forum, Google’s Search Advocate, John Mueller, cautioned against relying too heavily on third-party SEO metrics.

His comments came in response to a person’s concerns about dramatic changes in tool measurements and their perceived impact on search performance.

The conversation was sparked by a website owner who reported the following series of events:

1. A 50% drop in their website’s Domain Authority (DA) score.
2. A surge in spam backlinks, with 75% of all their website’s links acquired in the current year.
3. An increase in spam comments, averaging 30 per day on a site receiving about 150 daily visits.
4. A discrepancy between backlink data shown in different SEO tools.

The owner, who claimed never to have purchased links, is concerned about the impact of these spammy links on their site’s performance.

Mueller’s Perspective On Third-Party Metrics

Mueller addressed these concerns by highlighting the limitations of third-party SEO tools and their metrics.

He stated:

“Many SEO tools have their own metrics that are tempting to optimize for (because you see a number), but ultimately, there’s no shortcut.”

He cautioned against implementing quick fixes based on these metrics, describing many of these tactics as “smoke & mirrors.”

Mueller highlighted a crucial point: the metrics provided by SEO tools don’t directly correlate with how search engines evaluate websites.

He noted that actions like using disavow files don’t affect metrics from SEO tools, as these companies don’t have access to Google data.

This highlights the need to understand the sources and limitations of SEO tool data. Their metrics aren’t direct indicators of search engine rankings.

What To Focus On? Value, Not Numbers

Mueller suggested a holistic SEO approach, prioritizing unique value over specific metrics like Domain Authority or spam scores.

He advised:

“If you want to think about the long term, finding ways to add real value that’s unique and wanted by people on the web (together with all the usual SEO best practices as a foundation) is a good target.”

However, Mueller acknowledged that creating unique content isn’t easy, adding:

“Unique doesn’t mean a unique combination of words, but really something that nobody else is providing, and ideally, that others can’t easily provide themselves.

It’s hard, it takes a lot of work, and it can take a lot of time. If it were fast & easy, others would be – and probably are already – doing it and have more practice at it.”

Mueller’s insights encourage us to focus on what really matters: strategies that put users first.

This helps align content with Google’s goals and create lasting benefits.

Key Takeaways

1. While potentially useful, third-party SEO metrics shouldn’t be the primary focus of optimization efforts.
2. Dramatic changes in these metrics don’t reflect changes in how search engines view your site.
3. Focus on creating unique content rather than chasing tool-based metrics.
4. Understand the limitations and sources of SEO tool data

Featured Image: JHVEPhoto/Shutterstock