Coverage outranks almost anything you can build yourself
You can write a hundred pages about yourself and they will not carry the weight of one article in a publication people have heard of. That is the reason PR belongs in reputation work: earned coverage on an established news site is one of the few assets that reliably outranks a complaint page, an old article or a review site for your name.
It is also the slowest thing we do, and the least controllable. A journalist decides whether to write about you and what to say. Anyone selling guaranteed placements is selling advertising with the word PR attached, and search engines are increasingly good at telling the difference.
PR and reputation management are not the same thing
The distinction gets blurred constantly, usually by agencies who do one and sell the other.
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PR is about attention
Getting people to write about you, shaping what they say, building relationships with journalists and being useful to them.
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Reputation management is about search
Controlling what appears when somebody looks you up. Removal, suppression, reviews and monitoring, most of which PR does not touch.
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They overlap in one place
Coverage ranks. A well-placed article is both a PR outcome and a reputation asset, which is why the two are worth running together rather than separately.
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PR alone will not fix search results
A firm that only pitches stories cannot remove a mugshot, challenge a review or de-index a page, and will not tell you that in the first meeting.
Be careful what you buy
Worth having
- Genuine coverage in publications with real readers
- Expert commentary where you actually have expertise
- Trade and industry press in your field
- Local coverage of real activity
- Interviews and podcasts
- Awards you legitimately won
Not worth buying
- Guaranteed placements on syndication networks
- Press releases pushed to sites nobody reads
- Paid articles not labeled as paid
- Coverage on sites that exist to sell coverage
- Anything promising a specific outlet for a fee
The paid-placement networks are the trap. The articles look real, they are cheap, and they rank for a while before the network gets devalued and takes your results down with it.
You need something to say
The uncomfortable part of PR is that it requires substance. A journalist covers a business because something happened: a launch, a hire, research, a genuinely useful opinion on something in the news. “We would like some coverage” is not a story and no amount of pitching turns it into one.
For most clients the first job is working out what is actually interesting about them, and often there is more than they think. Businesses are usually poor judges of which parts of their own work an outsider would find worth writing about.
What it costs
Monthly retainer, because relationships and pitching are continuous rather than one-off. Timelines are long: a placement can take weeks from pitch to publication, and building the relationships that make placements likelier takes longer.
If you need results in search this quarter, PR is the wrong lever and we will tell you that. Suppression and removal work faster.
How it runs
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We find what is actually newsworthy
Usually by asking about the work rather than the marketing. The story is rarely the one a business expects.
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We identify the right outlets
Trade press in your field beats a general publication nobody in your industry reads, both for credibility and for ranking.
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We pitch properly
Specific journalists, relevant to what they cover, with something they can actually use.
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We prepare you
Being interviewed badly is worse than not being interviewed. Preparation is part of the service.
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We make the coverage work in search
An article nobody links to and nobody sees does little for you. Coverage should be promoted once it exists.
Choosing a PR firm
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They do not guarantee placements
Nobody controls editorial. A guarantee means it is paid, and paid placements behave differently in search.
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They ask what you actually do
A firm that pitches without understanding your work will produce coverage that reads like it.
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They know the search side
Coverage that is a reputation asset is chosen differently from coverage that is purely publicity.
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They tell you when PR is not the answer
If your problem is a review or a record, pitching stories will not fix it.
The realistic outcome
Over months, a body of genuine coverage that occupies the first page for your name, is credible to anyone checking you out, and is far harder to displace than anything you publish about yourself. It is slow, and it is the most durable asset in this entire service list.