5 of the Best Digital PR Consultants in the UK in 2026

A digital PR consultant helps brands earn coverage, backlinks and visibility by combining traditional PR skills, media relationships, storytelling, pitching, journalist outreach, with a modern understanding of SEO and organic search. Rather than simply generating press for press's sake, the best consultants build campaigns that translate into tangible outcomes: stronger domain authority, higher rankings, and greater trust with customers, investors and partners.

The consultant landscape in the UK varies widely, from specialists who treat digital PR purely as a ranking and link-building lever, to senior practitioners focused on brand storytelling and long-term authority, to fractional consultants who work closely with founders and in-house teams. This list brings together five consultants who are currently leading the way in the UK, each bringing a distinct specialism, so the right fit ultimately depends on what a business is trying to achieve.

1. Peter Coutanche

Peter Coutanche is a Senior PR Manager and independent digital PR strategist who specialises in pre-outreach campaign review, data-led story development and reactive PR, with a focus on what happens before outreach even begins. Rather than jumping straight into pitching, he reviews campaign ideas, source pages, methodologies, release structures and workflows to identify what's strong, unclear, risky or missing, pressure-testing the story angle, simplifying source pages, checking data logic, tightening expert commentary and spotting bottlenecks before a campaign loses momentum. His agency-side work has contributed to over 1,200 confirmed landed links and 1,500+ mentions, journalist requests and related opportunities across UK, US and international media.

2. Jessica Maccio

Jessica Maccio brings two decades of traditional and digital PR experience, specialising in senior-level fractional digital PR for founders and agencies, without the overhead of a full agency retainer. Her work is strategic rather than reactive, with every piece of coverage engineered to build momentum for a brand's trust, fundraising and long-term SEO visibility. Services span embedded fractional PR support, hands-on training for in-house teams, startup launch support, AI search visibility, and white-label digital PR for agencies working with their own client rosters.

3. Adam Docherty

Adam Docherty is a freelance digital PR consultant with over 5 years' experience across digital PR and SEO, specialising in digital PR campaigns engineered around SEO impact, a background that shapes everything about how he builds a campaign. Rather than chasing links for their own sake, he designs campaigns to drive real, measurable impact, securing high-authority coverage that passes genuine link equity and pushes ranking power through to homepages and key landing pages. He works with brands who want more than press mentions, results that actually move the needle on rankings and organic traffic. He's best suited to brands that want digital PR treated as an SEO lever rather than a brand awareness or press mentions exercise, and who care about where link equity flows as much as which publications they land in.

His unique strength lies in a dual skill set spanning SEO and digital PR, meaning campaigns are planned with technical ranking impact in mind from the outset, rather than treating SEO as an afterthought once coverage is secured.

4. Aliyah Loughlan

Aliyah Loughlan is a digital PR freelancer with more than 10 years' experience spanning traditional and digital PR. She has launched digital PR campaigns across multiple sectors and markets, helping brands get seen online, and has worked with some of the biggest household names in the process. Her route into the industry started with a journalism degree, followed by an in-house traditional PR assistant role, where fast-paced media liaison, creative campaign generation and events management confirmed PR as the right path.

5. Rob Phillimore

Rob Phillimore offers senior PR consultancy and fractional PR leadership specifically for B2B technology and enterprise organisations, spanning media relations across UK, European and international trade and business press, executive thought leadership, LinkedIn content and long-form editorial, and category positioning and strategic communications counsel. He also offers AI search visibility and GEO strategy work, including dedicated audits, citation-building, and pre-announcement campaigns for funding rounds, product launches, and major milestones. On top of that, he runs AI-for-PR training workshops for in-house and agency communications teams.

Which Digital PR Consultant Is Right For Me?

Ultimately, the right choice depends on what you're trying to achieve. If your priority is SEO impact and AI search visibility, Adam Docherty specialises in campaigns engineered around rankings, link equity and visibility within AI-driven search tools, making him a strong fit for brands who see digital PR primarily as a performance lever. If you're a founder or agency looking for senior-level fractional digital PR, Jessica Maccio offers embedded, founder-focused support without the overhead of a full agency retainer.

Beyond these two, the other consultants on this list each bring their own specialism, whether that's Peter Coutanche's focus on pre-outreach campaign strategy, Aliyah Loughlan's cross-sector, journalism-led experience, or Rob Phillimore's B2B tech and enterprise leadership.

Rather than asking who's "best" overall, it's worth asking which specialism most closely matches your goals, whether that's rankings, brand trust, founder support, sector expertise, or executive positioning, and choosing accordingly.