Securing backlinks from publishers has become an increasingly important part of the PR function, but picking up those all-important links is increasingly difficult to do.
Publishers are more aware than ever of how the content they put up affects their own DA. With search providing a wealth of evergreen traffic to their site we are now at a point where most hacks wont link back to a brand’s site unless they absolutely have to.
So how do we make a compelling case for them to change their mind?
At 72Point, we use a traffic light system. Stories that fall into the red light category are unlikely to get many links at all, certainly from high domain authority publishers, while those with an amber rating might pick up a handful of referrals from across the board.
But projects that hit green light criteria generally clean up with high-DA links from a range of publications, as well as a high percentage of follow links vs no-follow links.
Here’s how the classification breaks down:
RED – Link to my dot com
We give a red light to stories where the link is simply inserted as the brand citation, or within the copy as a dot com without leading to any supplementary information. These are the easiest links for publishers to remove because there is nothing compelling them to include them. It comes across as salesy, spammy and low-quality; everything most digital journalists are looking to avoid.
AMBER – Link to further information
A step up from this is using additional information, multimedia or resources to add value to the story. We give an amber light to stories where the link gives publisher’s a reason to link through and also demonstrates a natural, symbiotic relationship between the link target and the published piece of content. This may be an interactive quiz which relates to the story, a piece of multimedia content or running survey results in full so readers can delve deeper into your research.
GREEN – Making the link target the story
We give a green light to stories where the link target is the story. Digital publications are increasingly interested in writing about things that happen online, so creating an asset that is both newsworthy and sits on the client’s site is an SEO win for us.
An example of this is a campaign we recently ran for online retailer Lyst. They wanted to optimise their site in search around the keyword “sneaker”, so we developed a “sneaker intelligence unit” campaign and invited sneaker fanatics to apply for their dream job by completing an MI5-esque quiz hosted on their site. The resultant press coverage from the campaign led to 143 pieces of coverage, 82 of which linked back to Lyst.
The key to the success was that publishers had to run the link for the story to make sense, which gave a significant boost to the SEO performance of the project.
For more info on our SEO services, visit this page: https://www.72point.com/pr-services/digital-outreach-seo/
Get in touch today to see how we can help with your SEO projects.
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