However, if you want to reach the absolute top – we’re talking Wall Street Journal, BBC, Washington Post, etc. – and have a piece that’s able to create the most buzz or real waves online, regardless of how big or small the campaign is, it is absolutely vital that the methodology you’ve used to research and present your campaign is as solid as a rock.

Throughout my career, I’ve been fortunate to create a variety of campaigns that were picked-up by these top tier publications, and one of the things they always have in common is a great idea executed in a way that a good journalist would be proud of. In fact, one of the ways we consider our Digital PR work at Root Digital is akin to investigative journalism.

Half of the battle is having a killer idea at the right time, but how you actually execute it cannot be overlooked and can absolutely make or break the campaign.

A great idea gets your foot in the door. The execution is what lands you the link.

To build your campaign and leave a journalist in no doubt that your headline is a true reflection of the topic or the best take on a subject, you’ve got to show your workings out and use sound logic. Without it, you can lose a journalist’s confidence real quick, and time is a hot commodity you can’t afford to lose.

Two types of methodologies

At its core, a methodology is the structure you have in place for why anyone should believe you. How did you find out the answer you’re giving people or what is it that makes you qualified to comment?

This can be a methodology you openly feature on your campaign landing page but it can also be (to the same effect) the background knowledge and trust the company or spokesperson has that you are attempting to get featured. Essentially, both are achieving the same end result – trust.

Background methodology

Your background or the background of the person/company you’re working with is an asset. If used correctly, it can create the sense of trust we really need when discussing topics with journalists as it’s the very thing they’ll use (and should use) to determine how much value your words have to offer.

From time to time there are other factors at play (journalists may reference someone because of their following or brand association) but in 99% of cases, it’s not only what you have to say but who has to say it that is the determining factor. Getting this across is a key part of the job for someone using reactive PR tactics in particular.

When pitching comments to journalists or any tactic where an expert is involved in what you’re doing, you can build on this background methodology with a strong company or author bio. It’s the opportunity to scream what you/they have done, their qualifications, what their title is, key relevant achievements, where they’ve been featured before, etc.

Here’s what a really good one looks like:

As a Digital PR, part of your job is to not only construct and tailor a bio to suit the topic you’re discussing but to also find the people worth mentioning within your organisation. Who do you have that you can work with? What sort of topics would they best lend comments to and be acknowledged as an expert on? Do you have an image you can use and know where their social profiles are? Do their social profiles currently scream their achievements if a journalist were to check them out?

Featured methodology

A featured methodology is no different. It’s the trust signal you display to build up the confidence in the hook or takeaway that you have to offer from your research.

This is the more traditional view of a methodology and it typically includes everything from the sources you’ve used to find your data, what the breakdown of the target audience was like if you did your own survey, how you configured your weighting system and who (and their expertise) was involved in making that decision, etc. More on that in the next section.

When presenting an in-depth piece of research or even just a quick snapshot headline from a survey, having your methodology front and centre is a must, and in some cases – when you have a real value adding methodology – is critical.

Here’s an example for a piece called The Science of Scare. I don’t know who’s behind it (agency or in-house team) and I/Root are in no way affiliated with whoever did it but the screenshot below is the very first part of the graphic you see.

Notice how it doesn’t dive straight into a visualised data-point, or a hero image, like nearly all campaigns do. Instead, they’ve chosen to use a quite lengthy section of copy. For a Digital PR campaign, that’s a bold move when we’re contending with short attention spans, but once you read it or start looking at the piece itself, the reason why makes a lot of sense.

The methodology here is the most important part. The list that follows could have been anything – it doesn’t matter what film is number 1 or even if you agree with it.

The fact they’ve used heart rate monitors across a decent sample size in a controlled format gives anyone reading it confidence in the experiment, and the methodology itself provides a unique value because it’s not something a journalist is able to easily do themselves, or I’m guessing, anyone else has ever done (and at least published the findings from).

580+ linking root domains for that one. Of course it does.

What makes a strong methodology?

So what are some of the things you can consider that can help make your methodology one worth putting front and centre, and that top tier journalists are going to find hard to ignore?

As you can imagine, it varies based on the type of content you’re producing. If you’re working out which city is the best for a wellness weekend, that’s going to be different to how you work out which TV streaming service is offering the best bang for your buck. (Confession, both of those are ours but illustrate the point well).

However, here’s a great starting point to consider across a wide range of possible campaign formats, experiments and intended outcomes that journalists are going to be asking themselves:

• Were all factors considered?
• Does bias exist?
• Were credible sources used?
• What credibility does the company/person have?
• How is the weighting system configured?
• Who was part of creating the methodology and what are their expertise in this area?

The methodology is something you do at the beginning – not at the end

When we’re looking at a traditional creative campaign (like surveys or a piece of data analysis) as opposed to utilising expertise, there are some key questions to ask at the point you’re doing your ideation:

• Is this even possible?
• Can I add value to the topic through the methodology?
• Are we the correct company to talk about this topic?

Is it possible?

Firstly, we want to know if the idea is something you can execute, and this might be due to budget/time restraints or it could be the data just doesn’t exist.

However, there are a few things we can do to guide feasibility:

• Consider the most critical data-points you’d need to power your methodology
• Search the topic and see if anyone (especially governmental sources) have supplied the data previously
• Do you have or can you get access to the best target audience for your own proprietary research on THIS particular topic (aiming for unbiased and balanced)
• Is the data accessible?
• What sorts of sources currently exist? Are they reputable or questionable blogs or studies?

From here, you can start to get a picture about the hurdles you could be jumping through once you really get going.

Adding value

Now is the time to be looking at the concept you have and deciding if your methodology is unique and/or more respectable than anything that already exists that you’re competing with.

Like the Science of Scare example above or the Life of Tax example below, your methodology can be everything in determining why journalists will decide to feature your insight or not. Obviously, you still need a good idea, but your methodology can be the reason they feature your piece or decide to revisit the topic again if you’ve demonstrated an undeniable and interesting talking point(s) beyond anything else in the same area.

Whatever direction it is you’re taking and whatever the concept is, you need to make sure your methodology is going to marry up. There’s no point discussing how dementia can impact the brain if you don’t have the expertise to back those claims up or if you can’t find the sources that make the claims viable.

Your methodology is like a skeleton – it holds the whole thing together

Constructing the basis of your methodology before you start allows you to consider what else is already out there and importantly how you might be able to add real value to the topic.

Correct company/person

This part of the equation is a little self-explanatory but the answer isn’t always that clear.

Most people will know not to do a ‘best budget foods around the world’ concept for a luxury travel brand, but there’s often a grey area that can become a little questionable.

The way you can help decide isn’t actually based on the journalists or external perceptions but by looking more inward. If you were to do this campaign and get coverage, would the topical relevance help your organic ranking potential, or to put another way, is the coverage you’d get in any way synonymous with the goods or service you provide?

Admittedly, my core focus with Digital PR has always been the organic impact of our work. SEO is the career path I set upon before honing more directly on the creative side of this industry and therefore, I’m always keeping tabs on the bottom-line.

However, others may consider slightly different outcomes such as brand awareness, brand sentiment, or their own traditional PR values and metrics. For the most part, this all still plays a role in the organic outcomes because of the way search engines are connecting the dots and are actually looking for the same signal we’re trying to offer journalists through our campaigns – trust.

Source: https://rootdigital.co.uk/guide-to-digital-pr/role-of-digital-pr-in-seo/

For anyone interesting, I’ve written extensively about the role of Digital PR in SEO in my Guide to Digital PR.

Here’s a great example

A lot of the concepts we come up with for clients are focused on how we add value to something topical for them. The more interesting the question, the further we look to find a workable solution.

In this case, and working for a personal finance brand in the US, we posed the question ‘how much tax will people pay in their lifetime?’. It’s a scary thought and one that affects all of us, whilst being a question people had only really ball-parked numbers towards in the past. Therefore, we knew there was an opportunity to add value through a robust methodology.

As you can imagine, for any journalist worth their salt, our methodology for uncovering this answer (answers actually) had to be as in-depth as possible, providing an irrefutable process for obtaining our figure. Otherwise, we risk the whole project falling short of the links we aim for.

Importantly, we researched and knew the core data we needed was going to be there, there was no solid answer out in the wild and our reputable client was perfectly placed to discuss the topic. This ticked the boxes for our ideal kick-off.

Creating the methodology

Let’s look at the initial list of questions we had to consider in tackling this question:

• What do people pay taxes on?
• Are these things that affect the majority of people or just some?
• Is it possible to get all the data-points we might need or will some be missing?
• Do we have to take into account inflation across a lifetime?
• How drastically would this vary by state?

Going through this process is all part of making sure what we do is going to make sense. Are we going to end up with a piece that’s got a huge list of disclaimers and caveats, or are we genuinely going to be able to provide an answer?

Journalists at top tier publications aren’t concerned with ball-park estimates or incomplete stories. So working out your feasibility, where the hiccups may be and how complete your methodology can be is vital.

Once we had that, and we were happy, we had to start creating our formula. Just what is the total amount of tax someone will pay?

To do that, we worked out we needed the following data-points:

• Average earnings
• How long someone will work in their lifetime
• State taxes on income
• Federal taxes on income
• How much people spend
• How tax varies per state and what they tax
• How many years of their lives will they be spending these amounts
• The average cost of property
• State property taxes
• How many years does someone typically own a property
• Car sales taxes per state
• The value of the average car
• How many cars will people own in a lifetime

We thought about and collected data on every area of most people’s lives where tax is paid. This includes income, homes, car ownership and even where we spend our money and on what. And the sources we used? Mostly The Bureau of Labor Statistics. For some more arbitrary figures, like the details we needed on car ownership, we could be a little less official, but still use reputable domains like Doughroller.net.

The worrying answer is that, for the average American, they will spend $525,037 in tax throughout their life. That’s just shy of 35% of all the money someone will ever earn. And if you’re fortunate enough to live in New Jersey, that number rises to $931,698, or 49.5% of your lifetime earnings.

That answer, and a core part of our pitch, is now rolled up and packaged together using credible sources, a logical formula, presented by a respected personal finance brand, and uses a more robust set of data-points than any other has out there.

Bottom Line

A methodology can be as important a part of your digital PR tactics as the idea itself. It’s a hot topic within the digital PR community and one I wanted to write about because it’s important not only for the work and outcomes we all strive for but also the trust and integrity the profession has.

Like Jasmine Granton mentioned in her BrightonSEO talk – the responsibility is largely on us as an industry to make sure not only our personal and company reputations remain intact, but also the industry as a whole. We don’t want things heading in the same direction that ‘link building’ did in the past (I’m sure I’m not the only one who spends a regrettable amount of time per day just blocking guest post reseller pitches). Having sound methodologies is one of the ways to do that.

If you can, try to treat a methodology like you are producing a dissertation at Uni. Back everything up and explore the topic in more depth than anyone else has whilst trying to find something unique that adds value to a conversation.

Best of luck with it and please do leave comments or get in touch with me on LinkedIn or Twitter (mostly LinkedIn tbh) if you’ve got any questions!

The post Why Your Methodology Can Make or Break Your Digital PR Campaign appeared first on BuzzStream.

Newsjacking is adding value to an existing popular conversation online.

The process behind that is what I’ll expand on here, along with how to make sure the tactic adds bottom-line value to your activities and isn’t just a vanity play.

Being an SEO first and foremost myself, the impact of what I do is always judged on the impact it had on organic traffic, and more importantly, revenue. To have such an impact, there needs to be the key connection that is capable of not only resulting in links and brand placements but the ability to improve rankings for valuable queries.

Links are what most of us will be targeted with and judged on, but in isolation, this is a vanity metric. Instead, links are a means to an end and that end is increased revenue (mostly) through organic traffic. To do that, we want to improve ranking performance for relevant keywords – and that’s the key here. 

Successful newsjacking or any link building activity, if just measured on links could see the brand becoming relevant for queries that are of no value. For example. gaining coverage for an analysis of Strictly Come Dancing might be all well and good, but this won’t help your relevant ranking performance targeting ‘cheap holidays’. There has to be a connection between the core theme of your campaigns and the news you’re targeting in order to lead to increased revenue/traffic for the keywords relevant to you.

Newsjacking is a method of PR activity that’s been around for some time and one many people use extremely successfully. The results are usually communicated by a slide or image showcasing the various logos a campaign received coverage on. It’s impactful and something I do too! However, what I’d love to see and so would anyone deciding if it’s a tactic they should invest time into is ‘what happened?’ Recognisable logos are a great hook to demonstrate the power of a digital PR tactic, but you need the results to back it up.

So here I’m going to share how I’ve thought about newsjacking with a case study example to help communicate the story in full.

Know the news

The starting point with any newsjacking opportunity is to know what’s going on in the news. In my experience, you don’t have to get too niche specific with this as any news worth jacking is going to have a ‘general audiences’ element to it, so even someone following mainstream publications will (mostly) still come across news that is relevant. 

The biggest differences and where to train yourself is in looking for what’s missing and the value you can add to the conversation. 

Reddit is my platform of choice. It’s where I see most of the media I consume (dangerous, I know), and it’s where I saw the news of the Sonic the Hedgehog trailer release. I’d seen the backlash from the original trailer and this was now trending news, with publications like the BBC writing about it.

However, this time my thinking was different as we’d recently started work with a video production agency. Although big budget Hollywood style films isn’t their usual area, I knew input from them would carry weight and could offer the hundreds of publications already writing about the new trailer something to work with.

Understand links

Additionally, and critically, this was industry relevant news. It was being covered by film and video focused media or authors who often spoke about such topics, all mostly relevant to my client. Links here carry relevance, which is a key part of any link building strategy and reason why they are going to have an impact on your ability to improve meaningful rankings for any domain. 

As I’ve discussed in a post before on link anatomy, any successful link building activity should focus on the following:

• Domain relevance
• Semantic relevance
• High authority source
• Prominent placement
• Provides real value to users/readers
• On a page with no or few other outbound links

Newsjacking like this ticks all of those boxes and when done correctly, will have an impact on your ability to drive valuable organic traffic. Your value add to the news is attempting to provide follow up articles, where your news is a key part of the coverage, with a strong body copy mention/link, on high authority domains discussing semantically relevant topics.

Separately to what I’d discussed above, it also places you as the authority. This is the whole point of links (to find the voices online worth paying attention to) and that’s exactly what newsjacking should accomplish. 

Adding value to the news

The same day I’d seen the news, I’d messaged the company we work with and although it required a little explanation of what I was thinking, I asked them a key question: “how much did this cost the studio?”

Common sense told me that it would cost a bomb for a major film to reanimate their lead character and this angle wasn’t out there yet. It’s also an area my client knows well so played completely into their role as part of this story and their position as an authority.

Knowing where to add value is where your creative juices can flow. This can range from a video you create to help explain a story or as simple as a quote offered by a specialist. The price of something, an argument for why something isn’t correct, an explanation on why something is happening or quickly sourced data for any of the above are all great starting points and can mostly be created in days.

Impacting rankings

As I said at the start, any link building activity *should* impact organic performance. Therefore, if you’ve spotted the right opportunity that is both relevant and has a large journalistic pool to target, then used your creativity to add value to the story, some solid but fairly straight-forward outreach should result in some links and placements, but we want results. Here’s what we saw via Search Console:

The power of link building and digital PR has never been clearer. Eagle-eyed readers might have seen the date on the BBC article above and the dates in the GSC performance data, but we ran the campaign within 3 days of the news breaking and almost instantly, links were impacting search performance.

Critically, this uplift wasn’t coming from traffic related to ‘sonic trailer’ or the like, instead, this had filtered through to the keyword targeting we’d strategized for. This included keywords like ‘video production’, ‘corporate video’ etc. Being a high profile Hollywood production and discussing the ‘production’ of that movie naturally leads to semantic relevance and features on publications with a like-minded audience or peer group. 

To demonstrate the impact, here’s a quick snapshot of where this client was getting traffic before our involvement (bottom graph) and where their recent traffic was coming from (top graph): 

This is the result of utilising a technical understanding of link building and newsjacking. 

If you’re aiming for brand awareness or AVE, you can open up the amount of news you can jack, but if you’re looking to impact organic performance, it’s imperative you hone in on relevancy and provide value that places you as the authority.

The post Newsjacking – An SEOs approach to improving rankings appeared first on BuzzStream.

Before I begin here I want to say that every domain should always have a thorough technical audit conducted before any link building happens. There’s absolutely no point building high quality links if your domain is leaking value like a sieve. Once your domain is optimised for crawl accessibility and efficiency, you give links the maximum chance of impacting your domain and giving you the best return for your efforts.

With that said, we all know that every domain need links to a degree, but in this post I want to outline a process that enables you to benchmark your link profile against your competitors in each SERP, so you can work out if link building will lead to the best returns for your money. Before investing heavily in creative campaigns or contentless link building tactics, you’ll want to know if an increase in organic revenue is likely or if the changes needed are closer to home (i.e. technical issues or content improvement).

So, we begin with a piece of keyword research. The same that most of you will have done dozens of times. I won’t go into detail on how to do keyword research, but by exporting from a collection of resources like Search Analytics, Answerthepublic, Keywordtool.io, Keyword Planner, SEMrush, etc. you’ll need to end up with a keyword list that closely fits in with your target audience. I typically spend half a day reviewing the keywords at this point to make sure I remove any branded competitors and queries that aren’t relevant for me. Using whichever search volume tool you like (Keyword Planner or SEMrush typically) you’ll want the volumes associated to each keyword, to end up with the below:

From here, our goal is to find out if your domain ranks for each keyword and how your ranking URL benchmarks against the best ranking pages. My favourite tool to do this is AWR Cloud, with the setup to run manually. The reason being that this tool tells you the ranking position and ranking URL, along with all of the top 50 ranking URLs for each keyword (make sure you get a Top Sites report). So now, not only do I know if and where I rank for each keyword, I know who ranks in all the other positions so I can benchmark my URLs against theirs.

However, before we start benchmarking, we want to know where we rank and what the size of the opportunity is with each keyword. In this case, we’re going to kindly borrow the latest unbranded CTR’s from AWR’s monthly study. This will tell us what the expected CTR is in each position between 1 and 20, so we can estimate how much traffic each keyword is giving us currently and how much more that would be if we reach the top of the SERPs. Like so:

Note: We can’t use Search Analytics data for this. Although it does a decent job of telling us our ‘clicks’ in the current position, we then couldn’t benchmark it against the change, so we use a constant value, like AWR’s, instead.

If you’ve got GA setup and configured for goals and goal values, you can also take the above one step further. By overlaying your ranking URLs conversion rate and goal value, you can also multiply that by your expected traffic now vs expected traffic if you hit P1, to work out how valuable each keyword will be for you based on the revenue increase. Unfortunately, I’ve seen numerous GA setups where goal values don’t exist or the client isn’t comfortable using them, but when they do exist, they should absolutely be used for this.

So now we know which keywords are potentially the most profitable for you, either through pure traffic increase or based on your actual goal values (much preferred). Now, we want to know what’s the most realistic keywords to go after and what you have to do to get there.

To do this part, I would recommend using Majestic data because it’s isolated by link quality (TrustFlow) and link quantity (CitationFlow), in simple terms. You can use whichever metric you feel works best for you, but as we want to isolate links, I feel Majestic’s data is the only one capable of doing so because of how the metric is calculated. DA is probably the most popular people use, and a lot of clients do speak in ‘DA’, but as the metric is worked out using a combination of on page and off page signals, we can’t isolate with it, leaving us with more questions at the other end. It is a useful metric, but not here. If you want to read more about how these metrics are calculated, you can check out this comparison on the BuzzStream blog.

We want Majestic data on a page level, and to do that easily, I use URL Profiler.

By putting all my ranking URLs in, as well as the top ranking URLs from my SERP data (positions 1 – 3), I can then benchmark how much TrustFlow my ranking URL has, and how that then measures up against the average of the top 3.

This bit requires a lot of Excel legwork, and unfortunately the width of the screenshot I want to show you would enrage even the most laidback mobile user reading this. However, what we’re trying to do is keep the keyword as the constant, that’s our A column. Then, we want each ranking URL (our URL (if any), P1, P2 and P3) on the same row, along with each ranking URLs Majestic metrics from our URL Profiler export.

Then, on each row, we average the TF and CF of the URLs in the top 3 positions using an AVERAGE formula (even if we rank there), and use that average to take away our ranking URLs TF or CF – this is our variance.

If the variance is positive, primarily TrustFlow is the one we’ll want to focus on, we know we have more than enough link equity to be competitive at the top of the SERPs with that URL. Therefore, you don’t need links.

However, if the value is negative, it indicates that a strong potential reason (but not the only) why you don’t rank is that you don’t have the right quality of links, so therefore, you do need to do link building.

With all of the URLs ran through this approach, you can start to see which keywords present the biggest financial opportunities for you, and whether or not your URL (if any) already has the links to be competitive.

If your TrustFlow variance is greater than -10 (e.g. your ranking URL has a TF of 10 and the top 3 on average have a TF of 21 or above), this isn’t a keyword to consider in the short term because the amount of link building or internal funnelling required would need a considerable investment. But anything with an achievable variance (below -10) is one you should focus on.

I really hope that’s useful for anyone who is doing link building and not really seeing the right return, or looking to start investing without really questioning if it’s right for you.

Any questions or feedback at all, please do let me know!

The post Do You Need To Build Links? Here’s A Framework To Find Out. appeared first on BuzzStream.