Category: Thoughts

The Legacy Guide to Link Building

Posted on by Andrea Piackova

It’s often touted that Google’s search algorithm uses more than 200 factors to determine rankings. 

But how does Google determine which website to rank on page one? For us it can be simplified to two important factors. On-page and off-page. If you get the on-page right, then build quality links to the page, it will rank. 

In fact, a recent study of over 1 billion pages by Ahrefs found that pages with more links rank higher.

Link building is a different skillset in SEO though. And an awkward truth is that many SEOs don’t like to build links. In fact many of them straight up hate it and will do whatever they can to avoid building links.

That’s why many SEO agencies don’t include link building in their retainers as standard. They either don’t want to or don’t know how to build links. 

Especially the high quality links you need to outrank your competition.

This can be your advantage, if you can build more high quality links than your competitor. You’ll be able to outrank them.

In our guide to link building we’re going to teach you how to build high quality links that your competitors can’t.

You’ll learn:

 

Link building is the process of getting other websites to link to a page on your website with the goal of increasing your rankings and website traffic. 

Generally speaking, the more high quality links your website has, the higher your website will rank. 

The easiest way to understand the impact of a link, is that search engines see each link from another website as a vote that your content is valuable and relevant. 

The relevance of a link is based on the content of the linking page/site. 

That’s why it’s important to search for sites that talk about the same subject, or that is in the same niche as your site. 

Here’s a simple example, if your website was about landscape gardening, a link from another website/webpage that talks about landscape gardening is a highly relevant link.

 

So what are the three main types of link building strategies? Loosely speaking, there are three types:

1. Submission type links: Submission links are links you can get by submitting your website to another website. This can be done by adding your website to social media profiles, directories or leaving meaningful comments on blogs or forums such as Reddit and Quora. 

Because these links tend to be easier to get, these are considered low quality links and in most cases they won’t significantly move the needle.

2. Buying links: This is the elephant in the room. It is 100% against Google’s guidelines and it can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results. However, that’s not to say it doesn’t work. Many SEO’s have had a ton of success by buying links. Private Blog Networks are one of the most popular ways to buy links. 

Sites like Fiverr, Legit, the Warrior Forum and Reddit are popular places to buy links. Buying links is a black hat strategy though and isn’t a strategy we use or one that we implement for our clients because we prefer to use “White-hat strategies”

3. Earning links: The number one way to earn links is to create an amazing piece of content known as a “link magnet” or a “linkable asset”, then reaching out to website owners and authors in relevant niches and asking them to link to it. 

This is the best strategy to build links in my opinion and this link building guide will show you a number of tactics you can use to build these links.

 

Not all links are created equal! Some will help propel your pages to the top of Google, while others can hurt your site. 

What makes a high-quality backlink? 

There are two main categories to look out for.

 

The Relevance Of The Link 

Ideally, you want to get backlinks from relevant websites and pages. 

Let’s imagine you have created a piece of content on the ‘best kitchen cabinet paint colours’ (Like this one, from Improovy). Getting a link from a page on the topic of interior design would be much more relevant than a link from a page about fitness tips. 

Ideally, you want to get links that are relevant to the story you’re writing.

There are a number of different factors in the strength of a link:

  •       Destination URL: This is the URL address of the page the person will reach when the link is clicked
  •       Anchor Text: This is the clickable word/phrase/image attached to the link. It’s often blue and underlined.
  •     Rel Attribute: This defines the relationship between the page a link is on and the page it is pointing to. There are three rel values you should be aware of.

 

Rel Attributes 

  •       No-Follow Link: This tells search engines not to crawl/follow the outbound link. It essentially means that the website linking to you is not “voting” for you. As a result, it will not pass SEO ranking power. 

Many publications now add the nofollow tag to outbound links. Here’s what a nofollow links looks like in the code:

<a href=”https://example.com” rel=”nofollow”>Anchor Text</a>

    You can quickly identify Follow/No Follow links through the NoFollow plugin. 

Once you’ve installed the plugin. If a link is outlined in red, it is a “No Follow” link. 

When you’re analysing a website for Follow/No Follow links just look at the main body of text, don’t look at links on the page like those which link out social media websites or the author biography.

UGC: This stands for User Generated Content, and the UGC value is recommended for comments and forum posts. UGC link can be identified as follows:

<a href=”https://www.example.com/” rel=”ugc”>Anchor Text</a>

  •       Sponsored: This tag identifies links that were paid for. Use the sponsored value to identify links on your site that were created as part of advertisements, sponsorships or other compensation agreements. The sponsored link can be identified as follows:

<a href=”https://www.example.com/” rel=”sponsored”>Anchor Text</a>

 

Google’s original algorithm contained something known as Pagerank. In fact, the reason Google’s algorithm was so much better than their competitors is largely because of page rank.

In the early days, Google even had a tool where they would tell you what your pagerank was. 

But because SEO’s got so good and realized if they could get a higher page rank, they would rank higher, Google no longer makes pagerank public.

It’s not known if Pagerank is still part of the algorithm, however it is strongly believed that it is. 

If Pagerank is no longer part of the algorithm, it is believed that it has been replaced by something newer and more sophisticated, but based on the same principles that Pagerank was built on.

The weight of Pagerank in the algorithm is often referred to as “Authority” when it comes to SEO.

The authority of a website or a web page linking to your own website is a ranking factor. 

If you have more, high quality links from a more authoritative site than your competitors, you will likely outrank them.

Many SEO tools have tried to create their own version of Pagerank to interpret the authority of a page.

Moz uses Domain Authority (DA) for instance, Ahrefs has created Domain- Rating (DR) and Majestic SEO has created Trust Flow.

To check a website’s authority using Majestic SEO’s Trustflow metric, you can download the Majestic plugin. 

Majestic gives us information about the links that are pointing to that given page/website. 

When you’re analyzing any website focus on the following four attributes:

  • URL
  • Root Domain
  • Trust Flow
  • Referring Domains 

URL: This tells us about the specific page we are on. So, in this case, we are on the “Spark Real Estate Marketing” page. The URL is showing us all the links pointing to that page.

 

Root Domain: Analyzes the links that are pointing to the entire website. This adds up all the links, for example, the About Us Page, Blog Page, Contact Us Page etc.

Trust Flow: This is the overall quality of the links pointing to the page/domain. The higher the score the better. Any trust flow over 15/20 it’s considered a high-quality site. 

Referring Domains: This is the total number of links pointing to the page/domain.

 

Linkable Assets

When it comes to link building it might seem that it’s all technical jargon but there’s also a creative aspect that’s required. 

Link building is about value, you need to find out what value you can offer with your content as well as get creative with your email pitch. 

First and foremost create content that is worth linking to. This is what we call a “Linkable asset”. A linkable asset is any piece of content with a high probability of acquiring backlinks. 

So, what are the benefits of creating a linkable asset?

Linkable content can increase your referral traffic as you’re getting links from other authoritative websites in your niche.

Linkable assets will also lead to increased brand exposure, as journalists and industry-leading blogs will cite your content in their articles. 

There are a number of linkable asset formats you can create:

  • Case Studies
  • Original Research/Studies
  • Infographics
  • List Posts
  • Free Tools
  • Research Using Trends and Statistics 

Let’s explore some of these in more detail:

 

1. Infographic 

An infographic is a great way to use visuals to showcase your findings. 

If choose to create an infographic as your linkable asset, pick one topic that appeals to websites in your niche. Brian Dean refers to these people as “Linkreators” – people who run websites in your industry or a related industry. 

Try to brainstorm – What topics are they passionate about? What topics are they arguing against? Let’s imagine your linkeators are running bloggers. And you notice that a good chunk of these linkreators don’t recommend running every day to reach your goals. 

You’d want to make an infographic topic that they agree with, EG something like: “Why too much running is bad for your health”.

Make sure in your infographic you cover 6/10 data points. 

If you feel stuck with your ideas check out visual.ly to find infographics in your space or Google “topic” + “infographic”. 

If you don’t have design skills don’t worry you can hire a graphic designer on websites such as Fiverr. So, don’t sweat the small stuff. 

 

2. Original Research/Studies 

Original studies naturally attract links. Why? They offer unique data and insights on a winning topic. 

In order to get coverage, you need to have something interesting to write about. 

How to choose your topic? Use the Source Magnet Technique (Another Brian Dean creation).

  1. Is this topic trending?
  2. Does this topic lack data?
  3. Is your topic a “Tangential Topic”? (Topic that is related but not directly about your business)

In order to find what’s trending, put your topic into Exploding Topics or Google Trends. 

Remember journalists want something that is blowing up. Once you have chosen your topic, collect and analyze your data. 

If you’re doing a DIY Industry Study you should have a sample of at least 1,000 of whatever it is you’re looking at. Trim your list down to 12/15 data points. Important note: Journalists want to see how you conducted your study. 

When you’re organizing your results, start off with the most compelling finding to grab the reader’s attention. 

If you want to promote your study even further find influential people in your space that cover some of the topics that your study is about. 

Reach out to them and ask them to give their thoughts about one specific topic they’re most interested in. 

This will add credibility to the content. Once it’s published, share your content with those influential people. 

They are more likely to share your content as they contributed their expertise and it will make them look good. 

 

Content frameworks for linkable assets 

There are 7 content frameworks that are ideal to create linkable assets with. 

1.  Trademark Technique: Identify a problem a linkreator and their audience cares about.

Follow these simple steps:

  • Choose a Catchy Headline: The title is the first thing a potential reader sees and getting it right is the single most important thing. 

In your headline use three of the following:

1. A specific result

2. Specific Number (this increases credibility)

3. Specific Timeline (days/weeks are much better than months/years)

                        For example, How to (Achieve a Specific Result) in Only (Timeframe).

  • Identify Obstacles: Pick one obstacle that stands between someone and their solution. Give a brief overview of the obstacle and outline specific results in the Introduction. Share a solution that hasn’t been seen before and combine it with a unique name so it sticks in people’s minds.
  • Branded Solution Elements: The solution needs to be descriptive and must contain a visual element. Combine your branded solution with one of these terms: Approach/Formula/Method/System/Technique.
  • The First Section: Don’t jump into the steps of your branded solution. List out your results the following way:

1. Result #1 – Branded solution name & the Benefit you got from your solution

2. Result #2 

3. Result #3

  • The Details: 

1. Include 3/5 very detailed steps.

2. Show people how to implement each step exactly  

  • Write your Content as a Case Study: It’s important to show actual proof. Try to avoid the “this changed my life” type commentary. Average type results will do as they are more believable and attainable. 
  • Conclusion: 

1. Make a Brief Summary of your findings.

2. Make sure to include Call to Action.

Ramith Sethi’s trademark technique is a perfect example.

2. Go-to-Guidebook: Contains just about everything someone needs to know about a specific topic. 

Steps to follow: 

Choose a broad topic that can be broken down into 7/10 sub-topics which is not too broad or too narrow. 

Use Google Trends/Buzzsumo for topics that have already proven to perform well in your industry.

One you have your idea organise it into chapters:

  • Beginning: Basic/Introductory Topics
  • Middle: Detailed and Advanced Topics
  • End: Short Case Studies/Brief Tutorials/Tips etc.

Add Table of Contents and list out all your chapters and add page jump links.

For each chapter first write a short intro. This should briefly describe why this sub-topic is important. Then briefly describe 3-5 things someone needs to know about the subtopic.  

Conclusion: Ask your readers to comment – you want them to take action once they’re done reading. 

 

A great example of an evergreen guide.

3. Expanded List Post: These articles contain a list of tips and tricks readers can use to achieve specific results. The list should be brief and easily digestible. Avoid writing in-depth paragraphs. 

Steps to Follow: 

  • Find a topic that you can provide 17/27 bite-sized tips on. 
  • If you’re stuck, research other blogs using keywords like “your topic” + tips and “your topic” + strategies. You want techniques and tactics that people can use that day.
  • Do keyword research to figure out what people are already searching for. If you search for a keyword and no list posts show up this means it’s it isn’t a good for for a list post. 
  • Find 3/4 best tips for each technique. You can include actionable steps, screenshots, video tutorials, infographics and extra content to beef up your content. Tell them exactly what to do.
  • Conclusion: You want people to take action. 

 

A great example of an expanded list post.

4. Ego Bait: Make your topic linkreator friendly meaning a topic that journalists will be willing to link to.

Steps to Follow:

  • Your topic needs to be: specific and in a niche with at least 100 other blogs.

The 100 blogs benchmark to see whether a topic is the right size.

  • Gather your list of winners. Make sure the blogs you choose cover the topic now and again. Include at least 25 winners in your AwardsBait campaign. The more sites you include the more links you’ll get.
  • Use .edu sites as they are authoritative. To find them simply search: site: edu + fitness blog. Use Alltop.com for linkreator research. Type in the keyword that describes your AwardsBait topic. Use best of lists to find more potential bloggers.
  • Choose your blogs and narrow the finalists down to 25-100. 
  • Create AwardsBait Power Page by choosing a good title for example, “Top 50…” and add your keyword after so people know what your page is about.
  • Don’t put your winners in any particular order in this case “everyone is a winner” BUT put the most authoritative and popular sites at the top.
  • Create a listing for each winner. Include the following four elements in the listing: their name/blog’s name, a flattering bio, an image and link to their site or social media profile.
  • Promote your piece using unique logo/banner, create a badge for your winners and reach out to your winners.Write an intro using this formula:Introduce what the awards are, talk about how many blogs exist in this niche, emphasize that it’s an exclusive list and outline what your blog will bring to the table.

5. The Industry Study: Is a great way to show off your market research about a certain topic.

You can review the links your competitor has, then build a list of websites to reach out to and ask them if they will also include your website.

 

Broken link building is a process where you look for your pages that are similar to yours that have gathered some links, but the website is now offline so they are broken (404).

Here’s an example of a 404 page:

If you can find a broken page in your niche, then you can use Ahrefs to look at the websites that link to that broken page. 

Then you can reach out to the sites that link to the broken page and let them know they have a broken page, but it’s OK because you’ve got a similar piece of content they can link to instead.

In your outreach email tell your designated contact exactly where the broken link is and provide your content as a solution. 

 

Guest Posts 

Guest posting will increase your credibility and increase your brand awareness. If you can include a link to your website within the content or at the end in the author bio, it can still be a great link building strategy. 

This process takes time as you have to find websites that still accept guest posts and figure out a unique topics to write about. 

 

Link Roundups 

Link roundups are ‘best of’ lists where bloggers link to their favourite articles. Here’s an example from wow group.

The key here is that you must have a quality piece of content that you have recently written. Although not as popular these days, link roundups can still be found. 

Unfortunately, you can’t pitch a product/sales page. It usually has to be a blog/video/guide.

 

Link Reclamation 

Find a website that mentions your name/brand/business but hasn’t linked to you. Then contact them to include a link to your website for the attribution process. To find unlinked mentions go to Mention.com. Ahrefs content explorer or Google Alerts.

 

Resource Page Link Building 

A resource page Is a blog post/dedicated page that links out to that individual’s favourite things they think their audience will find helpful. You can create content around that link and pitch it to other potential resource pages. 

For example if your website was a website that offered free stock photos, you would find resource pages that had a list of free stock photos.

 

Sponsored Posts 

For sponsored posts, you’re looking for sites that actively accept advertisements. When evaluating the quality of sponsored posts look for:

  • Overall domain authority and trust flow
  • Content quality (are there any spamming links?)
  • Sponsored posts (do they say “sponsored post”?)

 

Digital PR 

Digital PR is our favourite way to build links at Legacy Communications. Digital PR involves creating a story that news websites and journalists will love and will publish, ideally with a link to your linkable asset. You can get the full play-by-play in this Digital PR case study.

If you’re interested in our Digital PR services for link building, you can also reach out to us directly, we’d love to chat!

 

There are a number of ways you can scale your link building campaigns and in this section we’re going to take you through them.

 

Create separate link building roles 

At Legacy, we favour the link building process created by Ryan Stewart at Webris. 

In this process, the link building team is separated into 4 clear roles:

 

The Link Prospector – This person spends time looking for relevant websites to pitch and collects email addresses for the right contacts.

The Outreach Manager – This is the person who spends their time reaching out to new websites, promoting linkable assets and ultimately asking them for a link

The Content Writer – When the outreach manager gets a pitch accepted for a guest post, they forward the content brief to the writer, who then spends the time to write the post

The Lead SEO – This is the SEO who sets the target pages for links, as well as setting the full SEO strategy.

 

Use Outreach Tools To Build Links At Scale

There are a number of tools you can use to build links at scale. These tools will help by automating pitch emails, automatically sending follow ups and more.

There are a number of tools that are popular with link building teams around the world:

-Mailshake

-Pitchbox

-Buzzsumo

-Ninja Outreach

-Just Reach Out

-Press Hunt

 

Link Building Guide: Conclusion

The digital space is constantly evolving. If you can’t adapt your business will be left behind. 

Always remember that link building is about exchanging value.

If your content is not link-worthy, then don’t expect other sites to link to it.

Your content is your biggest asset when it comes to link building campaigns so use it to your advantage to increase organic traffic for your business.

Hotel SEO: The Complete 2023 Guide

Posted on by Andrea Piackova

Hotel SEO: The Complete 2023 Guide

The travel industry is among the most digitally advanced industries in the World. According to McKinsey, Digital Adoption within the travel industry grew by 38% during the pandemic.

When you consider that 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine, it is vital to understand SEO. 

While we might not be primarily known for hospitality SEO as a team at Legacy, in my time as an SEO I have helped hotel clients rank for extremely valuable and highly competitive keywords across the entire industry and in multiple countries. 

I’ve been in SEO dog fights with behemoth online travel agents and still come out on top, achieving top of page rankings for highly coveted keywords such as “Hotels Hyde Park”. At one point, I had four hotels ranking in the top ten spots for “penthouse suites London.” 

So it’s fair to say that when it comes to hotel SEO, I know what I’m talking about and in this guide I’m going to teach you everything I know about SEO in the hotel industry.

We will cover the most important tactics when it comes to hotel SEO, starting with:

 

What is hotel SEO? 

Search engine optimisation is a process to improve the visibility of a hotel website on search engine results pages such as Google or Bing. With more visibility, we can help grow your traffic and enhance your direct hotel bookings.

Our SEO approach covers the whole funnel regarding hotels in an area, things to do, maps, and how to get to the hotel. We use a broad description of hotel SEO because a search engine is at the centre of each experience above

 

Why is SEO for hotels important?

SEO produces the best return on investment for hotels when you rank in the top ten search results of Google. Ranking in the top ten can unlock a new revenue stream each time a customer searches for a hotel in your location. These customers are ready to reserve a hotel room once you meet the criteria to rank in the top ten of Google. To rank in the top ten of Google requires a hotel SEO strategy which includes content, conversion, and PR. We consider content, conversion, and PR our three pillars of SEO. 

 

Our hotel SEO tactics for content:

When creating content about your hotel, it is important to understand that you need to stay local. If your hotel is in Hyde Park, you can write about Hyde Park, Speakers’ Corner, Kensington Gardens, Bayswater, Bayswater tube station, and the Diana Memorial Playground etc. You cannot go outside of that area because it is too far from your address.

Unless you want to target things to do where you would discuss Hyde Park, Kensington, South Kensington, Notting Hill, and Mayfair.

The types of keyword you are targeting will depend on the type of content you can create and rank on Google. It is best to go local because each area will have individual hotels, chains of hotels, and online travel agents in the search results. To stand out, you need to use clever ways of communicating your unique selling point through offers, a story, or the history of the building. Keyword research of your local area will help define what is achievable in terms of creating traffic to drive revenue. Once the keyword research is complete, we would recommend writing your titles and description to stand out from the crowd. 

 

Create unique titles, descriptions, and use hotel schema

99 times out of 100, your home page is where you will rank for your most important keyword. 

As a result, if you were targeting “hotels Hyde Park” you would ensure to get Hyde Park into the title. In the description you could highlight an offer or the main USPs of your hotel. We would also recommend adding hotel schema to your website. Hotel schema will allow you to display your star rating from Tripadvisor, an offer, or to ensure you get the right image in the SERP.

 

Take advantage of FAQs

FAQs are a great way to add more value to your page. FAQs are also valuable because you can use FAQ schema to take up more real estate in the search results (SERP). 

The online travel agents take advantage of FAQs in every SERP. You can utilise this tactic by adding extra content at the bottom of your page and use FAQ schema to help Google display it like Tripadvisor above. If you are looking for FAQ ideas, you can use Answer Socrates or Also Asked for ideas on what to add to your page. SEO tools such as Ahrefs provide questions when doing keyword research which can add ideas on what to say in your FAQ section.

 

Reviews: a simple content tactic

When creating your page and trying to boost how frequently you mention the keywords on your page. Add in a subsection highlighting reviews of your hotel. You can read through Tripadvisor to find four and five-star reviews. We would suggest choosing reviews that highlight your unique selling points. 

 

Target keywords with your hotel rooms in major cities

Most hotels will have a combination of room types, such as your family room, executive room, hotel room with a balcony and a penthouse for four or five star hotels. In large cities such as London, these room types have niche search volume. Using the keyword explorer by Ahrefs, we found over 350 keywords with 8,500 searches per month for hotel rooms. 

The beauty of optimising your family room page for “family room hotel London” is that you have an opportunity to rank for a city wide keyword no matter where you are in London. For example, the Apex City of London Hotel is ranking in sixth position after Booking and Visit London:

 

Use content hubs for awareness content

A content hub could target keywords such as things to do. A content hub can display this content in a user-friendly manner and bring the  best parts of SEO that are applicable to search engines and users. A content hub is a curated collection of branded content on a specific topic or subject. It houses articles, videos, infographics, and other forms of content that let users take a deep dive into a specific area in which the brand is an authority or expert.

We can elevate the brand through the content hub by overlaying different call-to-actions according to the marketing funnel. We would also highlight that a content hub allows us to express a brand in terms of colours, tone of voice and imagery.

 

Hotel SEO tactic for conversion

When considering the conversion side of hotel SEO, we would focus on technical SEO involving your website and the pricing of your rooms. Both converge to improve your conversion rate which should grow month-on-month when you work with an SEO team. 

 

Pricing your hotel rooms

Direct bookings are the most valuable for a hotel. Once you engage an SEO agency, it will be important to provide an incentive for someone to book directly instead of through the online travel agent. These incentives could include free breakfast, a breakfast and dinner package, a drink on arrival or a discount for staying longer. 

 

The SEO team will be able to use these packages in the descriptions and on-page content to entice people to book. By highlighting the hotel packages, your conversion rate will grow. In Google Analytics, the product performance report will detail which packages are performing the best. 

From experience, when popular packages are not available, revenue will fall. As a result, we would contact the hotel manager for new deals to kickstart revenue. 

 

What sells through Google Ads

When a hotel uses the same digital marketing performance agency for Google Ads and SEO, the team can share insights on campaign performance. One of the easiest ways to improve performance, is to take insights from Google Ads. When you compare the two marketing channels, Google Ads will show results quicker than SEO. To help improve the SEO, your SEO specialist can take ideas from the Ad text for titles and descriptions. They can also take insights from product performance through Google Ads to find out which hotel offers to promote in the meta-description. These simple tactics between a digital marketing team can help improve the quality of your website visitors and improve conversion rates. 

 

Make sure your pages load quickly

Page speed is vital for the user experience of your website. No one is going to wait for a page to load because we are hungry for instant gratification. For example, when we compare the page speed of the top ten websites ranking for “family room hotel London”. 

We can see that the Apex City of London hotel is slightly behind the average of 51, with a score of 30.

 

If Apex Hotels were our client, we would suggest working on page speed because we have clients where a good page experience drives over 50% of traffic on a monthly basis. Google rewards page experience because it improves the user experience of its customers who are everyone that makes a search on Google. We used the SERP speed tool by Reddico for this analysis. 

 

Link building and PR

As Legacy Communications is a PR agency, we consider PR to be the traditional format of pieces in a newspaper or magazine, online in a publication, or modern Digital PR. The goal of PR for a hotel SEO strategy is links. We use a variety of techniques to gain links such as from event venues and local attractions when working with hotels. 

 

Gathering links from event venues within close proximity to your hotel is among the simplest link building tactics. We can reach out to event venues who have an accommodation list to see if your hotel can be among the hotels mentioned. Sometimes venues want a business agreement which we would forward to the hotel manager. When the event venues agree to listing the hotel, we would include an offer that we know will be on the website forever. 

 

Go local with your Hotel SEO tactics

Hotels are essentially local searches no matter where the person making the search is living. The map pack by Google is always in the top three of the search results. The map pack is valuable real estate because of the ability for a hotel to display a price and book directly on your website. 

To improve your visibility in the Google Maps results, we would recommend completing the following:

  • Add a keyword optimised description of your hotel
  • Add all of your hotel attributes
  • Add a lot of photos of the lobby, rooms, and restaurant
  • Add a 360 degree photo of hotel rooms and the lobby if you have the budget
  • Ensure to add your health and safety attributes
  • Maintain a 4.5 review score

 

Last year, Google introduced a way for hotels to show free booking links. This month, Google announced an expansion of free booking links. These free links are now available on Search and Maps.

Google is rolling out the expansion of free booking links because of the positive user experience. One of the booking engines, “myhotelshop” has seen a 30% incremental increase in bookings during the summer of 2021 due to free booking links. 

 

Citation management for your name, address, and phone number

To correctly manage your local SEO, we prioritise organising citations for the business to extend our local listing beyond Google Maps. The citation management can also help people navigate to the hotel because of the agreements between Google, Nokia, TomTom, and the car companies. For example, some Google Map features are in Toyota, Audi, Mercedes, GM, Fiat, Volvo, and Nissan cars. 

For the official mapping technology, most car manufacturers depend upon Nokia or TomTom, so we would use citations to expand our reach into other technology providers. Creating the correct citations for your hotel also helps corroborate your Name, Address, and Phone which helps to build trust with Google. 

 

Creative content tactics for your hotel

All marketing strategies require a little creativity to engage users and create a brand. For some hotels this could be a big PR campaign to establish the name. For others it could be simple content tactics such as content for social media and the use of Web Stories. 

 

Create content for social media accounts

This idea is unrelated to SEO directly but will help build a brand. If you are familiar with Instagram, you may know about the accounts which promote Instagram reels of holiday destinations and hotels. For example, Glorious Hotels promotes Instagram Reels from influencers. 

Our suggestion is for the hotel to hire a videographer to create video content for Instagram reels and Tiktok content. If you are shooting a video of a room, make sure to have a person in the video to add the human touch of the walkthrough. Once the content is ready, publish it on your account tagging these larger Instagram accounts for a mention. We would also make it easy for the social media manager to use the content by putting it on a page on your website where it can be easily downloaded and reshared. 

 

Web stories for rich content

Web Stories is a rich, engaging content format that can appear on Google Discover and Search Results.  Web Stories are similar to Instagram Stories. You can add links, images, and videos. We can use Google Analytics on your website to track performance. Web Stories provides an extra channel to share Instagram Stories type content with tracking and control. We feel it is a type of content that could do very well for inspiration type posts leading up to calendar events or local attractions.

Need help with your hotel’s SEO strategy? Get in touch with our team.

Author: Arron Finn, Senior SEO Manager at Legacy Communications.

Arron Finn has over 7 years experience working in SEO, including helping hotels develop and improve their SEO strategies.

Connect with Arron on LinkedIn.

The Complete SEO Guide for SAAS Companies

Posted on by Andrea Piackova

I’ve been working in SEO for over a decade, and SAAS SEO is by far my favourite niche to work in.

At Legacy, we use a proven framework for SAAS companies that we’ve developed over the years. In this article, we will run you through our SAAS SEO Blueprint, a proven framework for SEO success for SAAS companies.

This post is for you if you want to learn:

 

The SAAS SEO Blueprint – How to Succeed in 2023

The SAAS SEO blueprint is built on over a decade of SEO knowledge. It aims to combine every little trick I’ve learned into one post to help SAAS websites rank internationally.

This blueprint has been built by working with a variety of SAAS companies across very different niches, such as project management, design, legal, internal communication and employee engagement.

I didn’t know much about any of the above industries until I started working with clients in these niches. However, with the methods I’m going to explain in this post, I’ve been able to create SAAS SEO strategies that have helped grow organic traffic, increase leads and ultimately increase revenue for SAAS companies across the globe.

 

SAAS SEO Foundation – Competitor Analysis

One of the first places I like to start when building an SEO campaign for a new SAAS client is competitor research.
While I don’t think it’s a good idea to blindly copy everything that a competitor does, reverse engineering what works for competitors can give you a head start and help you formulate a killer SAAS SEO strategy.
To analyse competitors, I will start by Googling my main keywords to determine which competitors rank. Once I’ve identified my competitors, there are a few things I’ll look at.

 

Competitor links

I’ll go into this in more detail later on in the post, but it’s very important to get a baseline for your competitor’s links versus yours. If you work for or own a relatively new SAAS company. You likely have very few links pointing to your domain (unless you bought an expired domain).

I like to use Ahrefs to get a baseline for competitor links. Let’s use an example where I work for a fictional accounting software and I’ve identified that Xero is a competitor.

To analyse Xero’s backlinks, I would copy their Domain and enter it into Ahrefs Site Explorer.

ahrefs saas seo xero

I’ll do this across a number of competitors to get an average. This will help me formulate an overall strategy, because by using the baseline for competitor backlinks I can decide what keywords are realistic to go after.

 

Competitor keywords

At the beginning of a campaign, I also like to look at competitor keywords. Again by using Ahrefs I can see which competitors rank for the most keywords and therefore garner the most traffic. I like to find out which 5 competitors rank for the most keywords. I’ll then use this information during the keyword research process to help build the overall strategy.

xero competitor keywords saas seo

SAAS Keyword Research

I break my keyword research for SAAS companies into 2 phases:

  • Brainstorming
  • Competitor Gap Analysis

 

Brainstorming keyword research

Brainstorming keyword research is relatively straightforward. You think of the keywords that you would Google if you were looking for your product and then check to see if the words you come up with have search volume.

To be honest about it, I prefer to use competitor keyword research as the main strategy. This is because brainstorming for keyword research can be a lot of work. Your competitors have probably already done most of the hard work and you can reverse engineer that work with tools like Ahrefs to save yourself a ton of time.

Nevertheless here is a step by step video I’ve created that shows you how to brainstorm keywords:

 

Competitor keyword research

One of my favourite ways to do keyword research and build my SAAS SEO strategy is to build on the above by analysing competitor’s SEO strategies to help me build my own.

Because of VC money, you’ll often find that you are up against larger marketing teams with much more resources than you.

You can use this to your advantage because in a lot of cases your competitor’s marketing team will have figured out what already works and essentially laid out the blueprint for you. You can then use this blueprint to do it bigger and better than your competitor has done and outrank them.

Carrying on from the above, I’ll export the competitor’s keywords from Ahrefs and filter out branded keywords.

I’ll then freeze the top row and sort the URL’s A to Z. I do this because it’s the quickest way to identify keyword clusters to target. For instance, in the screenshot below, I’ve identified that Xero has an invoicing content hub and that they’ve created content on:

  • How to make an invoice
  • How to send an invoice
  • What is an invoice

keyword clusters Xero saas seo

I’ll go through this data for all of the 5 competitors I found in the earlier steps to identify which keywords I can use to build my overall strategy.

I’ll then create a separate sheet called a content map. In the content map, I’ll create a row for each topic, with the main keyword and secondary keywords to use for the content. I’ll also map what stage of the funnel the keyword is at, if it needs to be new or existing content, as well as the search intent of the keyword (IE is it informational or transactional).

content map saas seo

Luckily for you, I previously created a few videos that walk you through the full process, step by step and in more detail.

 

Competitor keyword research overview

 

Competitor Keyword Research Part 1

 

Competitor Keyword Research Part 2

 

SAAS Content Marketing Strategy

When you’ve completed the keyword research process and created your content map, you can start to build your SAAS content marketing strategy.

You need to break this down into three core funnels:

  • Top of funnel
  • Middle of funnel
  • Bottom of funnel

 

Top of funnel SAAS SEO content

Your top-of-funnel content is usually your informational content with guides on how to do things in your industry.

In the example above, you saw that XERO have a number of pieces of informational content on invoicing, such as “how to create an invoice” and “what is an invoice”.

For a successful SAAS SEO strategy, you need to create content for every part of the user journey.Xero does this well by creating informational content that will resonate with someone at the beginning of their book-keeping journey.

To- of-funnel content will typically be blogs/informational articles for most SAAS companies. However, we have found more success recently by creating specific content hubs for each subject.

Again if we take Xero as an example, rather than putting their content on invoicing into the blog, it lives in their content hub. This is a much better strategy as it helps create relevance across similar pages through internal linking.

content hub saas example

 

Middle of funnel SAAS SEO content

Middle-of-funnel content is a key piece of your SAAS content marketing strategy that bridges between the high-level concepts of your niche and the value your product provides.

Users in the middle of the funnel are a little bit further along in their journey and a bit more educated than the top of funnel users. Content for middle-of-funnel users needs to help the user and ideally will move them towards the final step of the journey to the bottom of the funnel.

This might come in the form of an ebook or a webinar download that goes in-depth on the subject. EG our fake accounting SAAS might do a webinar on tips and tricks for a more productive accounting department.

 

Bottom of funnel SAAS SEO content

Your bottom of funnel content will typically come in the form of your product/solution pages.

These pages are designed to give your potential customer all of the information that they need to convert into a user.

Again using Xero as an example, we see that they have created a specific page to rank for accounting software.

This page ranks on page one of Google across the English speaking world and is likely a huge driver of traffic, trials, and customers for Xero

xero bofu saas seo page

 

The SAAS SEO Challenge

Here lies one of the main challenges with SAAS SEO these days. A few years ago if you wanted to rank for bottom-of-funnel keywords, your number 1 strategy was to create solution/product pages like the above example to rank, or else rank your homepage directly in the SERP’s for the keyword.

But in recent years, when searching for the bottom of funnel keywords, the first page of Google is dominated by listicle-style articles.

listlicles saas seo

This leaves you with a conundrum. You’ll want to rank your solutions/product landing page in the top 10, but in most cases, this won’t be possible as the page doesn’t match the search intent.

If you want to rank for the bottom of funnel keywords in most SAAS industries, you’ll likely need to create a listicle of your own that mentions your competitors so that you can rank for the keyword and match the search intent.

This is where it gets interesting because you have to decide on your overall content strategy and if a lot of your content will be listicles that mention your competitors.

This can prove especially tricky to get buy-in from other stakeholders, especially senior leaders who might want to avoid mentioning  a competing product at all.

 

SAAS SEO Content Brief

When creating content for our clients, we use a content brief to help ensure that all content matches the search intent, includes the right keywords and is  straight out of the box.

You can copy our content brief >here<

 

Conversion Optimization for SAAS SEO Campaigns

Because a successful SAAS SEO campaign should focus on all parts of the funnel, you need to be clever when it comes to conversion optimization.

The ideal situation is that each piece of content you create comes with a logical next step. You can’t just rely on Calls-to-action like “sign up for our newsletter”.

The harsh truth is that no one cares about your newsletter.

You should use your top-of-funnel content to drive traffic to the site and then use CTA’s with mouth-watering lead magnets that offer real value to encourage the visitor to take the next step.

For SAAS SEO campaigns, 3 CTA types that work well:

  • Embedded CTA’s
  • Pop-up CTA’s
  • Sidebar CTA’s

Embedded CTA’s fit right into the body of your content.

Ideally, the CTA will match the content, so if the accounting saas wrote a guide on how to send an invoice, the embedded CTA might be for a lead magnet with a free invoice template you can use.

Here is a good example of an in-content/embedded CTA from Digital Marketer:

embedded content cta

You can also use the in-content CTA to push people from a top of funnel informational page to a bottom-of-funnel decision-making page, here is a great example of this from project management software Teamwork:

 

in content cta for saas seo

Pop-up CTA’s are just that, they pop up onscreen and offer you the chance to download something. You can also set various rules, such as time on page or exit intent. Here’s a great example from Optinmonster (who also happen to have a great lead magnet tool):

saas seo conversion blueprint

Sidebar CTA’s go on the side of your content. In our experience sticky sidebar CTA’s work best, as they stay in the website visitor’s eyeline as they scroll through your content. Here’s another good example from Optinmonster:sidebar CTA saas seo

In this case, they’re actually pushing the user towards the product rather than a lead magnet.

 

SAAS Technical SEO

Technical SEO might not be as important for SAAS companies as it is for  e-commerce companies. This is because SAAS websites will likely have few pages  than an e-commerce website, so you can get away with your site being less structurally sound in the SAAS niche.

However, with that said, I do believe it is important to create a technically sound website for your SAAS company. If your technical SEO is on point, it can give you an advantage over your competitors, especially if you create a bulletproof site structure that spreads authority across all pages and internal links between relevant pages.

I do find that some of the tools really help you zone in on technical issues a lot easier these days.  The Ahrefs site audit is a great place to start if you don’t know much about Technical SEO, you can run a crawl and the tool will identify issues that you can then pass to your developer to fix.

ahrefs saas seo site audit

There are a ton of really in-depth guides on technical audits available such as this one, but if you are doing a technical SEO audit for a SAAS website, you’ll want to concentrate on the following areas:

  • Indexation
  • Google Search Console
  • Google Page Speed Insights
  • Pingdom Tools & GT Metrix
  • Robots.txt
  • Sitemap
  • Site Architecture
  • Links
  • Onpage SEO
  • Content
  • Keywords
  • Analytics
  • Mobile Responsiveness
  • Structured data

Our own site audit procedure at Legacy is extremely in-depth and can take 20-30 hours to complete.

I’ve put together a standard operating procedure document that you can use to run a mini technical SEO audit on your SAAS website.

You can get the SOP >HERE<

 

Links are a significant part of the SAAS SEO puzzle. If your website doesn’t have high quality links, it won’t have the authority to compete with your competitors and SEO won’t be a viable marketing channel for your SAAS business.

Here are a number of strategies I like to use to build links for SAAS companies.

 

Finding listicles in your niche

This one is low-hanging fruit for sure. You’re looking for websites that have written listicle posts about your niche. For example, if your saas was in the internal communications niche, you would look for articles like this.

You can just google keywords like “best [keyword] software [year]”, so for example, if you are in the accounting saas niche, you would search “best accounting software 2022”.

You can then make a list of all the listicle posts that mention multiple tools and then reach out to them and ask to be added to the post.

 

Reverse Engineering Competitors Links

Just like reverse engineering competitors’ keywords, reverse engineering their links can be a great way to identify potential link opportunities. In a lot of cases, if a website has linked to a competitor, they’ll likely be open to linking to you as well. Reverse engineering competitors can be an even quicker way to identify listicle posts like the examples above. You can also scroll through competitors’ links to identify any other strategies the competitor might use.

competitor links saas seo

 

Digital PR

Digital PR is ideal for SAAS SEO. It’s one of the best ways to build links at scale and at speed, which can be especially important for new SAAS companies, who need to accelerate their link-building efforts to compete with other SAAS companies that have been around a long time. In our guide to Digital PR, we take you through the step-by-step process we use to build links using Digital PR with main strategies including:

  • Reactive and proactive
  • Product PR
  • Creative Campaigns/stunts
  • Data led stories
  • Thought leadership

 

Guest posting

This one is slowly dying but is still a viable option. In my experience, the best way to do it these days is to partner with other SAAS companies in similar but non-competing niches to help accelerate each others growth.

Here’s how to find 5 super easy link opportunities.

 

How To Choose A SAAS SEO Agency

Easy answer – Just choose us. We’re a SAAS SEO agency with a TON of experience across many SAAS niches.

We’ve ranked many websites, across many industries across the world.

That’s important.

Being able to rank websites in multiple markets is a completely different skillset and needs a much higher lever of SEO skills.

Local and national SEO can be relatively straightforward, but for SAAS SEO success, you need to be able to compete and know how to rank a website on a global level.

The SEO team at Legacy communications is well equipped with over 30 years of experience in ranking websites on a global scale and can help you grow your SAAS business, whether it’s a bootstrapped startup,  VC funded, or publicly traded.

Digital PR

Posted on by Andrea Piackova

The Legacy Guide To Digital PR

The days of merely using print media to achieve brand awareness are over. In order to beat the noise of 1.86 billion other websites vying for consumers’ attention, companies leverage blogs, newjacking, stunts, data, creative thinking and social media to powerfully ramp up their business success. 

Your business will struggle to survive without a solid Digital PR strategy in place. That’s why we’ve created this guide that will teach you:

  • What Digital PR is
  • Why Digital PR is so Important
  • How to Build a Successful Digital PR Campaign
  • Proven Tactics that will Strengthen Your Digital PR Strategy
  • How to Measure Whether Your Digital PR Campaigns are Working
  • How Digital PR Agencies Can Help

With this guide in your business back pocket, you’ll know how to utilize Digital PR like a professional and start building brand awareness right away. 

What is Digital PR?

Public Relations is the process of managing and maintaining a favorable image in the public’s eye. It’s a tactic that marketers use to promote their brand and increase awareness. 

Over the years, companies’ public relations strategies have changed drastically. A marketing evolution driven by technology has transitioned public relations from traditional to digital. 

Fewer and fewer people are spending time reading newspapers and magazines, listening to the radio, or watching cable tv. In fact, printed newspapers have taken a steep dip in circulation, and magazine readers have dropped by 6 million last year. Radio audiences are declining, and millions are cutting their cable cord and waving TV subscriptions goodbye. 

To fully understand Digital PR, let’s examine this transition and the difference between Traditional PR and Digital PR. 

Traditional PR vs. Digital PR

The main difference between traditional PR and digital is that digital PR is – you guessed it, digitally focused. Traditional PR typically targets traditional media sources – things like newspapers, magazines, TV, events and radio shows. Digital PR, on the other hand, targets online sources, like news websites, social media platforms, blogs, online news outlets, and video portals. 

traditional pr vs digital pr

As a sub-service of content marketing (which also includes all your content creation), Digital PR is the process of:

  • Gaining publicity online
  • Connecting with online journalists and publications
  • Gaining high-quality backlinks (when someone sends their reader to your site) from websites, social channels, and online publications

Today’s most successful PRs have embraced savvy Digital PR strategies in order to reach a much broader audience. 

digital pr example

Running Digital PR Campaigns, they can connect with their company’s target audience and boost product and brand awareness much more rapidly than traditional offline strategies. 

Digital PR is a great way to gain additional coverage for a client by utilising a newjacking approach as well as creativity and timing to beat competitors to the punch and help your client rank as high as possible.

Why is Digital PR Critical for Your Business’ Success?

Digital PR professionals are a powerful force in a brand’s marketing team, able to effectively improve online presence and brand visibility. Digital PR drives brand awareness, traffic to a website, sales, social following and engagement, and links that boost organic rankings.

Its benefits for your business stretch far and wide, but let’s narrow in on the three main advantages of investing in Digital PR: 

Digital PR Gives Your Business a Glowing Introduction

When your target audience isn’t aware of you, Digital PR strategies can raise awareness, increase the visibility of your brand, and help you and your audience get acquainted. 

By connecting with your target audience through a blogger, or journalist who already has credibility with your audience, you can shortcut your way into their trust. Rather than running ads that tend to put consumers off, your brand can appear in front of your target audience as a recommendation from someone they already trust. 

Digital PR Ratchets Up Your Google Rankings

Digital PR SEO tactics, like when someone mentions your brand on their own website or online publication, may carry more than 50% of the ranking factor weight for search engines. How? 

Each online article, social media share, and product review that mentions you or links back to your site looks great to search engines like Google. 

As you rank higher on Google, you’ll gain even more traffic to your website. This increased traffic will boost your rankings even higher, and the cycle continues.

digital pr referral traffic jump

Digital PR Boosts Customer Acquisition and Lead Generation

The number of people consuming digital content on their handheld devices is growing each year. As a business, lead generation should be at the forefront of your campaigns. 

Digital PR gives you a way to target this massive and growing group of digital consumers and build quality lead generation.

How to Build a Successful Digital PR Campaign

Digital PR can be powerful, cost-effective, and transformative for your brand’s success, but only when a solid strategy is in place. Below, we’ll walk you through four critical steps to creating and implementing a robust Digital PR Strategy. 

Create Your Digital PR Plan

Before you start sending out dozens of pitch emails determine your plan and approach to Digital PR. You can create a concise and detailed Digital PR plan by answering these 3 questions:

What goals do I want to accomplish with these Digital PR efforts? Set specific goals within a timeframe. For example, you might want to increase sales by 10% by 2022, gain 1 million impressions for your brand, rank on the first page of Google in 6 months, or double the traffic coming through your website within the year. 

Which people and publications hold the most influence over my audience? Find out where your target audience hangs out. Which websites, magazine and newspaper sites, social channels, and blogs are they frequenting the most? Make it your goal to show up wherever your target audience spends their time.

Where is my competition getting published? 

Google your competitors’ names or the CEOs of competitor businesses and see which sites and influencers have mentioned them. These sites might be interested in interviewing you or featuring your products and services as well. 

Lock-In on an Other’s-Focused Perspective

Job interviews, marketing, sales, and PR are no places to gush about your business and goals. In any situation where you’re trying to convince another person to take you or your business on in some way, it’s paramount that you think from the other’s perspective instead of your own. 

Your story, your products, and your goals can be shared later. For now, all you should be thinking about is their story, their products, and their goals. 

Which outreach proposal do you think would more likely be picked up by a publication?

example of bad digital pr email pitch

Or

example of a good digital pr pitch

While the first message is all about John, the second is all about Sarah and her readers. If you want a “yes” from Sarah, pick a powerful angle for the piece you’re proposing that you know will capture her audience, increase her readers, and boost her sales. 

Don’t Be The Company That Slips Through The Cracks

Influencers, entrepreneurs, journalists, newspaper editors, and magazine CEOs are busy people. On top of their daily responsibilities, they receive loads of pitch emails and outreach DMs daily. Your first message will almost certainly be left unopened or quickly forgotten. 

Following up can make all the difference. Be patient and persistent. Send gentle reminders, graciously understanding that the people you’re reaching out to have a lot on their plates. They might need a few nudges before you hear back. 

Build and monitor your contact list

As you work, keep track of every publication, blogger, or journalist that you’re interested in contacting. Create a Google Sheet that shows who you’ve already reached out to, followed up with, and gotten a response from. 

email list example for digital pr

When one of your proposals is rejected, reach out again with a different article idea or product for review. Just because the answer is no this time doesn’t mean that they’d say no to a different article or product in the future. 

Note which sites published your content in the end. The commonalities can help you shape your outreach strategy in the future. Foster good relationships with the people willing to work with you. Oftentimes, you can continue working with them – especially if their piece or review covering your business boosted their own views and sales.  

Tried and tested Digital PR tactics

Now that PR has moved online, methods are rapidly changing and developing to keep up with the internet’s constant advances. Here are three timeless approaches to Digital PR that will foster good relationships with the public and build your brand awareness in today’s market. 

1- Reactive and Proactive PR (AKA Newsjacking)

digital pr example 1 - newsjacking

Reactive and proactive PR is a great way to get ahead of your competitors by anticipating trends within the news cycle and hopping on breaking news stories and topics to increase coverage.

By monitoring breaking news you can keep track of ways that your client can easily gain some additional pieces of coverage – for example, is there a beauty story they can add an expert comment to? A new story they can add a fresh outlook to? Look for ways to apply the news to each client.

 

The same applies to proactive digital PR, a lot of topics will resurface year by year, so it’s worth keeping an eye on the calendar to predict trends and have your own takes ready to go.

2 – Product PR:

Product PR when done correctly can be a great way to drive traffic to a client’s site. The key is to think outside of the box – if a bottle of ketchup won’t get you a mention in a publication, a bottle of ketchup from Mars certainly will. 

Get creative. The more outlandish the better, but make sure to approve any ideas with your client beforehand.

product pr example for digital PR

3 – Creative Campaigns or Stunts

When it comes to creating good digital PR, every campaign should be a creative one. Dedicate time and resources to thinking outside the box and figuring out fun ways to add value to journalists who might be reading your release.

Stunts are another great way to gain attention for your client, when done correctly you can secure massive amounts of coverage on both news and social sources. 

4 – Data led/Data Stories

Combining data with creative thinking is a key part of digital PR. Once you have your idea, spend some time thinking about if it could be improved with data – and where you would get this data from. 

data led digital pr

Journalists are always on the lookout for new facts and figures but are often short of time to gather extensive data. By doing the work for them and offering them some quality data, you’re way more likely to see your piece land.

5 – Thought Leadership/Expert Led PR:

Similarly to the newjacking approach, keeping an eye on trends within each of your client’s sectors will give you a massive advantage. Monitor journalist requests and have somebody ready to provide quick quotes at a moment’s notice.

expert led digital pr

You can also use this approach to add value to your other stories, if you’re sending out a data or creativity based release, having a quote from an expert can give your piece authority and make it a lot more likely that journalists will pick it up.

How to Measure Whether Your Digital PR is Working or not?

You can use several success metrics for your Digital PR campaigns. Your measurement will largely depend on what goals you set while developing your Digital PR plan. 

  1. If your goal is to increase sales by 10%, you can use tracking links and, with Google Analytics, analyze how many sales have come from that one link. 
  2. If your goal is for your website to rank on Google’s first page within six months, you can track your search traffic and see whether that number is progressively increasing. 
  3. If your goal is to secure 15 pieces of coverage or improve overall impressions surrounding a client, you can search online or use tools to search for mentions of your press release on various publications.
  4. If your goal is to gain more links to your client’s site you can then cross reference any publications who covered the release with any who attached a link to their site. Don’t be afraid to follow up and ask them to attach it either.

 

How Digital PR Agencies Can Help

To help build brand awareness, many companies hire a Digital PR Agency. These agencies can provide your company with professionals that can throw around acronyms like SEO PPC CRO, and CPC like Digital Marketing was their first language. The experts working at an agency can help you:

  • Generate market research
  • Create a strategy that beats the competition
  • Build and run powerful campaigns that help you reach your business goals
  • Create product or service advertisements in Google, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.
  • Manage and optimize your website’s rank

Running Digital PR campaigns takes a lot of time—precious time and resources that you or your in-house marketing team could be spending focused on running your business. After cutting out payroll and taxes, hiring an external agency to handle your Digital PR campaigns can also be a lot lighter on your business’ budget. 

Ready to reap the benefits of Digital PR but don’t have the experience or time to do the job right? We’re ready to help. See how rapidly other ambitious companies have grown while working with us. 

A Digital PR Case Study

Legacy put these methods into practice with a recent campaign that was hugely successful.

screenshot of the sun coverage for legacy digital pr case study

We secured 45 pieces of coverage from the campaign (so far), as well as 10 links, featuring in publications such as Her.ie, Galway Beo, Spin South West, Ireland Before You Die, four different Sun articles, two Mirror articles – and a multitude of local radio and news sites to boot.

Here’s how we did it:

Ideation: For our Ireland’s snowiest counties release, we dedicated time and resources to expand on the initial idea, finding tools to gather what we would need and analysing how it would work in practice before starting to collect data. 

Data: To calculate the probability of a white Christmas in each county, Legacy used weather data from the past ten years from Met Eireann and weather checking application, TimeAndDate. 

Timing: We chose the topic based on new cycle trends over the last number of weeks – as well as trends in the news cycle during the lead-up to Christmas over the past number of years.

Crafting: When writing our press release we crafted it like you would a news article, if you can do interviews with experts, think of snappy headlines and sub-heads and write in a news language style as much as possible – it will make a difference.

Outreach: You can always give your release an advantage by simply knowing what each publication is looking for. We took the time to look at what journalists were already writing about the topic before starting our outreach to achieve maximum results.

Retargeting: For Legacy’s Christmas-themed digital PR when coverage had come to a standstill after the first day or so we decided to ditch the traditional follow-up approach. 

Instead, we decided to go back to each publication, see what journalists had covered similar stories in recent hours, and add them to the outreach list.

Insights: Even the most successful campaigns can always be improved. We found that certain aspects of our campaign such as the creation of a resource page on Legacy’s website to drive links, and the expansion to other locations would have made a big difference. Take note and apply it to your next campaign.

Here’s a link to the full digital pr case study.

Have another Digital PR question?

Is this guide “ultimate” enough, in your opinion? Did we miss something? Let us know by tweeting @Legacy_Comms. We’ll make sure to keep you updated with the most relevant answers to your Digital PR questions.

Keep this Digital PR Guide in your business’ back pocket. With it, you’ll be able to build a powerful Digital PR strategy that will help you reach your business goals.