Creating Content that Earns Backlinks

Welcome to a new edition of Crawling Mondays. In today's edition, we are going to cover a topic that we all know we care a lot about. How do we create content that actually earns links that, um, everybody wants to link to? And for this particular topic, I have invited a couple of highly experienced specialists. who can help us to do exactly that. I'm so very excited to be able to speak with Hannah Smith, Creative Content Consultant on one hand. Hello, Hannah.

Hey.

And on the other hand, we also have Jess Pease, Content Team Lead at EOM.

Hello, Jess.

Hi.

Before starting our conversation, I want to thank our today's sponsor, which is ContentKing. ContentKing is the real-time SEO alerting tool that will let you know when something goes wrong on your website. So for example, if the title or the meta description or the heading was removed all of a sudden after a release, this is a tool that will alert you when that happens so you can avoid really bad scenarios. So go and take a look at Content Key. And now we're ready to start. I want to ask you, what are the main mistakes that you see people tend to do again and again when they're creating content and publishing, promoting content that they expect that will earn links and later on they don't?

So I think it depends a lot on different factors. So a couple of things that I've seen from creating content to earn links, whether that be hero content or more reactive content, depending on where I've worked previously, is there are some things that are quite obvious for certain brands to be talking about or not be talking about. And I think one of the key things for me where a piece of content might not get picked is if the brand doesn't make sense to be talking about the topic. So the same way that you might create like a content strategy for a client, you'd have sort of topic clusters, things that you expect them to be talking about, things they can be like authoritative with, things that they sort of have experience with, and then some sort of subcategories of things that they might sort of link back to in a way, something that makes sense to be in that conversation. But I think for a lot of the time, the issue that people have with hero content, so specifically creative content campaigns, is that they try to sort of put in a topic for a brand that doesn't quite make sense, maybe because the idea is good, maybe because it's trending. And I think people see through that. I think there is content for journalists that is written for journalists in a sense, but you sort of have to think about the person after that. So journalists also have an audience. They have people that they need to reach and for your brand to sort of makes sense to be talking about a certain topic, then the people that receive that right at the end kind of need to care about it. That's one of the main things that I've sort of found.

Crazily enough, I have seen campaigns also being very, very successful. And I was like, why is this player even publishing about this particular topic? Because sometimes they are piggybacking on trends that are happening around the world. You still see from time to time also players that get backlinks from campaigns that are not obviously connected to their industry just because it is a trending topic and they jump on the bandwagon to get a little bit of visibility due to that.

I'm not actually sure the extent to which relevance really matters in terms of getting links. So I have been guilty of creating hellishly irrelevant campaigns for clients very, very successfully for an awful lot of years. And like the one that springs to mind, so for GoCompare, we did a piece where we looked at the films with the highest onscreen death count and we claimed, oh, this is, this is for life insurance because life insurance is in fact just death insurance. But of course it has nothing to do with anything. And it was, it was, but it was very successful nonetheless. And I actually, like, I don't have a huge problem with doing stuff like that, but I would agree with Jess that it can feel very incoherent for a user. And I think that's that's actually the biggest problem. I think that you can kind of play around and do some sort of popular playful content and it will get links. I think what you need to be mindful of when you're doing stuff like that is that you have like a bit of a history of doing things like that. So I didn't feel too uncomfortable about doing stuff like that for Go Compare because we'd done a lot of campaigns which were sort of pop culture-y. And I kind of felt like it's, Yeah, of course it's got nothing to do with life insurance.

The tone of the brand, that is important. Like, if you do this with a bank that is super serious, I don't even know that they will have allowed you to publish that piece anyway. But yes, it needs to align in one way or another, right?

Yeah, doing something like that for Scottish Widows wouldn't be cool. I feel like Scottish Widows are like a very serious financial brand. But yeah, in terms of stuff which— where I see like mistakes happening, I think there's kind of There's probably like 3 things which I think I see most frequently. The first is, you kind of alluded to a bit before, was just like errors. You know, when you're like, you've made this piece and you've done this analysis, let's just say it is a data piece, and you've done this analysis, but your data is fundamentally wrong. Like, and it's very easily verifiably wrong. So that's obviously not going to get coverage from journalists because journalists do check things before they publish them. And so, and I have seen a lot of campaigns where I'm like, this is just wildly wrong. Like, you need, you do need to fix this before you could hope to get any kind of coverage of that. So I see, I see kind of errors like that. I think that probably a bigger problem, though, kind of comes down to like a, like a lack of understanding of the media landscape. I think that an awful lot of the time content is created that's sort of cool or interesting in inverted commas, but doesn't naturally lend itself to a story journalists might write, or it appeals only to a very tiny number of journalists. So it's kind of too niche. So there's like, there's either like a lack of breadth of appeal or a lack of available pool of journalists who will ever write this. Story for you. And I feel like ultimately this comes down to a lack of understanding of the media landscape. And I think that some of that can be solved with processes. But I kind of see it. I do feel like I see it a lot where people will kind of like— the question I get asked most frequently probably is, why hasn't this piece got links? And I'm like, more often than not, my answer is, I don't know which journalists would write about this. Like, that pool of journalists just doesn't exist. And then I think the other thing which I see, which is somewhat related, is kind of confusing a format for an idea. Back in the day, they used to make an infographic. Now—

Out of whatever for the sake of— Yeah.

Now it's not an infographic.

Linkability.

Now, for what it's worth, like, I can understand why this confusion happens in people's heads, because that's the thing you see. So you see, for example, a map which is incredibly successful and has got a load of coverage. I can understand how people arrive at, Oh, maps. Journalists love maps. But of course they don't. That's utter nonsense. And actually, confusing a format for an idea is, I think, often the biggest problem. And I think one of the first things that I explain to people when I first start working with them is what an idea actually is. And for me, an idea is comprised of 3 things. It's a concept. So that's the hook or the thing that allows the journalist to write a story. Then you have the content. That's just what the piece contains. So that could be data, it could be visuals, it could be a It could be a quiz or game or something like that. And then finally, you've got the execution, which is map, blog post, data visualization, interactive piece, video, whatever it is. But you can't just have an execution, or more accurately, I think it's dangerous to rely on just an execution without an actual hook for a journalist. And I feel that's where people often make mistakes. Yeah.

Yeah. We can also argue that there's also content that you can create that will get backlinks because it's something super useful. Then one of the things that I will say that I see that is sad to see also from a more technical SEO standpoint is how you see that many of these pages end up being orphan pages or pages placed in subdomains completely independent the rest of the website that is not well linked or it's not even passing the value that many of these pages are getting. The pages that be able to take the user through the customer journey later where it makes sense to bring them, right? So this is one of those things that I say, I was like, it's a waste of opportunity. They could be leveraging this much more, right? Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, the only thing I would say about that calculator thing is like, Just bear in mind, like, that is just another format, one. So like, don't make a calculator and think you're going to get links. And secondly, have a look at the links that they're actually getting. Like, most calculators don't get links from journalists. So if actually what you want are links from journalists, it can be hard. It can be really hard to get a journalist to link to your calculator. If you want links from journalists, you need to be able to somehow hook that into a story. And we made this calculator is not a story.

It should be about to give the opportunity of good storytelling. Otherwise you are not helping them. And that brings me to the next question, right? Like what are the building blocks, those main criteria that you see that are there in every single campaign or content that earns links?

I always start with where you want coverage. So like that's, that's the first place I start. So the first question I ask is, can you give me 5 to 10 sites where you'd like coverage or sections of sites? Like often it's sections of sites. And the reason I ask that is because it allows me to kind of get a handle on, you know, what the client's really looking for. And so I start with those sites and I start by looking at what the journalists on those sites are actually writing and try and figure out why they're writing those things. And then I will move on to thinking about how we find a space to play in that. So like, how can we add to that conversation? What could we do or make? Which would allow the journalists to continue writing those stories that get a lot of page views and that they obviously need to write to hit their own page view targets. In terms of the actual process, for me, like, I see it as a 3-stage process. So part one is inspiration. So that's me literally finding articles, data, topics, other pieces which I think are interesting and potentially relevant. Then I kind of move into generation, which I just do really, really quickly. Um, so basically I set 2-minute timers on my phone and I just try and come up with 25 ideas. And I do this a bunch of times until I have like 100 or so ideas. And I do this because only like 1 in 20 of every idea I come up with is likely to be worth making. So I'm like, if I need 5 ideas, that means I need to come up with 100. Um, and I find that easier than trying to come up with 5 good ideas. Coming up with 5 good ideas is hard. Coming up with 100 ideas is weirdly easy. I find, because the pressure's off. They don't need to be good. You just need 100 of them. Obviously, those aren't really ideas. They're like seeds of ideas. So they're like headlines or questions I'd quite like to be able to find the answer to. And then finally, after the generation bit, I develop and validate some of the ideas in inverted commas that I've come up with. And at that point, I'm asking things like, is this idea possible? possible. So, like, can I find data to support this idea, or can I get some data or do some analysis to support this idea? And then I do, as you mentioned, like, I ask things like, is this right for the client? To what extent can I find evidence that this is a resonant topic with journalists? So what are journalists already writing about this thing? And I also think about breadth of appeal. So what does the total pool of journalists look like for this idea? So if it's a very tiny pool of journalists, that might not be quite such a strong idea or something with a bit more breadth.

That was so interesting to listen to because it's completely like, we're like different ends of it, I think. So at NeoMound, we work in a way that everybody sort of has like a specialism. So my sort of part in creating content that earns links is that we have a creative team which come to us with some ideas. They'll sort of get vetted by other members of the creative team. And then as they sort of pass through into content and design, it's our job sort of to build a brief which looks at, okay, so this is what we want to make. Does it exist? If it exists, how can we make it better? Is there a need to make it better? Who's talking about it? If they're not talking about it, why aren't they talking about it? What kind of execution, as Hannah was saying, like, is the format right? Is there a way that we could deliver this in a way that has more appeal, that conveys the data in a better way? It's more easily accessible. Is it something that makes sense for this client to be talking about? But again, as Hannah said before, you don't wanna make that pool too small, like that there are a lot lot of things that brands can talk about if there's like a tiny like nugget of a link. So when it comes to me, it's sort of already like a fully fledged idea and I'll work with our design lead to kind of look at what kind of assets we want to create. Obviously still speaking to the person whose idea it was as well to make sure that we're creating something that's still authentic and true to what they want to make. And then as we sort of go through the process, we'll look at things like, so somebody recently spoke about that in an article. Is there anything that's happened since then? Is there anything that we can tie back into idea. And one of the biggest things that we do is so that with Neomam content, we have asset copy. So that's all the designs and graphics and calculators and sliders that you see all have content on them. We also then have like an accompanying landing page or a blog post, if you like, which then explains the idea in full and gives people more context. So it's our job to kind of convey the data in a way, in a really short amount of words, like less than 100 words. This is what we found, here's how we found it, here's why it might be happening. So it's kind of taking an idea that already exists and thinking about the best way to give that to somebody that might want to read it or might see it in the wild and think it's interesting. And the way that the journalist sort of plays a part in that is it's actually quite small in our way. So like our KPI is still links, we're still writing for journalists, we still do things that make it easier for them to find the story and actually have like a narrative to go off of. But we're still thinking about what kind of reader will care about this? Who is this going to appeal to? Does it have a purpose? So whether it's fortunate or unfortunate for some people, we still create a lot of infographics. We still have a lot of maps because they're resources people can come back to. So when creating content that kind of lasts, they're the things that we're looking at, like how can we add value? How can we make sure that this piece doesn't need to be made again? Or if it can be made again, we want to make sure that we're the people that are doing it again, if that makes sense. Another thing that's like a must for content that gets covered is a really tight methodology. So I think we kind of covered it before. Unfortunately, Twitter is a really harsh place sometimes. People will be absolutely torn down because they've used surveys or they've got some data that kind of doesn't make sense or isn't easy to understand. A journalist is very unlikely to cover your piece if they can't make sense of the method. So when we're sort of going through that process, if I can't understand it, nobody else is going to understand it. So we want to put it in a way that's really simple. But that is accessible for everybody and encourages people to kind of link to that content.

I think it's about credibility as well, right? If you've done a study and the results are surprising, actually, the biggest barrier to entry for a journalist to actually cover the piece is that they will think it's wrong. So you need to convince them that this isn't wrong, this is correct, and this is why. And that's why that's really important, because, yeah, I think you're totally right. I also think that people make the mistake of thinking like journalists understand maths. And like, I'm not saying journalists don't understand maths, but like the thing they've worked at their whole lives is writing. They're not necessarily best placed to deeply understand complex calculations. I think you can't rely on the journalist to find the story. I mean, I think this is a slightly related point to what Jess was saying. Like, journalists don't have time to find the story. Like, they have to write anywhere between 5 and 10 articles per shift. They don't have the time to sit and find the story. You have to deliver them the story. And I think it's often the case that, you know, scatter plots are like my own personal hell. Like, I don't understand scatter plots. I don't think anyone does. You're supposed to use them to kind of allow you to display some sort of like trend and outlier line, but they're horrific in terms of ranking. So if I show you a scatterplot and I say to you, who's first, who's best, who's worst, most people can't tell me. Need a ranking table for that, babes. Love a ranking table. Everyone understands that. First!

A piece that should be easy to consume and to be understood by the masses. You cannot use the same tools and visualizations that A specialist will tend to use to go through the data to identify the patterns for sure. What are great examples of excellent content out there that you have seen, that you have created yourself too, and even like third parties that you have seen around that it has made you wish to say, oh, I would have totally loved to do that.

So I've seen a lot of great reactive content in particular. I think that there is a space for that. I think a lot of people do really well with it. It's not the kind of content that we do at Near Mom, but it does still have its uses. So I just wanted to kind of mention one that I saw recently that I thought thought was good. So a company called Evoluted, which is another digital marketing agency in Sheffield, created a sort of planned reactive piece. It wasn't outreach for long, it was very sort of spur of the moment kind of thing, and it looked at horror movie posters and it used an AI tool to kind of generate the art for it. So I had a little look into that this morning and so far it's got 26 links, but I think in sort of a couple of days outreach, that's, that's pretty good going. But the thing that I loved most about it is not just that it was something that was trending and people could relate to and it got talked about a lot on media, it was actually a campaign that they did for themselves. And I think that's really great. Like seeing an agency do a case study or a campaign for themselves is one of the best ways to see that they're doing good work. So I kind of wanted to just mention that because I thought it was a really good reactive piece of content that wasn't like an expert comment and things like that, that again, we know do well. One of our pieces that we did recently, or at least is still picking up links, is we looked at the most sleep-inducing pop songs. So this was a bit more technical in terms of the method. So if you were sort of chatting about it day to day, you might not, you know, throw it into conversation, but the piece itself was so fun to work on. And we did this for a client called mornings.co.uk, which is all about sort of better sleep, how to get the best kind of sleep, what products are good for that. So it kind of had that link in there. And we sort of just like looked at, we knew that ASMR was trending. We knew that there were sleepy podcasts and that was something that people were talking about and found interesting. And we wanted to see how music sort of played into that. So we did like a huge analysis of songs that were on Spotify, and we sort of looked at the tempo and the beat and the lyrics to find out which artists had the best songs for drifting off to sleep to. And it did so well. I think it got 106 links or something like that after 21 days of outreach. And I think the reason that it was so interesting was that anyone anywhere can listen to music, and there are similarities in certain places that have like the same interest in music, but it can be totally different elsewhere. So we had this pop culture appeal of the artists that were trending. We had sort of artists that were maybe lesser known but really, really celebrated in certain countries and cultures and things like that. But also we had like the scientific element of the beat, what to use when you want to fall asleep, which I think is sort of one of the reasons it did so well. Another one that we did which did really well, and it was one of my favorite pieces to work on, it was absolutely like a mammoth task to work on, but it was the most beautiful gardens And we did this for one of our affiliate sites called House Fresh. So again, sort of linking the air quality of being outdoors to beautiful gardens around the world. And it got 306 links, I think. It got covered by places like TripAdvisor and Timeout and things like that because we had the travel vertical. We had gardens that you can go visit that are like tourist attractions. We had like unexpected places that you could go and visit that had really beautiful secret gardens. So there were all these tangents we could go off of. But the designs were really beautiful. And one of the things that we did, again, it was kind of like a map piece. So a lot of the campaigns that we do are, you know, maps because we have the regional, the national, different countries, things like that. And we try and look at findings that are interesting or surprising. So instead of just saying, this is this because of this, we want to find out why. So why is this garden beautiful? What do people like about it? Are there any surprising findings? Is there somewhere that's like a city that's got like a garden that's like really hidden? We sort of really went into it and it did so Well, and I know that's like blowing our own trumpet, but there are 2 pieces that even still after like sort of months of putting them out there is still picking up links because they have this sort of like mass appeal, I think.

Can't really talk about campaigns I work on anymore, mostly because they're not really mine and also NDAs. So these 2 campaigns that I'm going to talk about have nothing whatsoever to do with me, but I just liked them. The first one was actually created by a journalist called Lucas Shaw who works Bloomberg, and he did this bit of analysis which found critics and fans have never disagreed more about movies. So essentially he opens the piece and he's saying, like, you know, I'm getting the sense that fans think 2022 has been a great year for movies, but critics, I feel like, think it's the worst. So that was just his sense. And he went away to get the data to see if that was true. So they used data from Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and IMDb, and they looked at the audience scores and critic scores for the 10 biggest movies from every year this century to better understand 2022 in context. And he actually found— I mean, it is— he sort of says in the article, it may seem as though critics typically pan the year's biggest hits, but that's not the case. Audiences do tend to give blockbusters a higher score than critics. But the average gap in their ratings is usually around 5 points. So 5 points on a 100-point scale, that's not a huge gap. But in 2022, audiences have given the top 10 movies an average score of more than 19 points higher than critics, by far the biggest difference at any point in this century. And I love this stuff anyway, but what I really like about this piece in particular is that it's going back through the years. So it's kind of cool that he had a sense that 2022 felt different to him, just anecdotally reading stories. He's like, it feels different to me. So he went and got the data. And that piece, it's great. As I say, it was written by a journalist. So obviously journalists don't do outreach for their own pieces. It is on a major news platform. Bloomberg is a major news platform and it has links from 196 domains according to Ahrefs. And I think it's interesting because obviously like that's performed like that without any PR. Not that, not that that works normally, right? Like you need a massive platform like journalists do to get links without PR. But I think that like, it's, it's nonetheless like interesting to me. It's unusual that you see a story like that written by a journalist getting links from that many domains.

In Remoters, the most popular page after the homepage that has more backlinks is an article that I create at the start of the year, every year with the trends and stats about remote work. And I remember after COVID happened, I very quickly updated it with the latest trends, changes, and COVID stats and how it started to pick up. Doing zero outreach, all of a sudden it has more than 2,000 backlinks. Because a lot of the press started to cover it. They saw that I had gathered data not only from my own website, but in general, the trend, what I was seeing also using Google Trends, keyword tools showing the search behavior of the user, how it was changing, asking for also testimonials of a lot of the people that I knew that were starting to work remotely.

Love your points about the resource link building stuff. I think that it obviously, like, there are some things, as you noted, that you need, you need to think about. So like that nothing gets links spontaneously if it doesn't rank for search query. I think also though that something which I obviously I haven't worked for an agency for a long time and I feel like NeoMam are unusually good at this. Like, so NeoMam used to track the performance of campaigns after the initial outreach period has finished. I've worked for a lot of agencies and didn't really do that super actively. And something I think that you often find is that campaigns do get links over time, like long after you've finished outreaching the thing. And I think that's something that we should track and also something that we should go back and revisit our old campaigns and just make sure that they're well optimized. Because like, I think if you think about how we build campaigns, they're often using technologies which quickly become obsolete. So I've definitely like gone back and looked at campaigns which I was involved with making in the past, and they don't work anymore. And of course, like, that's not gonna continue to get links if it's— if the thing's broken, right? So I think like kind of working that into your process as well could be really important. And also, as you mentioned, interlinking. Please don't orphan these pages.

So to start wrapping up, I want to ask you for a last tip, a last resource or tool that you also find useful.

I personally love BuzzSumo's content analyzer. I've been blathering on about this for years. I am not, like, I have no affiliation to BuzzSumo. I just think it's a really great tool. So it allows you to find the most shared articles on any topic, any site, any section of a site, plus you can do site or site section plus topic searches. And I've just over the years just found it incredibly useful. So when I say I start with the publications I want coverage on, often I start on BuzzSumo by doing searches on the publications I want coverage on. But also, I mean, like, so BuzzSumo is a paid-for tool. If you can't have access to that. Equally useful, I think, is just good old Google searches, Google News searches. There's a bunch of newsletters which I love. So Iona Townsend does an excellent newsletter called The Grapevine where she just shares all of the campaigns that she's found in any given month, and it's just excellent. Mark Porter's been doing a newsletter called Content Curated for a few years now. Also really love that. And Paddy Moogan, who I used to work with back at Distilled, he went on to found Aera and he writes something called the Link Building Newsletter, which is also great, I think.

So I also second Sumo as well, because you can kind of see the articles that got the most engagement and why they did. You can kind of look further into that. So like, what was so good about the storytelling? What kind of method did the campaign use? So absolutely stand by that one. It's such a good tool. We use Reddit a lot at Near Mom. So especially when we're sort of looking for that initial campaign feedback before it gets sort of signed off and put out there, we put it on Reddit and we sort of see like people will tell you what they think on Reddit. So it's a really great way to get feedback, but also you can pretty much find like a data thread for anything. It's kind of good for like idea gen as well. So there's a lot of people on there just talking about things that they find interesting. Pinterest again is also good. TikTok, maybe lesser so because we don't really use it. In our like idea generation, but it's a great way to see sort of what people are talking about. Specifically when we've had campaigns that are like more musically linked, it's quite kind of a good tool for that. Like the stuff that TikTok's doing for music is incredible. We also have a swipe file at Near Mom, which kind of looks at every campaign that we've sort of found interesting, whether it's a competitor or a different agency or a similar sort of client name or something like that. We put that in there and sort of see. how many links it got, how well it did, things that we loved about it, different formats. And then also again, Campaign Newsletter. So second, Dionna, because she's amazing. I'm lucky to work with her every day. Content Curated is good. There was a podcast called Content Deconstructed, which I think isn't sort of broadcasting right now, but there's some good episodes on there. There's one with our creative lead, James Barnes, which is really awesome. And he sort of looks at how We try to pick apart ideas before a journalist gets to, which is a really sort of useful thing that we've done at EMMAM for a good while now.

Those are great tips and resources. One that I really like, and I think that not that many or as many people that should are using it, is Glimpse. Glimpse is a freemium add-on that you can install over Chrome and it overlays with Google Trends. So whenever you go to Google Trends to search patterns, trends, et cetera, they will add additional insights inside the Google Trends UI and report. So for example, they will publish or show you if there's like a specific trend going on and how many searches per month and if it has gotten down or up. And they allow you also to receive alerts from any searches. And they also have this discover section now. That allows you to search for any trends. So for example, any category. So if you add for jobs, it will show you like remote working jobs or job platforms or future jobs. And they will show you the growth year over year to show you if there's any positive or negative trends that you want to leverage. Thank you very much, Hannah and Jess. You have been wonderful. I really appreciate all of the ideas, all of the tips, the advice. I know that after this edition, many more SEOs who are not necessarily focused on link building now will be whenever creating a content piece, even if it is not for the sake of links only, are more aware of things that they can do to facilitate their linkability for sure. So it has been really, really valuable. And if you liked this episode, remember to like the video, subscribe to the channel to not miss any episode and follow Hannah, follow Jess over Twitter. You have the handles. Thank you very much.