Link Building & Outreach in an SEO Process: Common Mistakes & Tips for Success

Welcome to a new, very link-oriented edition of Crawling Mondays. In today's episode, we are going to cover link building and outreach in the SEO process. I have to say that for me, link building tends to be the most complex area and activity in general in SEO because it's the one that shouldn't be directly influenced by us, right? That is the whole point of links.

They—

this should be endorsements that come from an outside perspective that should be completely natural, right? And today with me I have 2 people that I highly respect in the link building industry who are fantastic, who are highly, highly, highly experienced on this, who I am very, very happy to introduce right now. Carrie Ross, she's the co-founder of Rise at 7. Carrie, how are you?

Hello, really, really good.

Thank you.

Thank you for inviting me on.

Thank you for coming. And on the other hand, I have Giselle Navarro. She's the Operations Director at Neomam. Hello, Giselle. How are you?

Hey, how are you? I'm good.

Thank you both for coming today, for connecting today. I know that you have pretty hectic schedules, so I really appreciate you coming to share a little bit more about link building. And in particular, I would also like to, to go through a few aspects of the outreach process, right? That in general, it tends to be potentially the trickiest part or the less straightforward part, at least for those of us in SEO who are not necessarily focusing in link building, in the day-to-days of link building, right? So to start a little bit, the first thing that comes to mind sometimes to me is that some people still in the industry have this outdated view of link building. Just, you can still see from time to time whenever link building is mentioned, so it's like, oh, link building, the, the worst part of SEO, or the, the spammy part of SEO, things like that still, right? But as far as I, I see, right, and I can imagine that you too, this is a very outdated view of what is link building. So I want to ask you, what does a link building process look like?

I mean, I think this is where I break your heart and I tell you actually the process is the same.

Yeah.

So the process itself, I don't think it has changed that much. So whichever approach you take or whichever tactic you choose, you still need 3 key things, which is a plan, you know, a strategy as to where you want to build the links, how you want to build the links, prospects or like a list of sites and contacts that you want to you know, get links from, or at least prompt in the direction of hopefully giving you a link. And then, you know, a strategy in terms of outreach of how you're going to approach them. That never changed. It has always been the same. I think that what has certainly evolved, and perhaps there's people who have not caught up with it yet, is the fact that there's different tactics and, and there is a different perception over what what link building is in this day and age. I think, you know, we do have a— Carrie is a great example of it— we have a new generation of digital PR professionals that are putting, they're putting an emphasis on links that PR, traditional PRs have never had before. And they're having as a goal within, you know, brand building campaigns, which is not that traditional link building you know, mentality. And then I also think since we had blogger outreach campaigns, then that has evolved into influencer marketing today. And then brands are kind of building links whilst also tapping onto audiences. And it's a different approach to it. Still, you can have link building as a layer within it. And I think people don't see that sometimes. And then I think the last level of link building that has also changed a bit is what used to be, you know, spinning articles and spamming heavily, that then turned into guest posting and spamming heavily. And I think now it's kind of moving on to informational content that, you know, supports resource link building but also can rank for keywords that are valuable and I think all these different levels are kind of evolving, and perhaps there's people who don't see that, but the backend, I think the process, the key elements, they remain the same, which, you know, it makes sense because there's only so many ways in which you can come up with a strategy and prospect and, you know, email people or get in touch or get their attention, I guess. So yeah, that's what I think.

Yeah, I actually back everything that Gazelle says. So from my perspective, I guess I've always gone down the digital PR tactic, um, to landing links. When I first started in the industry, I remember like I, I paid for links. I did. That was 6, 7 years ago. I've been there. I did blogger outreach. I, I did like guest post stuff. And that was the norm back then. And I think this new digital PR tactic that came around, I think other kind of SEOs was like, that's not real SEO, like people are not actually building links for SEO. And I was thinking, we are literally, I'm just creating stories that journalists love that much that they link to it naturally. So I think it's the tactics that have changed. But what's more interesting actually, which is why I love that we're talking about this now, is I'm actually seeing more and more emails, um, as somebody who owns a business of people coming to me asking me for links to their content. And this is like, I'm talking old school kind of guest posts or like spamming me. I get so much spam, like, do you want to buy all these links and stuff? But I'm seeing so much more of it recently. So I don't know whether, um, people are trying that tactic again. Um, it's quite interesting to see a couple of our clients are working with us on digital PR campaigns, but then working with other agencies that are more like targeted directory link building and that sort of thing. And it works. It's working on those sort of cases. But I think, yeah, the kind of old school forum spamming or kind of buying links and all that sort of stuff, I'm hoping people are changing. I think there's so much education online now, especially on Twitter. Everybody's seeing what not to do. So I think there are more tactics than digital PR, 100%. And we trial them all. And but I think the outreach process of building links always stays the same. We are creating something good or a resource or something informational to get links back to our client site. And that never changes.

I love that you mentioned this because in general, I think now that we're talking about this, it follows the same type of in parallel, right? Like evolution that goes in hand with the maturity of the whole industry. So for example, if you think about it in content development, right? still a few years ago and some people still, right? They talk about SEO content, right? Nowadays, like you realise that the content should be for people and then you can also align that content to follow SEO best practices to make it also relevant to the way that people search, right? At the end of the day, it's optimising anyway for people. It's not for search engines. It's the same with links because at the end of the day, it's what you mentioned well. You need to create a brand. You need to create an asset.

Content.

content, something that is relevant, attractive, useful, something that should be meaningful to link to. And then it's about identifying the best way to get that asset the visibility that it deserves because it's something that is really good in order to attract the links and endorsements that this asset, this great asset deserves. Which are the other misunderstandings that you see happening again and again when you interact with clients about the link building process and the things that you tend to clarify again and again with them to, to make it happen.

I think from the sort of things that come up mostly for me are quantity versus quality. That's always a debate of, you know, is it how many links versus the quality of them? And I think still to this day, we all, we all can't really define what quality means in a link. Um, I think we do. I have, I have my own theories even, and Stephen will disagree with me. And I think every single person has an opinion, and we can do as many equations and all that sort of stuff as we like, but really understanding the quality of a link Can be anything. Um, and I think what it boils down to from, from my perspective is I've learned that what our clients really want is traffic and sales. So although I'm building all these links for them, trying to prove quality of a link is maybe how many people are clicking on that link. So like, I, I've talked about this quite a lot where I, I once built a link on Forbes just because my client wanted a link on Forbes. I think Forbes DA is, you know, in your high 90s, something like that. And so, you know, people would say that's a very high quality link. But when I built that link, I think around 3 people clicked on it. Um, so for my client, they're like, well, how much quality is that actually driving to our website? And, you know, is that useful for us, etc., etc.? And another client of ours has built— worked with an agency who built maybe over 2,000 high, high, very high quality links over the last year, and it's not moved the needle. But maybe it's because relevancy. So I think the quality versus quantity debate always happens. And then we have the whole nofollow versus follow. So those are the 2 things that come up mostly for me. Um, constantly kind of trying to prove to clients. And luckily we've got there because we try to give them other metrics than just the typical SEO ones, whether that's traffic, engagement, social noise. We always try to add something extra with our content to track. But yeah, those are the 2 things that I think are mostly disputed or just talked about.

And this is the reality of big media websites right now. Unfortunately, they nofollow all external links at the end of the day. But indeed, as you mentioned, you are not going to say, no, I don't want that you link to me if the link is going to be nofollow, please. No, of course it's not the best possible ideal type of outcome. Of course you wanted that link to be followed, but if it is nofollow, okay, it's an amazing endorsement. I do really like though, and I guess that this is why the new type of attributes came into place by Google because it's like now they are saying like we may or may not take them into consideration depending on the context, which I think it makes complete sense.

I think what's interesting in particular regarding that is I think we actually think that, you know, more national papers are like giving out nofollowed links. But what we've done is we've created a bit of like a tracker. So every single campaign that we run, pulled into kind of like a master track sheet, and we can look at every single link, whether it's followed or nofollowed. And I think there's about 3,000 links on there from every single national paper, from UK, US, international. And we have, um, this stat I pulled the other day, and it's like 87% of the links that we've built out of those 3,000 are all followed. So we're seeing more kind of publications offer followed links. I think we got a followed link on the Express the other day, and we was all like, Whoa, that's weird because I haven't had a followed link from the Express for about 4 years. And so they had like blanket nofollow. So we're seeing people kind of change things up. And I know like Daily Mail, they got penalized massively. Whether that's because they was constantly giving out nofollowed links, I don't know. There's so many things around the Daily Mail debate. Um, but yeah, I think that's really, really interesting. And, um, like I said, there's times where I've built Daily Mail links that are nofollowed that have drove over 100,000 visits. So I am not turning that one down.

In our case, I guess because we do work, we are not an SEO agency and we do work with in-house SEO teams. They do tend to understand, you know, they have their own value that they put on links and they have their own view over nofollow, nofollow. We don't have to do as much education, but I think what I do find myself doing lots of education on, it's just the community and The big misunderstanding is that link building is wrong. You know, that it's wrong, that it's dangerous, that whichever way you're looking at it, you're paying for links, that you're spamming. I think to me that's the biggest rock that we're carrying and we've been carrying for a long time. And, you know, we've rebranded link building. We made it sound more palatable. We tried to remove negative connotations over time. I think now we're back to kind of be more comfortable with the idea of it. But in a way, I think that, you know, I, I've written about it before and I've said it before, it's like links are just such a natural part of the web that trying to control them to the point where we want to exterminate them, it just doesn't, it doesn't compute as to the way in which the web works. So it's just natural digital behavior. And within that, you have the follow, nofollow, you have the different types of sites linking to you, you have the different range of authority, you have, you know, the traffic and no traffic. And it doesn't— all of that together, that's the web. So when you start trying to control it too much, I think that's when you, when, you know, you start building patterns and things that make it dangerous, or if you try to automate it too much, then suddenly you, you end up spamming and that makes it dangerous. Again, I think there's ways in which you can go out of your, you know, of the safe route, let's say, of just create a good website, tell good stories, you know, create valuable content, and all the ways out in which Google has been super clear as to what they want to see. And I— but I don't even think it's Google that they want to see that. I mean, fine, they want to, but that's because users want to. Like, no, I hate searching for something and have to go to page 3 because the first 3 pages are just rubbish.

The way I think about it is links are not necessarily the strategy. It's more a result of good content. So good content, good marketing, big brands, um, and buy products. Exactly. Good products. You will get links. And I think, I guess, old school link building used to think about how do I get the link? Okay, I need to create good content. And it's just flipping it on its head. Create good content and then you will get the link. And I think that's what we've all realized. If we need something good on our site to actually link to. People aren't just going to link to your website for nothing. You can't just expect them to do that. It needs to add value or add something such as a resource or information for a user, a journalist, or editor in any way. And so I think it's the thought process of, in that way, of how we create content that just gets links naturally.

100%. That is great. And speaking about that, right, which are the most common mistakes, errors, simple fundamental errors that you see happening again and again In link building processes? Is it the misuse of a few tools or tactics or the misunderstanding of something? What is something that really, whenever you see it, like it really bothers you because you have seen this thousands of times happen and it can make or break a link building process?

I mean, to me, it's not going to be a surprise to most people, but to me, the number one thing is automation, period. Like, that's it. Fine, There's tools that come with that. There's other things that come into it. But I think it's that mentality of trying to scale and thinking, oh, the way in which we're going to scale is through automation. As that's like the only way in which you could even consider earning more links than the minimum. I think, you know, there's— I always say this when I get asked, like automation, there's an absolute place for it. And I, I personally think, you know, if you don't need a person sitting on the other end making decisions, or if they're going to be wasting like valuable time executing a task that, you know, it's— it doesn't require a brain, sure, automate it all the way. Like, don't just put a person to just die in front of a computer doing something that is meaningless. Um, but if the, the goal of automation is so that you have you know, hundreds and thousands of, of sites on it on a list that you didn't even check so you can just shotgun outreach, then you're spamming. And that's not, you know, that's, that's where again we go back to people thinking, oh, link building is dangerous and bad and all these bad things. Um, so I think what, what we have been showing, and I think my generation and, and the generations that come after Is that we can scale this idea of just links that keep coming when you do outreach with well-rounded campaigns. So that's a way of scaling that doesn't require that you just put 10 tools hooked up with a script so that you don't have to even look at anything.

One question, when you talk about automation, is it about outreach or something else too? Both.

So the list building. So let's say, for example, I think if you think of, if you look at any of the campaigns that Carrie does with her team, I can't imagine they start by saying, okay, what keywords do we put in the string to prospect and quickly scrape the web for 2,000 websites? And how do we clean up that list? You know, they don't start like that. They start thinking of, yeah, okay, what piece of content we're going to create? What story we want to tell? What You know, it has nothing to do with this idea. And I think automation in link building gets used a lot with prospecting, so finding the sites, within qualifying, which to me blows my mind, but like using, you know, metrics to qualify automatically without even checking the website. And then it gets used in outreach, which you could argue it's like a good place because just, you know, sending those emails, if you actually have a template that never changes and you do no personalization other than, you know, field name and field whatever, field website, uh, then perhaps automating outreach, it could be fine. But I, I've also seen the issues with that. So for example, automating follow-ups, and then suddenly you do— it has happened, it happens really often that you email one person and somebody else gets back to you and say, hey, she forwarded me They forwarded me the story, I wanna cover it. And then suddenly you go and automatically follow up with that original person like they never forwarded the story. And then because you actually have it set up in 3 rounds of follow-up, then you follow up twice more on top of that. It's like those things happen when you are automating. And there are tools that actually are thinking their way around it. I think BuzzStream, they— I don't use it, but I do, I love them as, you know, a company. And I, I do know so many teams who use it, and they do use the outreach element of BuzzStream for automating like the emails and then putting the sending. Uh, and it's something that perhaps one day I'm not gonna be scared and I'm gonna try it again. But I think that's the thing is like thinking of link building, I mean like link building equals like Scale equals automation equals like tools and scripts and a Python thing that does everything for me. That to me is like the biggest mistake that has been made and keeps being made again and again.

I have my own website, Remoters, and oh my God, the amount of spam that we get of pitches of trying to guest post or guest blogging with you, whatever. And realistically, I have to say something, right? You could very well automate by following very simple rules, but it's like if some people, they don't care. I mean, hello, sir, Aleyda, I love your website because you talk about VPNs. It's like we have a single article about VPN in the whole website. The website is about remote work. So it's like not even segmenting, filtering, or doing a proper job to personalizing that automation at the end of the day, right? So it's even doing it and doing it in a bad way. I think that maybe you could try to balance things a little bit more out.

Yeah, so it's very interesting exactly what you said. So we use BuzzStream as a tool to do our outreach and I absolutely love that tool. Like I don't think I could live without BuzzStream. But the things that I don't do is the automation. So some of the things that make things easy, so you can easily drop people's first naming and all that sort of stuff, but It's so automated that you could literally say, okay, I read that article that you posted about, and then it has all the automation in there. So it looks as if it's personalized, but then you bulk send. And the way that I remember when I first started doing outreach, what we used to do is we had a travel campaign, and we had a list of, say, 2,000 travel journalists. We didn't really know where they wrote for or what sort of topics they talked about, but we put them into an email and we pressed send to 2,000 emails, and we just hoped for the best. So now it takes so much more time to do outreach. It does. You have to be more personalized. You have to understand what stories they talk about, and journalists move all the time, and etc., etc. So that automation just doesn't work. And I think it doesn't mean that you have to take a traditional PR approach and build relationships with journalists. I don't think you need to go for a drink with them or meals or anything like that. In fact, like I've worked in this industry five years, and I've only ever met one, and. maybe 1 or 2, something like that max. And so I don't think that's needed, but I think understanding what sort of content they are interested in, building a relationship on Twitter just by following their content, and that sort of thing is so super important now rather than just kind of getting an email of 2,000 and just pressing bulk send and hoping for the best.

Even in data, I understand that you need to accelerate certain things that could be time-consuming and doesn't necessarily need much of analysis, right? You definitely want to have a human to double-check, verify, validate, actually go to the website and see if they will likely cover your story because it makes sense for them instead of like clicking a button and making it happen on autopilot, right?

Yeah.

Like, no, not at all. How do you make that connection? The whole outreach process that I reckon is the one that I might think that tends to take a little bit more of a complexity. How do you deal with it and which would you say are the keys for success?

From my perspective, I think the first thing that I do, which I've kind of touched on, is I understand the journalists and what they talk about. So I Google similar content, similar stories, similar campaigns to mine. So say if I've got a campaign around Netflix as an example, I'll then look at every single journalist that's ever spoke about Netflix, maybe in the last year, and then I will look at everything related to Netflix even down to Disney+ or Amazon Prime because they're usually the types of people that are going to also talk about my campaign. So I gather a list of all of these contacts and follow them. So I'll either look at their content on Twitter, I'll look at their sort of articles that they've wrote in the last 6 months and just understand this is the most time-consuming part to be honest. But that planning part that Giselle mentioned is the most important because it's understanding where are the right places to go. So I spend at least a day to 2 days doing that, and that obviously takes some time. And then the next stage is putting together my story. And when I put together my story, I do write a sort of press release, but not like a traditional PR press release. It's not an outreach email as such, but it's kind of like I pitch a headline. So take the Daily Mail. I take the Daily Mail, if it was a writer at the Daily Mail, and then I recreate their story, but using my content. So I'll create the headline just like a Daily Mail would. And so I kind of create this visual story so then they can see, okay, this is what our readers would actually be interested in. So that visualization part. But once you press send is not where it ends. So I usually kind of then engage with them further. Um, I, I usually chase up once, but that's like maybe 4 to 5 days later. But I guess the, the hardest part is obviously getting them to notice you at the beginning. That's the hardest part. And I think to get noticed, it's engaging with them on social media. It's sending them content that they actually will love, because that's the biggest problem that people do. They just send out crap. And even, even my staff have done it, and I'm like, yeah, but you know she doesn't write about that sort of stuff, so why would you email that story to her? Like, let's send them stuff that they are interested in. So that's how you capture their attention, because now we have journalists receiving content that they love, that they actually email us and say, Can you send us more of this please? Like, what have you got on next week? Etc., etc. So that's that relationship building. So much now that whenever a Rise of 7 person emails them, they'll know it's something good because we have to send them good content that they're interested in. But knowing that it takes time, it doesn't happen overnight. It probably takes around 6 months to understand really what people are interested in.

Yeah, I think I agree with all of that. I think that that preparation and actually that cares. It's that— it's just caring, really. I mean, that they're showing caring through everything. Uh, but I, I, I used to always, when I would train new people, always tell them, you know, there's 3 Bs. These are busy people. There's 3 Bs. So you have to be brief, and you have to be blunt, and you have to be basic. And, and I think over time these things have changed the way that I see them. So for me, being brief I like short pitches that touch upon the key thing that I think that one person is gonna care, which means that my lists are really segmented. So instead of having like the blanket pitch, sometimes it's just worth going super deep and say, well, these are the people who care about these who also wrote about this other thing. So then the way I'm gonna write that pitch, it's gonna be so straightforward they get exactly what they would care about based on what I know that they have covered, as Kari said. So I think being brief in terms of right away, you know, they need to figure out what— who are you, what is this, you know, what do you want, like super quickly. And you see it with journalists, every week there's some PR person or media relations person that goes on Twitter and says, oh journalists, can you give me tips on how to pitch? And they're like, Short, short. And, you know, if— to me, a good test is just send yourself the email, open it on your phone, see how many scrolls it takes, how many times. And, and really, like, how many scrolls it takes for you to even get to the meat.

Yeah.

You know, and if you don't do that, you don't know. And, and sometimes it really is tough, you know. You see it and you're like, oh wow, I really, you know, I, I planted the seed, but it's all the way down there. And they wouldn't— if they don't get to to pass the half of the email, they're never gonna see it. So I think that's where being blunt comes, like from that headline, that subject line, that, you know, thinking of it as headline. And then right away, you know, here's the information, here's it. Do you have visuals? Put them high up, like get them to see something quickly. So try to keep it short and get them to see something quickly. And then being basic to me is just keeping it simple. So sometimes I, and I, I, I still see it, probably I hope people are not doing with journalists. I know they do it with sites because again, I also have sites and I get pitched and they, they close the email with like, oh, if you want to share it with your social media followers or, you know, just, just send in your newsletter or maybe link to it. It's like, just give me one option. Like you give me 3, I'm gonna, if I do any, I'm gonna do the easier one and the link is never the easier Yeah. But in general, I think keeping it simple with also that segmentation of saying, right, so I will focus, laser focus this approach, that makes it easier for them because you're just— it's— we do say spoon-feeding, which it doesn't sound good, but you kind of— you're trying to do that because they don't have time. And as many journalists have Particularly here in the UK, you know, they have said multiple times that they have quotas that are crazy, like 10 articles a day, things like that. You have to tell them quick. You have to tell them what, you have to tell them quick. And you can't just go around in circles too much. It doesn't matter. If they have questions, they will ask. And this is the number one thing I always say, like, don't include everything. If they have questions, they will ask. So you can— I like showing range. So an easy way to show range is, for example, if you cover something, I don't know, there's something about celebrities like Hollywood actresses, actors, whatever. And instead of going and naming every single one, just show the 2 most diverse and say, from this to that. So we've covered blah, blah, blah, blah, from this to that, from this person to that person, from this country to that country, from this city to that. From this first step of the, you know, practical value elements, or like from how you set up these to how you sell it at the end. So I don't need to go and say there's 10 parts and in the first one I already show them range so that they can come back to me and be like, oh, okay, I have— I actually am interested in this and this and that. Um, so they will ask, that's their job. Like journalists ask questions, that's their thing, like that's what they do. So, and if you're not pitching to journalists at the same time, I think because of the things that you were saying, Aleyda, like we're all getting pitched all the time. You have 100 emails that get to your inbox and you don't even really are a publisher in that sense. And so, you know, wasting your time with a pitch, no, just tell me quickly so I figure it out. If I want it, I tell you right away. You want it for them to be able to, on their phone, to just reply and be like, yes. No, done, you know.

Now that you mention it, it clicks completely. Those people that I have said— those very few people that I have said yes to guest blogging, because I actually saw that they were experts in the field. So for example, right now with COVID right, I got a few really good pitches because this was an actual mental health specialist, someone who is actually specialized, and the other is about is from an ergonomic type of website. So this person does this for a living. They know how bad it can be for your back to sit in a bad position the whole day. And the way they got in touch is like, this is happening right now when everybody's stuck at home and their mental health is going crap and they are sitting bad. So do you think that it will be useful for your audience that I write about the ways to overcome these issues. I was like, yes, please, it does make sense, thank you very much. But they came up directly with, as you mentioned, the headline, the topic right away. And of course, this wasn't a generic writer who didn't know about the topic, right? This was a specialist.

I think what you highlighted there as well is that person that emailed you, what she did is she made it relevant to now. So straight away, you was like, yeah, my back, my mental health, or You kind of like identified with her, her story, and you knew that it was relevant to an audience right now. And I think so much we see, so much content that's maybe irrelevant to now, or they don't necessarily tie it back to something that's going on that people actually care about. And what I always say is, number one, the first thing, what you actually mentioned before, is send the email to yourself and read it. And there's so many times where I've wrote an outreach email and I've read the first 2, 3 lines and I'm like, oh my God, I'm already bored. And I don't, I'm already bored of this. I haven't gone straight to the point. What it is, is sales. It's just like sales. You've got to capture their attention, tell them what they're getting in a couple of sentences max. And I think that's how we need to think about pitch and outreach nowadays. People have not got the time. They definitely haven't got the patience. I haven't got patience. We need to capture attention very quick. And I think a journalist from The Times— so now people are targeting the big nationals every day because that's, that's the norm now. People are getting national links every single day and big agencies are doing that every single day with all their clients. So the Times journalist emailed, no, she tweeted out a screenshot of her inbox and she had 600 unread emails and she said, look at all of these PRs emailing me every single day with new content, new stories. I open maximum 4 of them. So you guys need to realize how number one to get me to open it is your subject title. So you've got to make it snappy. Like what emails do you open when you get email marketing? So I think you've got to really send it to yourself and understand, would I open that email? I'm like, no, I wouldn't. Let me change that. Or, and when you have opened it, would I cover that story? Is it too long? Am I already bored? Do I already know what this is about? So I think sending it to yourself is the number one thing, but then also send it to somebody like your partner, your mum. Do they care about what you've wrote, or do they go, oh, that's cool? I think creating content that people identify with that's relevant to now is the most interesting, important thing. If it's just, you know, oh, I've pulled together a list of the top 10 tools to use this summer or something like that. Like, it's— that's so old school. It's like journalists and like publishers are looking for something a bit different. They can create that in the space of 10 minutes themselves, so they will not take your content just to give you a link for that. So yeah, it's, it's thinking about what's relevant now is, is key and what people can identify with.

I want to finish with a last tip, right? Something that is highly overlooked by most people.

I think personally this is something that I've seen agencies and teams catch up with, but running link reclamation whilst they have campaigns going instead of slotting it in at another point or leaving it to some other agency to do link reclamation or the client. I think that's really like, it's key right now, particularly if you want to you know, be— do a big push for a piece of content and then leave it be so that then you have all the organic links coming. If you actually leave a bunch of unlinked brand mentions, you're gonna get another bunch of unlinked brand mentions over time. So trying to control those situations where somebody covers and doesn't link and jump right into it as soon as you can and go as hard as you can, it pays off. Like, we had a 2 weeks ago, we had already closed the campaign for one of the companies for a client, and the Reuters team picked up a map that we made from Visual Capitalist, or like a publisher that is well regarded in terms of maps, and they created to them. And it took us like 3 weeks of intense going after every single person in the Reuters team and being like, please link, and, and using Visual Capitalist who had covered as our example in the email to say, hey, they credited this client as the original source, so please can you just credit and showing that. And once we got the Reuters team to update that, then we went after every single other person that picked it up from Reuters and said, hey, Reuters team just updated it. So it just— if you actually do it as it happens, you have much better chance of actually getting those things changed than if you leave it for a link reclamation campaign later on. a year from now when the article is already super like in the depths of the website that nobody even cares about. The writer doesn't even write there anymore. Don't do that. Like try to have a layer of link reclamation as you're doing your campaigns and it really pays off.

I think I literally back everything that you guys say. And one of the biggest things that I say to all of my team is when we launch a campaign, there's so much pressure in the space of 4 weeks to deliver results. And people expect, you know, after a month like, oh my God, why have I not got like 10 to 15 links or at least minimum? And there's that pressure to obviously deliver quite fast when actually some of the best forms of content actually deliver links across a year. And so what I would say is don't give up, give yourself a KPI across a year and find opportunities to constantly push that out. So an example of that would be, so we did this report using external data so it weren't data that the client-owned, but it was a report around— it's a bit grim, but it was a report around choking deaths in like children and elderly. And the reason that we created this report, it was for a health and safety training company who resuscitate children and all that sort of stuff. And they saw a rise in stories of children choking on like balloons and things. It was hitting the headlines, so it was a topic that was being talked about. So we decided to pull some data from like ONS reports and other kind of like child health child safety, charity data, and things like that. We pulled this data into one, created a written report so that whenever a story hit the press, we went, went out with that. So I think 3 months after we launched the report, I think we had about 18 links into the report, and then about 3 months later, um, Robinson's Fruit Shoots, the drinks, um, company, they, um, got pulled by Trading Standards because children were choking on the lids. So straight away that hit the press, it hit the headlines, and journalists needed a, you know, a resource to get data from of like, how bad is this? Like, is it a thing that's happening in the country? And, you know, what is the— how serious is it? So we then pushed out our data again throughout the year so much that because we got around 20 links into the report, if you type in choking death data in the UK, the report ranks number 1, and now it's got over 150 links. We haven't done any outreach with it. People have just linked to it naturally because whenever they're looking for data, it ranks number 1. So I would definitely advise another tip is to in your headline copy or any sort of like remote working report or anything like that, call it a report. Say, mention the word data and tag it up with the year. So it could be like the 2020 version, 2019, etc. So journalists will see that Google ranks it and, and they use it as a resource and link back to it. And so yeah, I think all of those tips are the best, but I think, um, Giselle mentioned before about using extra, using your own data, and I think that is just the best thing ever. I did a talk about a year ago where I showed some examples of brands using their own data, creating content out of that, and getting thousands and thousands of links. One of my favorite campaign examples was from TomTom. So TomTom sat navs, and they use their own traffic congestion data to live show which cities are the busiest. And that has probably— I think it's on about 3,000 links at the minute, from CNN to Bloomberg to BBC, you name it. But what I said is you have experts there that can comment on this stuff, and that is gold for publications like the BBC or the Daily Mail.

They—

those sort of publications need experts. They're crying out for experts because all they do, journalists, is Google it. That's all they do is they try to get experts or data to back up their stories because there's so much fake news out of there. They need to get reliable sources. So using your own data, using your experts in-house is so valuable. And I think actually the least sexiest brands have so much more to say, but people don't necessarily know that they have. So it's kind of like they need to wake up and realize you have got a voice, you've got so much to give, you just need to realize that and then they fly.

That is amazing. That is amazing for sure. Oh, so thank you. Thank you very much. I think that these insights, hopefully it has already changed the minds and the view that many who are watching this already had from lean building. Thank you very much for sharing with me. Of course, if you want to learn more about lean building, follow Kari, follow Giselle. You will see their handles here on Twitter and websites so you can follow them too. And if you have any questions, any doubts, make sure to leave them in the video too, below here in the comment section. I'll make sure to tag them so they can reply any doubts that you may have. And of course, I will put my YouTuber hat right now to make the engagement happen. If you like this video, remember to like it, please, and subscribe to the channel in case you haven't, because there are many more videos as cool as these ones coming over And thank you again for watching. Hopefully you have a great day. Bye-bye.

Roni Condes.