Creating Influencer-Targeted Content to Earn Links + Coverage

Most SEO campaigns need three kinds of links to be successful; targeting your content to influencers can get you 2/3 of the way there. In this Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers the tactics that will help your content get seen and shared by those with a wide and relevant audience.

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about how to create content that is specifically influencer-targeted in order to earn the links and attention and amplification that you often need.

Most SEO campaigns need 3 types of links:

So it's the case that most SEO campaigns, as they're trying to earn the rankings that they're seeking, are trying to do a few things. You're trying to grow your overall Domain Authority. You're trying to get some specific keyword terms and phrases ranking on your site for those terms and phrases.

So you need kind of three kinds of links. This is most campaigns.

1. Links from broad, high-Domain Authority sites that are pointing — you kind of don't care — anywhere on your site, the home page, internal pages, to your blog, to your news section. It's totally fine. So a common one that we use here would be like the New York Times. I want the New York Times to link to me so that I have the authority and influence of a link from that domain and, hopefully, lots of domains like them, very high-Domain Authority domains.

2. Links to specific high-value keyword-targeted pages, hopefully, hopefully with specific anchor text, and that's going to help me boost those individual URLs' rankings. So I want this page over here to link to me and say "hairdryers," to my page that is keyword targeted for the word "hairdryers." Fingers crossed.

3. Links to my domain from other sites, in my sector or niche, that provide some of that topical authority and influence to help tell Google and the other search engines that this is what my site is about, that I belong in this sphere of influence, that I'm semantically and topically related to words and phrases like this. So I want appliancegal.com to link to my site if I'm trying to rank in the world of hairdryers and other kinds of appliances.

So of these, for one and three, we won't talk about two today, but for one and three, much of the time the people that you're trying to target are what we call in the industry influencers, and these influencers are going to be lots of people. I've illustrated them all here — mostly looking sideways at each other, not exactly sure why that is — but bloggers, and journalists, and authors, and conference organizers, and content marketers, and event speakers, and researchers, and editors, and podcasters, and influencers of a wide, wide variety. We could fill up the whole board with the types of people who are in the influencer world or have that title specifically, but they tend to share a few things in common. They are trying to produce content of one kind or another. They're not dissimilar from us. They're trying to produce things on the web, and when they do, they need certain elements to help fill in the gap. When they're looking for those gap-filling elements, that is your opportunity to earn these kinds of links.

Content tactics

So a few tactics for that. First off, one of the most powerful ones, and we've talked about this a little bit here on Whiteboard Friday, but probably not in depth, is...

A. Statistics and data. The reason that this is such a powerful tool is because when you create data, especially if it's either uniquely gathered by you, unique because you have it, because you can collect it and no one else can, or unique because you've put it together from many disparate sources, you're the editorial curator of that data and statistics, everyone like this needs those types of statistics and data to support or challenge their arguments or their assertions or their coverage of the industry, whatever it is.

• Why this works: This works well because this fills that gap. This gives them the relevant stats that they're looking for. Because numbers are easy to use and easy to cite, and you can say, "Feel free to link to this. You're welcome to copy this graph. You're welcome to embed this chart." All those kinds of things. That can make it even easier, but much of the time, just by having these statistics, you can do it.
• The key is that you have to be visible at the time that these people are looking for them, and that means usually ranking for very hard to discover, through at least normal keyword research, long-tail types of terms that use words like "stats," "data," "charts," "graphs," and kind of these question formats like when, how much, how many, number of, etc.

It's tough because you will not see many of those in your keyword research, because there's a relatively few number of these people searching in any given month for this type of gap-filling data, so you have to intuit often what you should title those things. Put yourself in these people's shoes and start Googling around for "What would I need if I had to write some industry coverage around this?" Then you'll come up with these types of things, and you can try modifying your keyword research queries or doing some Google Suggest stuff with these words and phrases.

B. Visual content. Visual content is exceptionally valuable in this case because, again, it fills a gap that many of these folks have. When you are a content marketer, or when you're a speaker at an event, or when you're an author or a blogger, you need visual content that will help catch the eye, that will break up the writing that you've done, and it's often much easier to get someone else's visual content and simply cite your source and link to it than it is to create visual content of your own. These people often don't have the resources to create their own visual content.

• Why this works: So, for everyone who's doing posts, and articles, and slide decks, and even videos, they say, "Why not let someone else do the work," and you can be that someone else and fill these gaps.
• Key: To do this well, you're going to want to appear in a bunch of visual content search mediums that these folks are going to use. Those are places like...
  • Google Images most obviously, but also
  • Pinterest
  • SlideShare, meaning take your visuals, put them up in some sort of slide format, give some context to them and upload them to SlideShare. The nice thing about SlideShare, SlideShare actually reproduces each individual slide as a visual, and then Google Images can search those, and so you'll often see SlideShare's results inside Google Images. So this can be a great end around for that.
  • Instagram search, many folks are using that especially if you're doing photos. You can see I've illustrated my own hair drying technique right here. This is clearly Rand. Look at me. I've got more hair than I know what to do with.
  • Flickr, still being used by many searchers, particularly because it has a Creative Commons search license, and that should bring up using a Creative Commons commercial use license that requires attribution with a link is your best bet for all of these platforms. It will mean you can get on lots of other Creative Commons visual and photography search engines, which can expose you to more of these types of people as they're doing their searches.

C. Contrarian/counter-opinions. The last one I'll cover here is contrarian or counter-opinions to the prevailing wisdom. So you might have an opinion like, "In the next three years, hairdryers will be completely obsolete because of X."

• Why it works: This works well because modern journalism has this idea and modern content, in fact, has this idea that they are supposed to create conflict and that they should cover both sides of an issue. In many industry specific sorts of fields, it's often the case that that is a gap that goes unfilled. By being that sort of challenger to conventional wisdom or conventional thinking, you can fill that gap.
• The key here is you want to either rank in Google search engine for some of those mid or long tail research type queries. These can be competitive, and so this is challenging, but presenting contrarian opinions is often great link bait. This is kind of a good way to earn links of all kinds in here.
• Second, I would also urge you to do a little bit of comment marketing and some social media platforms, because what you want to start is to build a brand where you are known for having this contrarian opinion on this conventional topic in your space so that people point all these influencers to you when they're asked about it. You're trying to build up this branding of, "Well, I don't agree with the conventional wisdom around hairdryers." Hairdryers might be a tough topic for that one, but certainly these other two can work real well.

So using these tactics, I hope that you can go reach out and fill some gaps for these influencers and, as a result, earning two of the three exact kind of links that you need in order to rank well in the search results.

And we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com