Knowing who your competitors are when it comes to link building is simple. Brands of similar keyword importance, appearing on the first page of Google, above you, are simply your competitors. The question is, how do you tell an engaging story and build keywords at the same time?
A page rank update (referring to Google page rank) is a day that Google will go through all of its listed sites and assign a new page rank. The new rank given could be higher or lower than previously. Sites that had no rank before could now be ranked and vice versa. This will change frequently depending on whether your content has had an increasing amount of shares / links to it or if your PR activity has increased, but no one really knows how often it’s updated.
Knowing how to set goals and measurable objectives in the planning of client’s online content makes you much more effective when it comes to delivering and reporting on results.
So what’s changed? Brands are investing more and more in digital PR strategies as links are now more significant than ever. Achieving links from a quality source is what PR’s do best. Technical SEO and PR bodies are working closer together helping to improve organic search ranking for a client’s brand. Telling stories and building keywords hand in hand.
Here are some of the tools that we’ve been playing with, helping measure success and report more effectively.
Not only is keyword planner used for paid search queries it’s also useful to determine keywords you should be using in your online content to help rank better.
From average use (how many times users have searched a word in a month), to bidding (paid advertising on Google), it’s great to understand what consumers are searching for around keywords relevant to your brand.
Start using them in your online copy and begin to notice a difference when it comes to engagement or shares.
Find out what questions and queries users are asking Google. Knowing the “for” or “with” gives a much richer starting point for content ideas. Again, if people are asking the questions, quite frankly you should be talking about them.
Majestic is a tool used to view the links between different websites. This really useful tool creates an ‘Internet map’ which is used by SEOs and marketeers looking to measure results of PR coverage.
Without having to create an account with Majestic, you can see the amount of external backlinks to your page, the referring domains, IPs, and subnets. You can even look at the stats from the last five years.
You are able to tell which page on your site has the strongest external backlinks, and referring domains.
If you create an account with Majestic, it opens up more opportunities to track competitors and see their SEO positioning.
Similar to Majestic, Open Site Explorer allows you to examine the linking profile for any website.
You can view the domain and page authority of the site, page link metrics, and even the social metrics of the link (paid subscribers only).
Link information can go even further with Open Site Explorer. You can see Inbound links, just discovered links, top pages and more, to get an in-depth look at how your website (or your competitor’s website is performing).
BuzzSumo measures the social popularity of content.
With this tool, you can see which pages within your website gain the most social traffic and what your audience prefers. For example, list posts, trends and questions.
BuzzSumo is also useful for gathering competitor insight. Have a topic you want to see generated the most shares or traffic? Plug in the keywords and BuzzSumo will list what’s the most prevalent.
So there you have it, in a nutshell, Digital PR should follow closely with your SEO and digital marketing strategies for maximum effect. However, Digital PR can strengthen weaker landing pages and increase the site traffic of slower moving stock – even if it does not directly follow your overall marketing objective. When used with SEO, Digital PR can take advantage of key search term trends and maximise coverage on what people are already searching for on the Internet.
