 How's everyone doing? Day three? Yes! Like three more presentations left and then we get to go bowling and sing karaoke. Where are my karaoke fans? Okay I'll be seeing you later. If you're watching this virtually please tweet at your go-to karaoke song. This has been a topic of conversation. I want to see what you have to say. Before karaoke I want to talk to you about how to leverage earning links and this says content syndication. We're going to talk about content syndication but in particular we're going to talk about how to localize your link earning strategy in order to double the number of links that you earn. So oh there it is. A little bit about me before I dive into this topic. I've been in the content marketing industry for about a decade now and I love talking about it which you'll see right now. I can go on forever and ever. Mostly about tangential content and how to build authority with content. Almost always in the context of earning links and that's how it's always tied to SEO. Now I work for a newswire called Stacker which has been really cool because I get to see kind of all the backend data of what publications are picking up all the stories we send out. How often they're picking them up what the themes are of those stories and we also have a direct line of communication with a lot of these publishers and we get to ask them hey what do you want to see more of and I'll show you a little bit about that in a second. I also love my little void named Bagheera. If you don't know Bagheera is the Black Panther from Jungle Book. I'm a big Disney person. And for better from worse I am from Florida. Where are the Floridians? There's a lot of you I think. Okay not an enthusiastic bunch. We're shamed I'm from Florida which is known for something called the Florida Man. I okay this series of headlines were all pulled weeks weeks before I built this presentation. So we start with a guy getting arrested for not getting his way at Burger King that was just a great headline. Being bitten by an alligator is a classic Florida story if there's not an alligator involved like is it Florida I don't know. A golf etiquette fight? Sure. This one was just innovative. Just making a like charging your phone at a traffic light. You just got to respect that. A woman stealing mangoes. There is a video of this. She's literally leaning over the fence taking mangoes off somebody's tree and shoving them in her pants. That made the news. And then also the classic chili throwing story which I've never seen before either. The reason I'm showing you this it's almost honestly not a great example because Florida Man in particular has kind of gotten national fame maybe even international. But I care about these because I'm from there and we all inherently care more about where we live and the places that we're from. So Florida Man may be amusing to everybody but when I see those stories I'm like please don't be Florida. Not again plus I just want to know especially if it's in my county I want to know what's going on down there. My degree is in journalism I promptly abandoned that whole career path but my degree is in journalism and we learned about the elements of newsworthiness in stories and content which has been very helpful for me in content marketing and I've been trying to find the list that I was taught in school and I finally found it and it's this list I think it's Purdue's writing lab website that had it and I highlighted proximity and you can see in this order I don't know if it's necessarily like most important order but timeliness being kind of what we classically think as newsworthy if it just happened it's breaking we got to tell people about it but proximity is second on here and it just states that people care about what's happening near them and it makes an inherited sense right you care about what's happening in your community in your city maybe a little bit more than anywhere else so why then do we tend to not really care as much in the link earning digital pr realm about local media pickups some of you might disagree or like no I do care but in general I feel like we tend to overlook this I did and I think a lot of our management also doesn't see it as particularly exciting compared to maybe a USA Today or CNN pick up right but I I've been thinking about that because when I joined this newswire I saw how much potential there is with local content if you're thinking about it from a link perspective it honestly doesn't make any sense that we overlook these sites because sure okay USA Today another you know national publication bustle their domain authorities are in the 90s everybody kind of knows that they're respected but then you have Baltimore Sun with a dave 90 a very respected newspaper and then my hometown newspaper the South Florida Sun Sentinel also up there with the domain authority of 87 we don't tend to say we got to get in the Sun Sentinel and it's not as exciting to necessarily report on maybe because somebody hasn't heard of it who doesn't live in Florida but from an SEO perspective why are we not targeting them you still get the follow link you still are at a publication that has high authority a respected publication at that that's read by people in their community and trusted by people in their community and it's still earned and not paid for so something I this was the impetus for this presentation because something to me wasn't adding up I saw it in my own career and I wanted to share some of the things that I'd seen that this is a huge area of opportunity in my eyes whether it's PR or link earning especially if you're trying to scale those programs I'm going to show you some examples of what that looks like but if you're trying to scale if you've been doing a pretty good job of digital PR and link earning and you're kind of reached this point where you're plateauing and you really want to upgrade your program this could be the way you do it so this was the piece that inspired all of this for one of our brand partners we wrote an article about all the rural hospital closures around the country this was not something I'd ever honestly thought about but it was kind of it was newsworthy I had no idea that all these rural hospitals were closing around the country so our team created this national piece and we sent it out through the newswire and we syndicated it through like msn so another national site right and sfgate and cron which technically are local but are more well known and do have a wider audience I'm sure many people in here if you've ever pitched a new site sfgate I'm sure is on that list so these are kind of the classic pieces right but then we localized it and that's what I'm talking about today localizing also led to pickups on all these local publications that maybe we would not have thought of in the first place and the way that we did that was instead of talking about the national stats we zoomed in on the state stats we said Tennessee is the number two state with the most closures that's a totally different perspective if you're living in Tennessee now you're not just looking at the national numbers you're like oh Tennessee is actually struggling with this more than most other places interesting suddenly all these other publications in Tennessee picked it up when they didn't pick up the national version the national version got 310 pickups and the local version got 639 that's a two to one ratio I could not believe this when I saw this I was honestly in disbelief but there's not many things you can do that can lead to a two to one ratio of how many more links you can be generating from the same project it's the same data set and it's not just links we're talking about links because this is an SEO conference but it's also your reach it's your awareness it's your authority because now if you're in local newspapers for these people who maybe aren't reading SF gate or MSN and they're reading their local paper now they're seeing the story too I don't know if you follow bb the link builder on twitter she's awesome and she just DM me like I saw this piece on stacker or her local site and she said it's about restaurants in Minneapolis that's pretty niche right you're not going to see that in the USA today but she saw that and she liked it and she messaged me so now you're increasing your your entire reach you have a different audience you're tapping into especially for beauty to see this is very important but we also need to talk about the state of the media and this came up earlier unfortunately this year is the second worst in terms of trust in the media and the reason I bring this up is because as SEOs we can't be operating in a vacuum especially for trying to work with publications this isn't all about us if we're trying to earn media it's about them as well and we need to be cognizant of where they're coming from and what their challenges are so they're dealing with a lot of hurdles right now as you can imagine this is one of them the other very similar off of the back of Ross's presentation 2200 local newspapers have closed since 2005 thousands of local sites and newspapers have closed which as this headline is alluding to means that there are stories that are not being told on a local level because there aren't as many papers to do it and then also the ones that are still around have had budget cuts and staffing cuts so even if they do exist maybe they aren't able to cover everything they want to because they're so concerned with keeping their engagement up their visitors up their traffic up this is the other reason why this is such a huge opportunity because not only can we get and earn the links that we're looking for we're actually able to provide content to folks who probably want it more than the national sites that are inundated with pitches who have the funding to be writing the stories they want to write so that's the meeting of these two points i think is a crucial one so if you're bought into this if you're like okay local content seems like a good opportunity i would be remiss if i did not actually walk through how to do it or at least how we do it i'm sure there's plenty of ways there is a tad bit of pre-work and i always have this caveat because in my career i've worked with folks who are really eager to do this stuff and that's awesome but if they didn't have their technical SEO sorted and they didn't have already created amazing content on site that was converting that was already showing your authority they weren't getting the benefit of doing this work they weren't getting the benefit of doing the pr or or building on this massive amount of authoritative links because all of these rankings they don't have pages that are worth ranking or they can't do anything with the traffic that they're earning so this is the pre-work this is my caveat but once you're over that maybe you're at that point the first step is data data is by far the easiest way and i say easy it's not necessarily easy but the best way to go about this strategy and there's many reasons for that mostly it's that when you have a data set you are able to narrow it down by state country city zip code so many comprehensive data sets come with all of that stuff i realize this should animate i'm sorry you won't see all the stories on here but this is an example on stacker.com we now have a local part of our site that shows all the stories we've done in each city and so many of them are database so many of them because it's the easiest way to localize at scale instead of manually doing research about one particular city like i get that we don't have time to do that necessarily it makes sense to do it if you have a target audience in a specific place for sure but for the rest of us who are national or international you can't do this for every city but using a data set that already has all this information in it is an incredible way to approach this some example data sets that we use at stacker all the time and i'm sure you're familiar with zillow and bureau labor statistics we use a lot they release new information monthly so even if you're kind of used to seeing these sources you got to remember that there's always new data coming out from them so that doesn't mean that you shouldn't use them tripadvisor is real time so you can go and get data from them and it reflects what's currently showing on their site the census is constantly updating all kinds of reports i can't give you an amount because or a timeline because there's so many different reports that they do and they release them at different cadences so i recommend just diving in there and seeing what's interesting and then marking it on your calendar when the next release dates are probably going to be and then sites like redfin which posts updates on their blog i think like every week check out sites like this depending on whether b2b or b2c or what industry you're in this is obviously going to vary a lot from person to person but we have found in all of the categories that we write in we found data in these types of sources especially for able to overlay that with maybe some internal data that you have or some other perspective that you can bring to the table that hasn't already been assessed because my favorite thing to say is we're not sitting around on the census trolling through data on our own we want other people to do that for us we're not interested in doing that in our spare time so as an example we used triple a data to create a free or a gas price widget that we sent for free to all the publications in our network and they love this thing because it just live shows what triple a already has to say but in a way that's much more accessible to their readership they're not going to triple a's website they want to just see it on the on their home page and we just applied that for them we took data that already existed and said hey this is a much better way of packaging it and you can have that like what's to say that your brand can't do something similar about your industry if there aren't a lot of public data sets available that seem relevant to you definitely still look around maybe private companies have them because you can still license data that is not publicly freely available or maybe get access to their apis that investment could really be worth it if you think that there's a ton of potential there for your content especially if you can syndicate it on this level so i mentioned at the top of this presentation that we have a direct line of communication with our publisher network and i talked to that team before this presentation and said what are the local publishers asking for what have they been excited about what are they running what are they saying you know stacker we really appreciate it if you can create more stories like this so i want to run through those really quickly these are the five main things they mentioned you see a lot of trends they love trends definitely local trends in the context of national trends tend to do very well we want to know not just what's happening nationally but what's happening here us so employment real estate we know that this is like we want to keep tabs on these things they're really important crime interestingly avoiding scams was a huge one as scams get more complex newspapers especially local ones are really trying to help their readership they're trying to position themselves as an authority as a source of trust and that's where news you can use comes in the journalism kind of term for this is service journalism i just learned this a few months ago but for marketers it's how to content right it's creating something explaining something trying to help somebody accomplish something or do something the caveat there is if you're a brand that doesn't have a ton of authority yet you might not get away with building a how-to and pitching it to a publication they're going to be like who are you why do we trust you to put this together so i wouldn't start there if you are in a respected established brand who have already been working on this for years go for it but i think it's better to start with this data backed trend side and that's why i wanted to call this out but really interesting to see that they are asking for data they're asking for those types of stories and then in terms of the overall topics that they seem to be really eager for lifestyle which is the the nice thing for us is that's pretty broad a lot of things can fall under lifestyle it didn't show up in the Birmingham slide but we do have a piece that goes out locally about dogs and cats that are available for adoption in each city and i was watching i believe it was Colbert and he has this great segment where they bring on all these puppies and they get them all up for adoption because they named them adorable things and i was like i love this content because it's puppies but i can't adopt these dogs i don't know where they are i don't know where these dogs are being put up for adoption so this piece allows you to be looking at your local paper and say this cat is up for adoption in my county that's very relevant to you all of a sudden we also did a piece about vaccine costs for pets in your state so if you're thinking about getting a pet we did this for one of our brand partners if you're thinking about getting a pet instead of looking at you know googling it and seeing whatever the snippet is for the national number we use i think it was Banfield had a price tool and we use their data to send that out across the states and that's what i mean thinking about data that you can present that puts things in a different context even if it exists nationally really think about it from a local perspective number two is probably going to be the biggest one for everybody money everything we do is tied to money if you can't think of something to start think about how whatever is in your industry is related to how people's daily spending habits might change or their personal finance approach anything along those lines money is going to be relevant and they want that content it does well people care about what they're spending their money on and why number three is news might not be dabbling too much in this category government military or politics brands don't typically touch that although i will say when we were looking on more of a top level for another presentation i put together that political stories that were localized did do pretty well there was a higher percentage of like by category of localized stories in in politics because there's probably not as much coverage about local politics as there is about all the stuff we're seeing nationally we're tired of that we don't need brands contributing to that but could be interesting from a local perspective entertainment continues to work celebrities movies tv we've all seen these marketing pieces i'm not going to dive into that and then sports and sports is another one where it's like well i'm not going to cover live sports that has nothing to do with anything and there's already a whole slew of people whose entire industry is built on that but as an example something that we did for a brand partner is we looked at the oldest professional sports arenas per state because people have a lot of a lot of passion about different stadiums and arenas and we thought we'll just manually go make a list of all the professional sports stadiums we'll find out all the years that they started and we'll look for any other trends to throw in there that are fun release it nationally and release it locally in the places where it made sense so i just want you to not immediately see these categories and be like i don't work in those niches still you might be able to find some overlap and maybe get some ideas of how you can apply it to your industry step two and this is an important one is how you're framing the national and the local pieces so here's an example of both at the top we have counties that have seen the biggest growth in housing over the last decade this is the general national version that we sent out this is implying we have a list of all of them they're ranked you can get all this information the localized version makes it much more newsworthy for texas because of the 20 texas was nine that's a huge difference so we republished it with a different headline and a different lead and sent it to texas publishers which one do you think they're going to be more interested in and all we did it's the same data all we did was figure that out that that was interesting and change the headline and the intro superlatives tend to be the best way to do this if you have a ranked list so for states you can take the top 10 and the bottom 10 for example because you have 50 so even being in the top or bottom 10 is kind of like that seems important but you can also if you don't have that or if you have a state lingering in the middle of the list you can say no here are the rates in pennsylvania so it's still specific to you even though you can't utilize the superlative but i would say if you have to prioritize which ones you're going to push locally do all the superlatives first if those do really well maybe then invest in doing all the other pieces but that is the order in which i would do it because if you see that your city or state is number one in anything you're going to publish it and you're going to click on it that's almost a guarantee and then when you have this data set that has information about every city or every state you repurpose it you create it that many times you change those headlines you change the leading data but it's all from the same data starting data set and how nice would it be to get so many more links for the same project instead of doing it over and if you're in link building you know it's it's so tiresome to create more and more and more content and you get a couple links and it's it's a lot it's it's very taxing so the other thing i like about this is you're really getting the most out of one data set and one piece of content even though you're reframing it to make it more relevant for different audiences and then step three is what you actually do once all of that is done and this could probably be a whole separate presentation the promotion side of things but i'll touch on some of the most important pieces as it's relevant specifically to localizing maybe start with the local publisher that you think is most relevant to you or the one that you grew up with or the one that you definitely want to pick up your story and study what they're publishing because i'm telling you you know what we're hearing but that doesn't necessarily apply to all local publishers or the one in particular that you think would be really useful to you or whatever it is but make it a practice of looking at what their covering in your space right or general topic area that you're going to go for if it's lifestyle if it's food whatever it is but don't just look at the publication you got to look at the writers themselves because each writer has a particular beats they cover specific topics and you need to under you need to know if that writer has any chance of publishing what you're sending them based on what they're already doing i get terrible how many people just get terrible pitches all the time there's definitely more than the handful i'm seeing i get so many bad pitches every day because they didn't bother to see what i even talk about they just did not spend a second to look at what i talk about they might have looked at stacker like hey you want to run this piece about you know manicures or whatever i'm like no that's not even my job and no anyway so look that look at that first then if you like the writer and they're covering your topic do they write explicitly about like hard news are they doing their own original reporting maybe their beat is crime and they're going out and reporting on that first person that's not the person to pitch unless you're doing some really cool investigative journalism or something that's not the person to pitch so you need to be really critical about what are they covering that you think is going to be suitable and match what you're pitching them you're probably looking for people who will write more feature pieces every now and then at least and then the format of your content so some people can build really cool interactive maps when you have all this localized data and some kind of images and not everybody is actually set up in their CMS to handle that very well so it's a good practice to check around say hey have they ever published an interactive before do they tend to have images in their pieces because every barrier that is set up between you pitching them and them publishing it decreases your chances of success doing all this work up front just as a guideline for you like i know it's hard to think of every local publication in the country all at once but pick one and take a look at it and see what's going on with them because that'll help you create something that you think is going to work at scale and then this is maybe the most important piece at the end is to make sure that that localization is everywhere you have to make it very clear why this is interesting to their audience we already talked about how it's in the title of the piece but it's also in the subject line if you decide to pitch somebody in the subject line you should sell them we looked at this data about your city or your state or your county so that they know and they see it oh this isn't just like some random national data set that they're sending me they actually took the time to know what's happening near me in the body of the email of your pitch you should be saying hey this is why i put this together and why i think it's interesting and if you have that superlative angle or some other angle like the nine out of 20 for texas you highlight that you say oh we put this together and it was really interesting to us that texas showed up nine out of 20 times we thought this would be really interesting to your audience because you tend to write about xyz you're trying to show them that you did your homework and that you understand what they're pitching because again that barrier piece is extremely important they're not going to sit there and try to figure out why this is relevant to them and that leads into the localization should also be highlighted in any data you share sometimes people will share like their entire data set or their source and you don't want them to be like trying to do any kind of calculations or searching this data set to figure out how you came to your conclusion you can if they've already decided to publish it and they just want the data that's fine but if you're still trying to make your case make it very evident how you came to your conclusions the data that you used and surface all of that so that it's very easy for them to take in because they're not going to want to do that on their own they're going to click delete just like so many people do and you'll have done all that work for nothing so let's take a look at one final example because i'm talking about a lot of different things and it's sometimes easier to see how it all works together this is another piece we did as i mentioned scams are a big topic right now and local publishers asked us to create content around this so we did but we use the data approach we're not going to sit there and explain how to avoid every scam we're not experts at that anyway we shouldn't be doing that but we did look that there was a data set that the fbi provided that showed how often different scams were happening by state i was like that's kind of fascinating i didn't know that that existed that data set so let's take that let's let's take that data set analyze what's interesting about the different states that run with it we can release the national and the local so the national version alone got 160 links and pickups i mean honestly that's a success of itself but again in the spirit of getting the most out of something that you've spent so much time creating because it does take a lot of time let's see what else we can get when we localize it we got another 298 and that was by using the strategy i just mentioned Tennessee is the number six state least affected we went as far as number six and they were still like yes we want to know we want to publish that were the number six least affected but again if it's not a superlative see how california is affected by e-commerce scams those other local publishers in california much more likely to pick this up than they were the previous piece about countrywide right same data set different positioning different slightly different title and pitching but significantly higher results if you do that once and you report on that you'll probably get a lot more investment to keep doing this i know i talked a lot i'm going to be hanging out by the coffee if you have questions i want to chat but thank you so much for coming