 Hey everybody, hope you're having a great time at MozCon today. It's my very first MozCon, so excited and nervous. But today we're going to talk a bit about links. So a few months ago, I was checking the news, and I came across these three articles. They're not really that related to each other, but they have a few things in common. So they're all well-known tech publications. They all are high DA sites, and they all link to research reports. And these research reports have anywhere from 50 to 1,000 referring domains. Pretty impressive. So what are the research reports anyways? They are a piece of long-form content that uncovers data. So in the SEO world, we have examples like Zippy's study of page title rewrites with over 200 links. We also have Aira's state of link building with over 50 links. And what these reports have in common is that they share interesting data. And that's how they are able to get a bunch of links. So if you want to create a research report that gets links, we need to be able to uncover interesting data. And that's because interesting data is exactly what journalists want to share with their readers. So if your report is able to do this, then you're able to get links to your report. And of course, I'm not talking about just any link. I'm talking about high DA links that everybody here has gotten emails about before. Yeah. So how do we do that? Well, there are basically two things that we need to nail. The first is the story that we tell. And the second is the outreach that we do. And the most important thing is really going to be number one, the story. What is the topic that we're going to do our research report on? And then that's going to affect the success of number two, the outreach that we do. And so let's jump into exactly how we're going to do this. I'm going to take you step by step on how we are going to create a research report that is link-worthy. So first step is going to be to do a brainstorm. So let's say my company sells ergonomic chairs. So here I try to choose something that's not the most sexy product out there. And what we're going to do is draw three concentric circles like this. At the very center is going to be our product, which is chairs. And then next is the features of our product. So our chairs are adjustable. They're very comfortable. They're made of some of the best materials. So any other features you can think of, you can jot those down. And these are going to help us determine what ideas are going to go in that outermost circle. And the outermost circle is our related topics. So things like health, posture, office ergonomics, which is a real keyword that has search volume, work from home, things like that. You want to go broad with the topics that you can think of. Because journalists, they want to report on topics that affect a large group of people. So with that in mind, we'll narrow down our topics to these three. And we'll come to you on to the next step, which is to do research. So this step is probably going to be pretty similar to doing something like a content competitor analysis. We want to see what existing data is out there, what research reports are out there on the topics that we narrow down. So easiest way to do this is to just Google. We're going to combine the topic with these keywords and see what shows up. We can also use Moz's SERP analysis tool. So here I typed in the word health trends. And we can see that CVS did a report back in 2021. And so two things kind of jumped out at me. First is the year that this report was published, 2021. If, let's say, this report was published in 2018, it would be potentially an opportunity for me to provide more up-to-date information. Because the report wouldn't be covering things like COVID. But since it's 2021, I might be like, maybe not this idea. Another thing I would look at is the number of referring domains and the quality of that. So if I click into that, I can see the backlinks aren't that great. So maybe let's not just choose this idea. But I want to keep track of all the research reports that I come across and keep a list of these. That way, when I publish my final report, I can refer back to this list and do outreach to the journalists that have reported on these reports and see if they can link to my report. Now, the next step is going to be to decide on my idea. So I have a few ideas. I'm not really sure which one I'm going to choose. So the easiest way, the way that I like to do it, is to just score my ideas. So you might have heard of frameworks like ICE or PI. So I won't go into those. They're really great for prioritizing your ideas. But they don't determine. You can't figure out how press-worthy or how news-worthy an idea is from these frameworks. So I'll introduce something new called the hot score. So it's a score from 1 to 10 that factors in three things. Headlines, other teams, and timeliness. So for headlines, the H in hot. We're going to think about what our potential headline's going to say about my report. So for example, 78% of remote workers experience back pain. And I'm one of those people. So the more headlines that you can think of, the higher your hot score is going to be. And so you want to think of any other newsworthy things that you might expect to see in a newspaper or magazine about your report and give a hot score according to those numbers. The next is the other teams. So when you work on a research report, you want to make sure you loop in other teams, like your PR team, your data team. For the PR team, it's really important for them to be involved as early as possible, because they are the experts in what journalists want to share with their readers. And so you can get their feedback on your ideas, and then also they can help with doing the outreach for your report. And if you're a SaaS company or you have a data team and you determine that you want to analyze the data that you have internally, you want to ask your data team and see if that's even possible. So it's important to get these other teams involved in the process. Next is the T for timeliness. How timely are the ideas that I have in mind? Do they tie back to current events? Are these things that people actually care about or are we tired of hearing about it? So let's jump into examples. Number one, work from home stipends. So I feel like the topic work from home has been, we talk about it a lot in the past two years. I feel like people are maybe a little bit fatigued about hearing that type of news. And so the hot score for that is going to be a little bit low. Whereas something like best cities for hybrid work, it's more top of mind for people. People are going back to the office. So this is going to have a much higher hot score. So maybe some other examples is, let's say, if we want to do some research report on the benefits of good posture. I mean, I think that's pretty common knowledge. So that's going to have a really low hot score of one or two. Whereas if I could somehow tie back ergonomic chairs with the recession, then that would have a hot score of 10. Now with the scoring, we can go on with the next step, which is to gather data. Since we have an idea of what topic that we want to do our research report on. So the next step is to gather your data. So before we do that, we need to first figure out what questions do we want our research report to answer. We can tap into communities like Twitter, Reddit, anywhere else that your customers hang out. And then take a look at what people are talking about there. Are there any topics that people have opinions about but lack actual data on? And then you want to start listing these out and then think about how do you gather these data points? There are typically going to be three ways to get data. There's using existing data sets. You can conduct a survey. You can also tap into your proprietary data. Or you can even do a mix of these three. So an example of using existing data would be Lydia's gender gap in SEO publishing. So yeah, awesome report. Make sure to check it out. Basically, she scraped different SEO publications to see what is the gender ratio of male to female writers. And Moss did really well in this one. So again, check that out. And so other ways, other data sets we can tap into are like Google Trends. There's a bunch more in the link. And you can get data for free and be able to analyze that and put that into your report. Let's say we do our work from home stipends idea. We can get data in two ways. So first, we can scrape data from different job boards to see how much people are paying their remote workers for the work from home stipend. We can also do a survey. We can ask people, what did they spend their stipend on? How much did they receive? Whether or not that was enough. And then with this data, we can splice it into by location, company size, industry, and more. Let's also do the other topic with the higher hot score. Best cities for hybrid work. So for this, I would like to create a formula. What does a good city for hybrid work look like? So there might be different things that we can score cities on. So things like, how good is the transportation, the number of hybrid jobs, how bad is the traffic in those cities? And then we'll be able to get a score for each of the cities and create a ranking. And then with that ranking, we can also create a really cool graphic like this. People love to share, and journalists also like to report on things like this. And the nice thing about this is also I can reach out to some of the top cities and be like, hey, Seattle ranked number two for the best cities for hybrid work. And journalists in Seattle would be really interested in reporting on something like this. Now the next step is to analyze our data and then tell a compelling story. So we have gathered our data, and now we need to analyze it and tell that story. So as you look through the data that you gathered, ask yourself, what here is newsworthy? Is there anything here that are going to make people be like, wow, I never knew that? Tell me more. Or anything controversial? You want to pull these data points and then turn that into the story you tell in your research report. And then you also want to add these points at the very top of your report. It just makes it easy for anyone to copy and paste into whatever they're writing. So to recap, we want to identify a topic with a high hot score for headlines, other teams, and timeliness. We want to gather that data, analyze it, pull the most interesting newsworthy insights, weave that into a compelling story, and then we want to do outreach to the right people. So I'll leave you with two quick tips on outreach. The first one is always make sure to monitor your unlinked mentions if you aren't already doing so already. So when you hit publish on that report, anyone who mentions your company, your report, any of the stats, those are opportunities for you to get links easily. Second is also to monitor the links to the news coverage of your report because sometimes people might cite that news coverage as the original source of data, but they could also be linking to you. So an example of this is a report that I did at Dialpad earlier this year. And Tech Republic, they did news coverage on our report. And Statista came across this news coverage and they linked to it, but they didn't link to our report. So I reached out to them and I said, hey, thank you so much for mentioning our report. We really appreciate it. I noticed you didn't link to our report and you only covered one stat, whereas our report, there's a bunch of other interesting stats and we were able to get a link that way and it's a really great high-day link from Statista. So a reminder, all the prep work that you do before you publish your report, that's gonna have the biggest impact on your link potential. So if you want to capitalize on the links you get to your research report, just make sure to follow the steps that I share today and go out there and get those links. Thank you.