 Hi, I'm Isa Lavaghan, I'm a search strategist and today I'm going to talk to you about how inclusivity drives link diversity. So obviously, inclusive marketing, right? We've heard a lot about it over the last few years, it's a topic becoming more and more popular and, you know, obviously a great thing for, you know, an ethical point of view from an inclusive point of view. But actually, inclusive marketing also makes business sense, right? And it makes business sense because it's audience centric, right? It's relatable. It widens reach, so kind of you get out to more audiences than you would normally. It's personalized and all those things lead to it driving more revenue, right? So inclusive marketing, it makes business sense. So how do we then take this on board when it comes to sort of search? So first of all, from a Google point of view, right, Google serves all audiences. Of course it does. It's business model. When you come on the brand side, whether you're agency side or you work in-house, we have a thing where we focus on a target audience, as we should, you know? And when we do sort of target audience stuff, we have our call audience at the top. Then we have our sort of secondary audience, that's kind of that we prioritize. Then we have sort of on the C level, we have audiences that dip in and out, that we kind of cater to all sort of engagement on a seasonal basis or when certain products or services come out. So then what I'm going to really talk to you about today is sort of the other audience. Who are we missing? Who could we potentially be reaching out to that we're not thinking about, that isn't front of mind? Let's talk about sort of backlink profiles, right? Huge kind of thing that we talk about in the SEO world and kind of link building world. So say you're a hotel in Bali and that's kind of your website. And we're looking at your backlink profile. So you've got links from BBC, a wedding blog, sort of a luxury travel like Condé Nast. You've also got like a surfers journal. You've got a solar traveling website and then you've got a cooking website. What is this all telling you? This is all telling you that different audiences with different kinds of aims are linking to you and vouching for you. Diverse audiences, right? And this is kind of what gets you that wide range of referring domains, which is what we know Google loves. All these things are telling Google that you can be trusted as a brand because you've got all these different audiences who want and need different things linking to and recommending you, which kind of goes to talking about why diverse backlink profile is important. Yeah, it tells Google who your audiences are and how different they are. That sort of indicates trust and authority. Yeah, if different people, if you think about going on a review site and you've got sort of different people reviewing a hotel, reviewing a product and you can see their sort of different personas and different audiences, you're more likely to sort of trust that product because you can see different people kind of vouching for it. It kind of makes you think, oh, right, if all these different people sort of saying, go for this brand, I'm actually more likely to trust them. That is the same as kind of having that sort of wide ranging referring domain. It also represents broad reach. Obviously, the more kind of links you have from different referring domains, the broader your kind of reaches, the bigger your audience is. And finally, it kind of, it obviously appears more natural and organic. You know, at the end of the day, if you're kind of just getting links from that one source and that one website or that one kind of type of website, once you've got that link, it's not then telling Google anything different about what you have to offer and what your USP is. Hence why referring domains are so, so important. So let's go through a couple of examples on how we can kind of really think about this and put this into practice. So let's say you're a restaurant in London, right? From a sort of outreach camp, sort of link building campaign, you would obviously think about these sort of audiences like a food blog, a travel website, maybe a dating blog, giving advice on where to go in London. But what about something like a mobility lifestyle blog, right? Let's say this restaurant is sort of accessible, accessible, wheelchair friendly, all this sort of stuff. Why isn't that kind of mentioned? Why isn't that pushed? Why aren't we, why isn't this restaurant going out to that audience and saying, hey, look, this is what we do? Because, you know, threefold, you're getting a link from that website. You're reaching out to that audience, saying that we cater, we offer, we have an offering for you from a brand perspective. You're also building a brand within that audience by saying, you know, actually, we're also for you as well. So it kind of works all around. So that's what I mean by who's missing. That mobility lifestyle blog is someone who's potentially missing, that we're not kind of thinking about initially, but we should. Then let's say you are a company that sells fitness equipment. And obviously, when you think fitness equipment, you know who your core audiences are, who are, for example, personal trainers, of course, small gyms, for example, and of course, fitness enthusiasts. But when you kind of go and you do a bit of search insight and you kind of do a bit of keyword insight, you see actually there's a lot more different audiences looking for that product, looking for that kind of key time. So when you think fitness equipment, fitness equipment for, there's fitness equipment for elderly, fitness equipment for wheelchair users, Parkinson patients, pregnancy, physiotherapy. Again, all the kind of missing audiences that we're not thinking about when we're thinking about an outreach, marketing, branding that we should be thinking about. And obviously you can't cater to everyone all the time, understandably so. But it's also thinking from a strategic point of view how you can create some sort of kind of content offering to these audiences that aligns with you, aligns with your brand and as possible. So that could be a blog post, content piece, a how-to guide, a video, or potential outreach campaign during an awareness week or an awareness month, let's say. It's thinking about it from that sort of point of views to make sure that there's touch points for these audiences that you might be missing out on and not really thinking about as part of your kind of core strategy. So what are the key takeaways and how do you kind of put this into practice and get going into having more of an inclusive kind of link-building kind of strategy? I'd say update your personas. So we as marketers all have our sort of personas, our key audiences, we kind of get them worked out and we do that on a regular basis. Always think about this audience. Who's missing? Who are we not thinking about? Who are we not catering to? Who could we be reaching out to that we're not currently, that kind of makes sense and aligns with our brand and our business? Then I'd say kind of really try and discuss your campaign ideas and your strategy with different archetypes, i.e. people that are different to you. So if you're a millennial, you might want to talk to a Gen Z about a campaign idea to see if that kind of fits in with them. Perhaps talk about an idea with your kind of parents or grandparents or kids. It's really good to kind of think about how different audiences might receive a certain product or campaign or offering that you might be missing because you are not that audience. So talking to different archetypes really helps you kind of update and amend ideas to make them more kind of accessible and inclusive. Then another one is jumping on sort of trending topics and news to find new audiences. There's always new topics, new trending topics where you can kind of find out what the new problem is. And if there's a new problem that you can kind of answer or cater to, that's another way of reaching out to new audiences that you might not have thought about but actually is there waiting for you to kind of cater to. And then I'd say so the last final kind of two kind of reasons would be don't just tick box this, don't just make a list like, okay, we've got to do an inclusive campaign tick box. Make it part of your key strategy. At the end of the day, this audience isn't just a kind of standalone audience, they're part of your strategy and they actually need to align with you and your brand and your offering. You just need to think about who they are and how you should be reaching out to them in an authentic organic way, which leads me to my kind of final point, which is to kind of be authentic with it. Do it where it's at the core of your business, core your service, core your product and your offering. And it makes, again, back to what I was saying in the beginning, it makes business sense. Thank you for joining me on this Whiteboard Friday. My name is Isa. I'm a search strategist. If you want to talk to me about anything to do with PR, link building, outreach or thing search, you can connect with me on LinkedIn, Twitter or my website.