 Link building, or digital PR as SEOs call it these days, is one of the artist's parts of SEO, and Amanda Milligan is one of the people in the industry who excels so much at this. Why put Friday H sessions on this topic are my personal favorites. Amanda Milligan is the Marketing Director at Fractal, a prominent growth marketing agency that helps brands build high quality backlinks and build authority through content marketing. Throughout Amanda's career, she has directly managed the creation of 2200 plus content campaigns and led the strategy for 20 plus clients. She hosts Fractal's cash in on content marketing podcast and a content marketing advice as appeared in Moz, Entrepreneur, Forbes, TechCrunch, The Next Web, and a lot more. There will be lots of link, or I should say digital PR takeaways from this one, so buckle up. Hi everyone, my name is Amanda Milligan, I am the Growth Director at Fractal, an agency that specializes in driving relevant traffic to your site through content. And today I'm going to talk about finding and filling gaps in your link building strategy. I've actually never given this talk before so I'm really excited to share it with you all. It's something that we do for our clients who are looking to improve their backlink portfolios and build their brand awareness. And before I get into why it's important to do this, I want to clarify what a gap link analysis is. It's essentially looking at where your competitors are getting their links from and that you're not and seeing how to, as the title says, fill that gap. So why is this important? Well, your backlink portfolio matters. So when this article came out several weeks ago, it kind of made a splash because John Mueller at Google basically confirmed that link volume isn't necessarily the most important thing. It's the quality and the relevancy of those links, right? So here's the quote from the article, or part of the quote, this is extremely important for people who work in SEO and content and it signals that the quality of your links is more important than the quantity of your links. And a lot of us have kind of had this philosophy for a while, but if you go back to the beginning of link building and beginning of SEO, obviously that wasn't necessarily what anybody believed or what they followed. And still plenty of people today really focus on the number of links rather than the quality of those links. And by quality, however you want to measure the authority of those sites, if they have anything to do with your website, et cetera. When you focus your time on building more black cat links, being a little more spammy or getting links in another way, it might work in the short term, but over time you are not actually building the right kind of authority and trust that the algorithm is really trying to look for, right? So even if it gives you that short term bump over time, it's not really going to do you any favors. So in order to get links of this caliber, you have to create content that's worthy of those links. And that's another piece that we're going to talk about today that's really important. We call this link worthy content. So content that is not just how do I get links in any way possible, but how do I actually, when I decide where I want those links from, how do I decide what is the type of content that's actually going to be deserving of earning that link? So we're going to talk about all of this today. We're going to talk about how to do the link app analysis. We're going to talk about how to create the content that's going to earn those links and then even how to pitch publications in order to acquire those links. So when you're doing this type of analysis, if your competitors have better back links, if you're doing this comparison and you see, oh, they have some really great coverage or they're getting mentioned on these really authoritative sites, that's signaling to Google that that brand is more authoritative, that perhaps they have better content. So when you perform this type of link app analysis, what you're able to do is say, where are there opportunities for me? Where do we have something to offer that we haven't really put out there in certain ways? And how can we demonstrate that we are just as authoritative and have just as much to offer? So let's jump right in. How to perform the back link analysis. And we're going to walk through it step by step. Moz is what we're going to use for this. But before you even go into Moz, there's something you have to do first. You probably already know who your primary competitors are, I'm going to guess. So if you know that, you start there, you're going to want to see where they're getting their links from. But don't necessarily stop there. For one, maybe they're not doing a very good job. But also it's good to have a diversity of options to see and get ideas from. So the second bullet here is about what other brands in your space are doing a really good job with their content? Where are they getting links from? What kind of content they're creating to get those links? You probably admire some different brands. Now don't do brands that are completely irrelevant to you. But in your more general space, even if they're not direct competitors, there is still a lot of value there. And finally, if you're doing your keyword research and there are sites that are ranking for keywords that you want to rank for, maybe add them to the list too. Again, even if they're not direct competitors, what are they doing that's building their authority? If you think your brand should actually be talking about these topics and they're surpassing you, probably good to also throw them into the mix. And see where they're getting their links from. So make a list of these websites because we're going to use them in a second. Then when you go into Moz, we are going to be in the link intersect tool today. And this is where you'll be. Thankfully, this is not an overly complicated process on the technical side. So if you're following along, go ahead and open your link intersect tool. So I'm going to pretend I work for Chewy. They're not a client of ours or anything. But I think this kind of demonstration is easier when you have an example brand. So I put on the top here Chewy.com. And below, I put the list of some competitors. In this case, Petco and PetSmart, because those are the ones I know the best. And as you'll see at the top under link intersect, it says find out which sites link to your competitors but not to you. So the tool is built for this very purpose. So go ahead, you can type in your own URL right now and your competitors. And you can make this more robust later, but just to get a sense of how it works. So what you see is something like this. And this is only a snapshot of the full results. But you'll get the names or the URLs of the links that your competitors have. You'll get those domain authorities and some other information as well. But what I like to focus on, I look at that list and I think, okay, first of all, what makes sense? Like Google isn't really what we're going for here. And I look to see where do I think I could actually pitch and get coverage from? Where do I think that I can create content and that they'll want to talk about it? So in this case, we've gotten coverage on CNN in time for some of our clients. So I marked them off here. I'm thinking to myself, it would be tough. These are really great sites. It's not going to come easy. But I know that they're still realistic and something that I can aspire towards. So you take a look at this list. And in this case, I wanted to see specifically where they're getting their links from. So that's the next step. When you click on this drop down on the right, when you see top referring page, you'll see a list of the URLs to your competitors. So this one is just fantastic. Guinea Pig suit of armor on eBay, right? So I wanted to see why, I believe it was either PetPro or PetSmart. I think PetSmart got a link from time and I looked and found the link was at the bottom of the article for punk rock attire for dogs. I'm very sorry to say that that does not exist anymore. That page is defunct. I was very, very sad when I encountered that. But now I know, okay, PetSmart got a link from time because of a product that they were offering, right? That might seem like it's not extremely helpful, but it actually really can be. But I'll get to that. First, when you get that results where you get all of those URLs, export the file. It's just easier to work with. Export the file and put it in Google Sheets, Excel, whatever you want. And then remove all the links that aren't relevant to you and get a clean sheet where you can be adding notes that we're going to talk about coming up. So here, though, are the other examples of publications that are linking to PetSmart and PetCo and not to Chewy. So I look at this and I'm actually kind of intrigued. Some of the things you can learn from this exercise are like, why are they getting links from tech websites, right? That's not necessarily something I would have expected. So when you do this type of work, you'll get a sense of, oh, maybe they're targeting different verticals that I've never even thought about before. That's a great insight to have. And then going that step further, like I did with time, to see what is the actual content that's getting those links? Was it product pages, press releases, or something else? So all of this will really feed into your inspiration and your brainstorming and your strategy. So I wanted to see the answer to the question about the technology side. I checked the next web and saw that PetSmart was being mentioned because they were carrying the whistle product. So again, this is more along the lines of a press release type of deal. I don't think they sent the press release, but it's a company update. It's something that's happening with the company. It's not like a piece of content. It's not anything that you as a marketer would probably create yourself. It's something that you would help get out there. But that still has a takeaway for me. The takeaway is that tech products are of interest. Maybe I hadn't thought about focusing on that. Do we have anything in our inventory? I say we hypothetically, do we have anything in our inventory that might be of interest? But also what are some relevant angles that could spark ideas for interesting stories like if this was an activity tracker for dogs, which I didn't know was a thing. So how much are pet owners willing to pay to keep their pets in shape? I have no idea. But maybe that's a question we can answer as a brand. So even if it looks like something is a press release or a product page or something, you can still get ideas about general topics and also kind of spin off what some of those products are and think why are people interested in this in the first place? And what can we contribute to that conversation? So you do this link app analysis. You have a spreadsheet now. It has a list of all the URLs. It has the domain authorities. Usually in the notes you can put either the link to the actual coverage, the link to the actual story, and maybe add some notes. Like, okay, here's some topic areas I want to cover. So you have all that, right? Now you have to actually create something that is going to be deserving of links. So this is the hard part. Here's an example of what we're talking about today. The top being more of a company update. That's not what I'm going to be speaking on because it's kind of a straight forward or if you work in traditional PR, this is what you do. It's getting the word out about your company. If you got acquired or if you have a new product or service, those types of things. We're talking about more of the original content, original data side of things. And here's an example, whereas instead of reading about something that Petco's offering, you're reading instead unexpected health benefits of owning a dog. Now I'm curious, I don't know what the unexpected health benefits of owning a dog are. And as you might imagine, that is still relevant while being more widely appealing, right? So this is what we're getting at. Because if you can be more widely appealing and relevant, you're likely to get high quality links that get a lot of traction and you can do it more often. If you're relying on company updates, those only happen every so often. There's a finite number of times you're going to have a big update, right? But if you're creating your own content, your own data, you can be pitching this information as much as you want, as much as it makes sense. So if your competitors are only doing the press release, company update type of stuff, this is a huge opportunity for you. Let me say that again. If your competitors are only doing the press release type of PR, then data journalism and digital PR, the newer type of digital PR, this is a huge opportunity for you. So the link app analysis that we did helps you understand where you might be lacking, but there is still work to be done. You need to do more research on the actual publications you're planning on targeting, right? So you saw a couple of those pieces of coverage that are linking to your competitors, but you still need to understand the publication overall and get a sense of what they want. But also understanding those topics. Like we said, maybe pet tech, maybe you don't know too much about it personally as a marketer working at a company like Chewy. So this is where the normal type of marketing work comes in. The question research, the keyword research, persona analysis and et cetera. So I'm not going to dive into all of those things, but you know how to do those things and it's going to come into play here too. So when you're doing this process, you're like, okay, I have two things. I have publications I would like to target and get links from. And I also have general topic categories. You don't have actual ideas yet, but you have an idea of what might be interesting to talk about, right? So here are just some items to help you go down the list and come up with ideas that are going to work. So again, looking at what the brand created to get that link, does that, if that's not extremely relevant to you, can it spin off some other ideas? What did they do that you can do better? So if it is interesting, what did you like or not like about it? What is missing from it? And maybe how can you do something similar and fill that gap? What type of content performs well on the target site? So, but SUMO is a great tool for this. You type in a URL and you can see all the most engaged with content on social media and you also see the number of backlinks over there too. But that immediately gives you a very quick glance at what kind of content is really resonating with that publication's audience. And that's a great way to kind of steer yourself in the right direction of not only where their audience like it, but their writers will be intrigued by it because they've seen something similar do well in the past. Maybe it's a methodology that went really well or just like the structure of the headline, the kind of takeaways that they're looking for. And then looking at actual specific niches on those sites. So maybe they cover only one specific topic that's relevant to you so that you have an understanding of what you can and cannot pitch them. And I'm going to talk a little bit about that later as well. So, one of the things that I noticed when I was doing this is that on the time.com article at the beginning, this was something that I think is an amazing clue for you. And that is that they link out to other relevant stories. So even though it was just a link to a product page on Petsmart, that article about the guinea pig suit of armor linked out to relevantstoriesontime.com. So this is a really good way to get a sense of what other pet-related content might be of interest to this publisher. Do we love our dogs more than people? I mean, come on. How many people make that joke or don't joke about how they like their animals more than they like human beings? It's great. Like, we want to click on this. We want to see maybe how many people feel that way. And then the second one being about pet costumes, which as you know, when I was looking at the original story, I was very into why do we spend so much money on our pets is basically the question that that other article is getting at. So just from the one article that you're looking at, the one piece, you have all this insight into what this publication already talks about in this realm and what might be of interest to their audiences that's relevant to your industry. So this could all be a little overwhelming if there's a lot to do. So start with the low-hanging fruit first. Do you already have content that you've created that might be of interest? And maybe it probably, not even maybe, it probably needs a refresh if we're going to target the media with it. But is there something that you already think is interesting? Maybe there's an annual report you already do that this publication might be all about? Start there. But if not, that's fine. Do you have internal data that they might find interesting? So if you're a pet supply company, you probably have data on how many things are being purchased, how those purchases are changing over time, those questions of how much money are people spending on their animals, you probably have a really good insight into that. And are there trends? All that stuff could be fascinating and just something that you already have. So that's a really good place to start. And then when it comes to who you're reaching out to, maybe don't start with the times of the world. Start with still authoritative publications, but maybe places where you know that the writers are even accepting pitches. Sometimes they're on Twitter. They say that they are. Their emails there. Start there. But don't necessarily rule out places where the writers aren't doing that. Just look for publications that actually have a high potential of success. And I'll talk about that later. So at this point, you might be wondering, this is a lot of work. Is it worth it to do all of this for quality backlinks and to fill this link gap that we have discovered? I might be biased, but the answer is yes. And there are many reasons for this. But the primary one is that quality content won't be penalized. So again, we're not going at this necessarily with just the goal of building links. We're coming at it as, where are my competitors doing that? And then what can I provide that's valuable in order to build similar links but actually contribute something? And that content, not only will it help you build those links. It'll help you build trust and authority. You can repackage it in many different ways. You can put it in your email newsletter. You can make a blog post about it, whatever it is. It just has so much more intrinsic value than coming at this in a more black hat type of way. Also, when you pitch to the media a more widely appealing news story and you get a very authoritative piece of coverage, it tends to syndicate, which means you're not just getting one link a lot of the time when you're pitching something, you're getting multiple links. It's not a one and done thing. And then as you do this type of work, you're also building relationships with writers. If you're creating really interesting content and they see it and they really like it and it does really well with their audiences, that means that over time they might even start wanting it. They might start asking, hey, do you have any new research about this topic? So there are a lot of benefits to doing this. It is a lot of work, but it pays off. It's an investment that you make in order to see the types of results that are almost impossible to get in any other way. So pitching, link worthy content. So essentially what I mean by this is if you've created some really cool piece of content, say you had information about pet supply sales and you're thinking to yourself, this is super interesting. I think that certain publications are gonna be really into this. You probably wanna package it in some way on your website. Don't make it too public because they're gonna think it's published already and not want it. But if you create a graphic of the results and maybe put it on like an orphan page of your website, now it's time to see who might actually be interested in this. And I'm really sorry to say that creating the content, brainstorming, all of that is only half the battle. This side, the pitching side, the promotion side is the other half. This is where most people falter. This is where most people decide they're going to give it the bare minimum and send out hundreds of pitching emails that aren't personalized or just templated and they just hope for the best. It's doing a disservice to all the work that you put into this already. The reason why you wanna put the work in in addition to what I already talked about is the type of coverage that you're getting. You're not just getting the link. You're getting positioning that's really hard to get otherwise. Your brand is probably the source of an entire article, number one, that you didn't pay for. Number two, your brand is being mentioned pretty high in the story if it's a source of the article. It's not gonna be like on time where your link was the very last thing in the entire piece. And as the source you're getting mentioned, this is some examples of work that we've done where it's surveys or studies, literally saying a new survey or a new study or a new report or new research by this brand. So extremely authoritative, not only beyond the publication but the way that you're positioned on that publication, right? So not only are you filling that link gap and getting links from the same places you're competitive as are, you're doing it in a very authoritative way that's likely to build even more links as a result. So this one slide could probably be its own presentation but I wanted to quickly walk through the process that we use. The first being to build a pitch list. You already started to do this because you've done your research. You already at least know probably a handful of publications you wanna go after and here the important thing is to do additional research especially into the writers in particular. Then when you have this list, you're gonna pitch for exclusive coverage. So you're gonna pick your favorite ones, the ones that you really wanna get to, maybe your reach possibilities and you're gonna tell them I'm pitching this to exclusively, are you interested in covering it for your audience? Obviously more than that in your pitch email. But you're pitching it exclusively first. It gives a little bit more of an edge because journalists like to publish things that are exclusive meaning that nobody else has talked about it, right? There's an appeal to that. Once that piece of exclusive coverage goes live, then you can pitch for all of your other coverage. And not email blasting, nothing like that but on your pitch list, the people that you've already curated, now you pitch them all and say, hey, like check out my study, let me know if you're interested, right? And then at the end, you collect and report on your results. So we always use nothing to elaborate, Google spreadsheet or something, track all the links that were built, not just the ones that we earned ourselves through outreach but all the syndications that happened and there will almost always be syndication. It might not always be high quality syndication but Google understands that that's what happens naturally when you get top tier media coverage so there's nothing to worry about but it's all good to track. Later you can even go and send emails to try to convert those links to do follow if they're kind of random no follower or just text links or not even links, text attributions, that's a whole other process you can do but track all those links, the domain authority of those links, whether they're do follower or no follow and then maybe any qualitative data you wanna add like I said, if it's in the subhead or if your brand was mentioned in the subhead, that's cool, you probably wanna know that. Did they pull images from your project and include it in the article? Anything like that is good to make note of as well. So that is the very top level breakdown of how to do this. The most important part is the pitching the right people. This is, so I said that a lot of people slack off on the promotion side and then within that they slack off at the targeting side. So they might have the publications in mind but they don't really give a lot of thoughts to who had that publication they're pitching and if they're a good fit, right? So you need to look at the actual writer and see what is it that they talk about? What is their specific beat? And that might not be as obvious as you think. That might not be as general as you think. So maybe you think somebody covers pets but actually they only cover pet technology. So that would require looking at a few of their articles, right, actually getting an understanding of what they wanna talk about, what their audience is interested in and what they're assigned to do. These are all really important steps. Another thing to look at for example is how often do they publish? If they are a contributing writer who only publishes on this website once every two months, you are much less likely to be that one slot that they have than somebody who's a staff writer writing every day. So again, we're talking about low hanging fruit. I wouldn't necessarily, you can go after the people who are only publishing every now and then by all means but just know that your likelihood is lower. The reason why I emphasize this so much is several years ago, I think actually 2019, my colleague Domenica surveyed 500 writers at different publications and just asked them outright, what are your biggest pet peeves when you're pitched content? Number one was that they're being pitched something that is not relevant to their beat. And number two is that the person hasn't researched the publication they're writing for. So essentially the targeting was bad. They're getting pitches that make no sense for them and it's annoying and it kind of makes everything harder in our whole industry. So this is a really important thing because you might have an amazing piece of content but if you're not targeting appropriately, it's not gonna land. The person's gonna say, this has nothing to do with me and that's not really gonna encourage them to forward it to the right person, right? So if you're gonna spend any extra time on promotions, this is where to spend it. I alluded to how templated mass pitched emails aren't good, personalize your emails. If you have any kind of relationship of having something published on that website before, you can mention that but most of us don't. So react to something that they wrote recently in a sincere way, don't say, I get this all the time, hey, I like your blog post or, hey, I really like this thing you did. Like that's a good start but actually have a sincere reaction to it. So don't pick something that you didn't really care about or read. See if you actually got something out of it and genuinely compliment them on it or something that maybe you read on their Twitter page. If you follow them on Twitter, something in their bio, something they tweeted, something that you connect with, maybe you have the same alma mater, maybe you are dog lovers, whatever it is, remember that there's a human being receiving your email and again, you have to earn these links and earn the coverage and by earn, that's the content but it's also like putting in the work to actually make real connections with people. And the last thing I will say about pitching emails is that it's important to keep it short. So in that same survey that we did, we asked writers, okay, how long do you want these pitching emails to be? And they said, a majority said 100 to 200 words and a majority said under 200 words, right? There's 22% who said under 100, that's pretty short. So, take a look at the work out of your pitch emails, if it's over 200, ask yourself, does it really need to be? Because you have that personalization should only be a sentence or two. And then you gotta get right to the point of what is the study that you're pitching them, what are the important insights from that study and linking them to it, right? Just explaining, you wanna make it all as obvious as possible in the email so that they don't have to dig around and do the work for themselves to understand why do they care, right? So, keep it short. Celebrate the links you should build as a result. But it's not, like I said, it's not just about the links. It's about the fact that this whole process has meant that you've created super interesting, relevant, exciting, engaging, pertinent content, right? And you're starting to build relationships with writers and you're providing value to your audience. All of this is interconnected. And if you do this type of work and you get a sense of what your competitors are doing, you can do better than what they're doing. You're not just only sending press releases out, you're saying, they're getting those links, but I'm gonna do that even better. I'm gonna build those links in a more authoritative way with content that I can repackage over and over again. It's, I can't emphasize this enough, if you don't do this and your competitors don't do this, it's a huge opportunity. If your competitors are doing this, you need to catch up, right? So I hope that this has been helpful. If you have any questions, please let me know. And it has been such a joy to speak in my first MozCon. Thank you so much for joining.