Enhance link building and onsite efforts with collaboration

As Digital PRs, we want the content we promote to get in front of our desired audience, whether that be through niche blogs, national papers or social media shares and promotion.

We do this via link building and outreach, but it’s much harder to get a backlink to a page that doesn’t meet the needs of the audience, journalist, blogger or everyday internet user.

Similarly, onsite content teams want their content to be useful and purposeful for potential and existing customers as it’s more likely to achieve the ultimate goal of driving leads and revenue.

To help guide onsite content teams, Google uses E-A-T (expertise, authority and trust), a concept that’s especially important to Your Money Your Life (YMYL) sites, such as financial services.

These sites warrant far closer scrutiny and it’s crucial financial brands focus on ensuring their content is relevant to their audience, genuinely useful, and of a high quality, providing real value.

Relevance is an often-overlooked in content for Digital PR and link building, as are the other elements of E-A-T, but we believe this shouldn’t be the case. If it is, it’s likely the links you’re gaining have little to no impact outside of the number you secure.

If Digital PR and content teams work better together, from ensuring the principles of E-A-T translate through to Digital PR content, to capturing additional traffic secured by links to funneling people through to convert, both teams can achieve their objectives and the rewards can be plentiful.

Here I’ve shared three big reasons why collaboration is key.

Feature twice in relevant SERPs with onsite content that has a Digital PR twist

When it comes to Digital PR, it’s important the topic of your content is something you have a right to speak about as this plays a role in providing value and authenticity to the conversation. To stand out, you’ll also need to approach the content in an interesting way.

From an onsite content perspective, it’s important the content satisfies the needs of consumers, is clear and answers their common queries.

These two needs can be achieved together.

Before creating your Digital PR campaign, understand what keywords and content types are ranking and what is engaging your audience in the SERPs. This keyword research lays a solid and reliable foundation for your work.

Once you have this, you can ensure your content answers questions the audience are looking to have answered and provides insights, tips, expert quotes, statistics and so on to give value.

The greater the insight and expertise, and the more interesting ways you present such information, the more your piece can stand out from the rest as something to be shared and promoted by others, elevating its chances of organic success.

Digital PRs then lift the most pertinent points from the content and outreach it to enhance the chances of it being picked up by publications while using the full details on the content page itself as an incentive to link.

Using keyword research as the foundation for your campaign will help you to feature in the SERP twice. Once with your content as it’ll be full of relevant terms and useful information, and secondly in an article written by a relevant publication that features a mention and link back to you.

This small business toolkit by the multinational enterprise software company, Sage, is a great example of such content.

Our recent guide explains in more depth how you can use the consumer research undertaken as part of your SEO strategy and on-page content production, to identify relevant topics for Digital PR.

The benefits of Digital PR stop at links if the content has no thought for onwards journeys

In a recent campaign for Sage, we created an interactive quiz for future business owners to understand their readiness to launch. The campaign was called Are You Ready To Be Your Own Boss? and gave personalised advice based on current mindset, business know-how and financial situation.

Our aim with the campaign was to reach and engage small businesses through content. To do this, we first conduct a content landscape analysis to arm us with the data and information needed to base the campaign on.

The research uncovered the optimal topics, content type, format, and distribution tactics for the campaign, but also highlighted additional topics for supporting content that would provide further value and insights to those that took the quiz.

The supporting articles were written by experts and highlighted the authority and trustworthiness of our client in the finance and business sectors.

We gained 20 high-quality links to the page which drove a 16% increase in organic visibility for tracked keywords. Meanwhile, the supporting articles produced to support the campaign page rank in traffic-driving positions for over 250 relevant search queries. It’s also been nominated for industry awards by both the Drum and PRmoment!

While the attention, improved rankings and links brought the right people to the site, the campaign and supporting content kept them there – funnel them through their desired journeys to take the desired actions.

E-A-T isn’t limited to onsite, Digital PR has a place in it too

Onsite teams may create content that ticks all the boxes in demonstrating E-A-T, but this work could be undone if links to that page don’t maintain similar standards. In fact, a huge part of E-A-T is the links secured by the page.

It’s easy to get carried away if you achieve a huge number of backlinks to your target page, but the real value comes in the relevancy and quality of those backlinks to your client and its content.

Creating an outreach list full of sites that are hyper-relevant goes without saying, but a targeted list and a strong outreach strategy will increase the potential of a campaign and ensure all the great work done before isn’t lost.

Equally, while you may have created fantastic onsite content if you do nothing else with it once published it’s firstly a wasted opportunity, but it may also struggle to rank without links.

We mostly find that our clients are sitting on a goldmine of content that could be used for link building that are doing nothing with it.

Final thoughts

Whether it’s a planned, multi-faceted marketing campaign, or a quick, reactive Digital PR piece, it is clear that working across teams to build content and outreach with core principles of quality and relevancy in mind should be at the top of your priorities.

For financial sites with an extra responsibility to provide accurate information to readers, this is even more important, and something to consider at all stages of a campaign, be it onsite or offsite.

If you want to know more about how teams work together in harmony and for the better of your content, you can always get in touch and chat things through with one of our specialists.

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