Table of Contents
After working and learning from Ross Hudgens, the founder of content marketing agency, Siege Media, for close to seven years, I am thrilled to have him on the podcast.
Ross and Emily Campbell Snidal, their VP of Content Marketing, recently released a podcast explaining their new “product-led digital PR” approach. So, being a super fan of Siege Media, I wanted to get the inside scoop on how the strategy works, the challenges, and the tactics behind its success.
You can check out their original conversation about product-led digital PR on their blog.
Main Takeaways
Here is the TL:DR recap of the conversation.
Product-Led Digital PR Can Build Brand
Ross and Emily’s new strategy focuses on digital PR campaigns that directly connect to the product and brand. By aligning with search-driven topics that also align with the product, campaigns can generate brand awareness and SEO value, as they resonate better with relevant audiences.
Shift to Fewer, High-Impact Campaigns
Instead of high-frequency outreach, they now emphasize fewer but more impactful campaigns. This approach reduces the risk of “outreach fatigue” with journalists and allows more time for producing high-quality, highly relevant content.
Leveraging First-Party Data for Unique Insights
The product-led approach creates original insights and reports using proprietary data. This not only generates links but may also boost content visibility in AI-driven search results, as these algorithms seem to favor unique, primary research.
Repurposing Data Across Content for Long-Term Value
To maximize the ROI of the data-driven reports, they then by repurpose insights across various content formats (SEO posts, product pages, etc.). This extends the relevance of each campaign, allowing it to benefit multiple content assets over time.
This is a Long-Term Strategy:
The Siege team emphasizes long-term brand building over short-term link wins. By focusing on content that boosts brand reputation, you can create a stronger, more sustainable PR and SEO impact over time.
Adjusting Outreach Frequency to Match Industry Relevancy:
This approach can really work for any brand, but it’s smart to tailor the frequency of PR reports or surveys to the industry. For instance, consumer brands may benefit from monthly data reports, while B2B might be more effective with quarterly or annual releases.
Resources Mentioned
SurveyMonkey: A platform for creating surveys and collecting first-party data.
- https://www.surveymonkey.com
- Audience Calculator: https://www.surveymonkey.com/collect/audience/calculator/preview
Ahrefs: A comprehensive SEO toolset used for link intent analysis and keyword research.
Keysearch: A keyword research tool that provides balanced keyword difficulty scores.
Positional: A tool that offers features for optimizing internal linking structures for SEO (and much more).
Cyrus Shepard’s Internal Linking Study: An in-depth analysis of internal linking strategies and their impact on SEO.
Orbit Media’s Blogging Statistics Survey: An annual survey providing insights into blogging trends and statistics.
Transcript
Below is a semi-edited transcription of our conversation.
What are your thoughts on the general direction that you think Google is heading right now?
Ross: Yeah, it’s interesting to watch and you’re right.
I normally wouldn’t pay too much attention. I think we had to pay attention to AI overviews cause it’s like, so, so different, um, and there was pessimism there for sure. I think my takeaway I is, I mean, I was a little nervous about it, uh, but a lot of those nerves I think are behind this, especially with things like the monopoly breakup.
Um, I don’t think that’ll change the world or anything that, uh, that they have that ruling against them, but hopefully it’s just like another positive, uh, potentially positive thing. And it seems like a lot of this kind of apocalypse news is not so much. Slated or everyone was concerned in terms of the downside risk, at least so far.
I mean, they, what, what I’ve kind of said since the beginning is it feels like in a worst case scenario, it’s a 10 and 20 percent drop. I think that’s it’s been on the lower side of that so far. It could expand to the higher side, but still a very, very healthy channel. I mean, will it ever be as big and fruitful, especially for smaller players?
Um, That it was in the past. I don’t know, but if I generally feel optimistic, especially kind of getting on the other side of what was one of a rare, rare era of a little bit of pessimism, I, I, I guess.
Vince: Yeah. I mean, you, uh, did a couple great studies on kind of the impact that you saw across your clients, I think that’s what you’re referring to that like 10 or 20 percent decrease.
Outside of organic traffic a few years ago, you kind of announced that you were maybe taking a step backward and doing outreach and kind of content led outreach and link building.
And now it seems like maybe you’re kind of going back a little bit towards it again. Why the initial switch off, I guess. And then maybe we can talk about why you’ve started back up.
Why did you initially stop manual link building and then come back to it?
Ross: Yeah, I mean, the, the switch off, we have a post on why we stopped doing most manual link building, uh, was, you know, We just felt like we found a more efficient vehicle. It’s not that outreach wasn’t helpful.
It was more that if you did things correctly, you invested in the website, you invested in the brand, and you still thought about link acquisition via like organic link assets, topics that attract links, naturally trends, statistics, data points, all that stuff.
It was just more price-efficient than doing a lot of outreach. So, the rationale was, like, why would you do that?
We’ve gone a little bit back on that, uh, not to a massive degree. And what the degree is, I think previously we were like, oh, we could promote four assets a month with manual outreach, but now more of the thought process is, you know, still there’s value, but it’s, uh, maybe you just shouldn’t be doing it as frequently as you were before.
Is it quarterly? Is it even twice a year? Sometimes, it’s only once a year, and the less you do it, the higher the leverage.
You’re not going to wear these people out. It’s truly good content, digital PR.
You’re getting a secondary value, and the values, you have more opportunities for more links in that way as well.
So that’s higher leverage.
By nature, you can’t reach out to the same publications 95 times. Also, you stay product-tied, which is that product-led idea. If you’re product-led, you make a real argument that this actually has value to your brand, it actually can drive sales, which I think, unfortunately, a lot of digital PR cannot, cannot say.
The second part is that when you do that work, you can reproduce it across more things. So those reports can then be used across all your content. And that was kind of an aha. Seeing it deployed is like, why not use this data across all SEO content or as much as possible? And if it’s about your product, truly, that’s relatively easy to do because it’s just so naturally on voice to do so.
Vince: Yeah. I mean, touch on a couple of things there. And I remember, you know, being at Siege and doing, hitting some of these challenges that I’m sure a lot of agencies hit where it’s, you know, if you are hitting the volume that we were talking about for posts a month, you do run those risks of only like burnout from people like it’s like ideation burnout, right?
It’s like hard to find stuff.
And then you start, like you said, getting a little further away from center further away from the product and kind of brand centric stuff, but then also potentially souring some of the relationships with with journalists and bloggers.
I feel like we were maybe doing at least when I started like six years ago, we were a lot doing a lot more blogger outreach.
It was easier to sour those relationships more quickly just because they were getting pitched all the time, but yeah, I really like this.
And I think the approach is something I haven’t really seen. I’ve seen different versions of this done. I feel like HubSpot does this in a way where they’ll do their massive marketing report.
And then reuse those statistics that they find in statistics posts.
But this doesn’t exactly sound like what you’re doing or how you’re leveraging it, or at least that’s maybe part of it. But you’re doing it a little bit more on product pages, too, right?
Why call it product led digital PR?
Ross: We call it product led because that’s a good, Test case, like, could the data live on a product page?
If you couldn’t have it live, that’s kind of like the, I forget the right framing of that, but if it couldn’t live on that page, then it’s not truly tied to the product, and because of that, it probably will struggle to live on other SEO content.
So you’re right that, and this is, I think, I think we were doing it when you were last with us, we would put it on top of a stats post that was the obvious place, but kind of the aha was how much further it could go like we, for example, have a trends report on our site and we talk about link building.
We talk about interactive content, like if they’re using it or not, and then we have a post on interactive content by nature. We can cite that.
Same data point about interactive content on it, where previously we would have just put it at the top of a stats post. And that was kind of, that’s the milking it idea that just drives so much more ROI.
And I think it definitely doesn’t hurt to put it on a product page. Sometimes there’s just difficulties doing that. Uh, and it probably could help you get some links directly from those product pages by all means. But I think that framing is helpful. It’s just that. You got, you just got to walk through that, that test case of, could I actually have this on a page?
And if so, then it’s probably actually capable of driving conversions and extra value beyond just that link.
Vince: And is this kind of a topic, in general, that could live on a product page, or are you using that to determine the questions?
And if you do a trends report or something like the top subtopics, just make sure that it’s laser-focused on your product and brand’s general area.
So the product and brand really dictate the questions or topics you cover in a report?
Ross: Yes. I mean, I think thematically, like in our example, we do digital PR, we do content creation, we do, we have a lot of SaaS customers, like hypothetically, you could have a trends report across all of these areas. Segment areas, um, hypothetically, of course, that would get diluted a little bit, but I think that’s a great place to start generally.
Um, and the broader you are, the easier it is to build a trend report like that, but something that Emily also ideated that I thought was really smart was that you would start with a trends report, and then you have that keyword research. And by nature, all your questions for that report could dovetail into, say, your next 10 topics.
So if you have 10 questions you’re going to ask, you know, there’s one on interactive content, one on digital PR, one on link building. I now have a data point for all 10 of those assets.
That’s pretty awesome.
In addition to just making that original report pretty powerful. Now, all my 10 SEO posts are differentiated, unique, first party data, defensible, that kind of stuff.
Vince: Yeah. And that kind of first party data, it’s probably a good segue to talk about kind of the AI overview, at least from my perspective, like that’s where you’re going to be able to get. Into those AI overview results and the chat GPT and search GPT results is by producing your own data. I mean, is that kind of the thought process there?
Is first-party data helpful in getting into AI Overviews?
Ross: Yeah, definitely a part of it.
You’ve probably heard the term “information gain.” It seems like information gain is more prominent in those overviews. So that seems very probable, and we’ve done data and studies of clients who had 50 first-party data references in their articles.
And then half of the articles did not have any.
And it was like really, it was 83 percent difference in traffic value. And I think 34 percent more links, but you can see how you could think how nature of someone like your researcher is just looking at articles and they’re trying to find something in the site by nature, that’s going to help everything just kind of lift as well.
Vince: Yeah, I think it was the very first person I ever saw do this was Orbit Media.
They had like a blogging statistics survey that they run like every year for since like 2014 or something and like for a long time that was ranking number one for blogging statistics because it was all full of their own statistics, right?
And that was before everybody was writing stats posts.
But yeah, I mean, it’s it. It. It seems so obvious, right, to just like produce your own stuff and get this first party content. I think probably the challenges for a lot of people are how to run these reports, the cost of these reports, and the cost-benefit analysis, especially when you get into a longer term link gain or like something that’s not as directly at a one to one, like I’m going to get 30 links from this, you know, being able to tell a client that like it’s not, it’s a tougher conversation to have.
So, or at least, I don’t know, you tell me, is it a tougher conversation to have with clients in something like this?
Is this approach harder to pitch to a client?
Ross: I mean, I think it’s been relatively easy, actually, when you think of it, of the good news is. And this is sometimes the framing is that first report can fall on its face, even though it’s, it’s so rarely does just because it’s like that big report, it’s not a high frequency thing you now have, uh, what we’re putting in our project trackers, as you remember, Vince is like a data bank, and we’re going to reference that data for an entire year.
Sometimes a little longer than that across all content. So even if you’re spending for an experience, expensive targeted audience, 10, 000 for a report, if you’re using that over a year for a very serious content marketing and investment, like that’s to me, very high ROI. It’s very possible that first push is not like wildly high, but I mean, that’s pretty, it’s hard to, it’s hard to argue for the ROI of, of that effort in my opinion.
Vince: Yeah. But would you say the timeframe is, I mean, it’s obviously not like a month. You’re going to get that it’s, you’re looking more like a year, two year.
What is the time frame in link gains for these big trends reports?
Ross:Right. I think it’s, you’re kind of like link, lifetime link, like link up. Yeah, you would. Well, I mean, we say we’re doing the outreach pieces, I think it, because it’s so powerful and can get into a lot of links and can actually drive secondary value.
And that, that’s one of the hot differences that when we pull back, it’s like, when you’re saying you do that lifetime link value.
We have a post on link building costs, which talks about how we kind of analyze industries.
That math wasn’t always super great. Uh, and I think it’s getting worse a lot of like the value of links, but if you were truly tied to products and you know, you can get a lot of coverage and brand awareness, and it’s going to live on your site for a year in prominent ways.
There is truly arguable secondary value.
You might even argue primary value, um, if it’s done well. And I think that it’s kind of the differences, like now there’s true primary value beyond just a link. So, of course, the links are good, but, um, we’re trying to get like the other stuff just weights it more than the high-frequency stuff we were doing did.
Yeah.
Vince: You’ve always been very cognizant of brand, I think, but do you maybe find yourself talking more about it these days about how link building and SEO and the kind of work that Siege does influences and can help build the brand and how and why brand is so important these days?
Do you talk more about “brand” these days?
Ross: Yeah, I don’t know that we, I, I would say indirectly, I don’t know that you asked that question. I don’t know if I find myself saying the word brand or drew our head of sales saying the word brand specifically.
I mean, it’s an indirect, this, this digital PR thing, I think definitely contributes to that. I would say we’re not kind of the antithesis of your question.
We’re not saying, Oh, we’re, we’re, we’re not emphasizing links in our conversations. It’s, it’s in there. It’s in our goals. It’s. Something we talk about, but it’s like not, it’s become less and less of a primary voice of the volume of links in the DR of our links and stuff like that. It’s just, it’s cadencing down.
That might not be the right phrasing, but that’s a little lighter than it was.
Vince: Yeah. I mean, I guess the reason I asked that is like, from my perspective, you know, even seeing the way that I get pitched things, I feel like there’s like two main camps of like link builder thought, you know, it’s like the long term like hyper-relevant where we’re going to build a brand as we build links.
And then there’s go buy links from this side or link exchange networks or guest posting, which, you know, is essentially kind of the link exchange network. They’re kind of one in the same. Yeah. I think there’s a big gap these days and trying to convince people that are doing those kind of older school tactics, maybe not like quick win, maybe not as like quantitative focused on, like, I’m going to get you these 50 links of whatever DR and like, those are the only metrics that they care about is like the quantity of links and not necessarily the quality. I just feel like it’s a tough conversation to have with people who are so entrenched in those older school methods, if that makes sense.
Is it hard to convince people of this product led digital PR approach who are entrenched in old school link building?
Ross: Yeah, I mean, I agree. I, I feel like we’re iteratively over time hearing less of those conversations. I don’t know if those people, those companies are slowly getting washed out. That, that would be my assumption. Like you hear about the affiliate scrappy people of the world.
There are fewer and fewer, and those are not doing as well recently, which I think aligns with that mindset more often. Um, it’s kind of just a, you feel it slowly over time.
But suppose I looked at our form submissions, for example. In that case, I feel like we just anecdotally see fewer people kind of lead with link-building focus messages even though our position on our site hasn’t changed dramatically.
Vince: Like I need to build a hundred links in a month or something.
Ross: Yeah. Cause I think that old school, yeah, to your point. I mean, I think it just doesn’t, it’s not doing as well. So whether or not they think it or not, it’s probably slowly getting those, those people then eventually end up not doing that.
Vince: Yeah. So, let’s get back to the product-led thing. Because I want to kind of drill down to some more kind of like tactical pieces of this.
One of the things that I talk to a lot of people about is, you know, people ask, like, are these data studies like these reports? Do you have to be a specific size? You know, if someone like, oh, I have a startup, should I even be doing this?
Is this even going to be effective for me? What’s your take on that? Let’s start there. Let’s start with the size or newness of your website or company.
Can small sites or companies still get value out of product-led digital PR?
Ross: I mean, uh, the more distribution you have. The better it’s going to do, for sure. In some ways, you could argue, and I think it’s true.
We could build a report like this, and the bigger the company, the less actual outreach they might need to get the word out.
It just could live in the architecture of their site and do well. It’s high leverage enough that I think outreach is definitely a positive ROI.
But if you’re smaller, I think it can still be warranted.
You brought it up, and we’re actually doing more posts on this coming up on my LinkedIn, which will be in my history. I’m not sure when it’s publishing, but roughly, there’s a survey we use SurveyMonkey primarily.
They have an audience calculator to get statistical significance.
You could be somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000 for a pretty good survey that you can ask 10 questions and then build a whole report; you could create multiple one-offs just with that one survey, really, if you get them out quickly, and it’s still relevant to very niche audiences.
It could be as high as 10,000; that’s rare, but that’s possible.
And it’s all about your budget, I guess, as a smaller company. But if you’re a leaner startup and you’re taking this thing seriously, I think it’s warranted, but I would say if you’re smaller, you’re also going to be taken a little less seriously by big publications. But if you’re a Salesforce writer writing a sales trends piece with data, everyone will cover that, of course.
Um, so that’s probably the one reason you might not lean that way if you’re day one.
Vince: Yeah. You know, it’s funny. I ask a lot of UK-based teams about this, and I’ve asked journalists about it too. It’s like, do you care where the data comes from?
Like, is it a small company, a large company, a well-known one?
And for the most part, they say no, like as long as the story is relevant and they can look at the data and make sure it’s statistically significant.
That piece seems to be the most important, and even the survey platform (I mean I even think this is different from some of the research we did when I was with you guys) people don’t really seem to care again.
As long as the data is there, it’s good, so that was interesting to me.
And, which makes me think that maybe it doesn’t matter what size you are, but to your point, it sounds like to get the most out of spreading the rest of the data throughout your site. Like if you don’t have a big site, you just, you just have this one big report.
And that’s it.
Ross: Yeah. Yeah. And I, just to put color on that, I wouldn’t say …there’s benefits to being huge for sure, but there’s still a lot being smaller. It’s just probably a degree. Like, I don’t think it’s a no; maybe you’re smaller. It’s just natural, big brand kind of stuff you generally see.
Vince: What about like industry specific?
Like, does this work for B2B brands? Is this something that’s only specific B2C? What, you know, what’s your take on that?
Are there specific industries where this works better than others?
Ross: Yeah, that’s a good, good question. So that’s been something we’ve been thinking about internally around the frequency of these things. Like certain industry, if you’re hyper niche, you probably can’t even do it.
You can’t do a report every quarter.
You’re too small for that.
You probably could do once a year.
That feels like the minimum for most, as long as it feels on-brand.
So, an example, without saying the client. Um, in a B2C shoe space, their voice isn’t data. It doesn’t feel right to communicate, to speak in data a lot.
So that’s like a rare exception, um, that we probably wouldn’t want to do a ton of lift around it. I think that we’re still working. Places there. But as long as data feels like it matches your voice, I think it works in most industries. It’s just a matter of frequency. It’s like when it starts breaking down around that product led concept, then I think you have, yeah, yeah.
Problem. So there are. We’re kind of going on a spectrum where it could be as much as like every month. I think you still could do it every month for certain consumer, generally brands to give you a broad example. I think travels very big travel sites could probably do it every single month for sure.
Vince: I was going to say, yeah, you see Bankrate, does it have a user spending study or something or a state savings monthly report about how much people are saving?
Ross: I would say most B2B could be, yeah, I think it makes sense for most B2B.
Most B2B can speak data naturally. So there could be as much as every other month, but more frequently, I think we’re saying quarterly. And although sometimes it could be every six months, I just feel it’s kind of goes back to what can we talk about?
Do we have enough product areas as well?
Like at Siege, just to say it again, like we have content creation, we have digital PR, we support SaaS, and you hypothetically could do some different reports on all of these areas and not have it be redundant. Still, if you’re just broadly just you’re a niche startup and you’re known for very niche thing, you might just want to do one report each time.
So it’s really a frequency question. Yeah, but generally, yes.
Vince: Yeah. I mean, this isn’t exactly what you guys are doing, but maybe there’s some similarities there. In one of our podcasts, we talked with Brian Dean about a lot of the trends reports and a lot of the data studies that he used to do for Backlinko back when he was still there.
Um, It seems like it’s kind of a similar approach where it’s like, as long as you’re like putting in the right amount of effort, you’re going to get something out of it.
Talk to me about where this can fail. Cause you mentioned this a couple of times, like, Oh, this might fall flat, you know, the first, but, but then it sounds like you kind of have.
Because you’re getting all this data, you can kind of safeguard it somewhat because you can reuse the data and other pieces. But where does this fail?
Where can this product-led digital PR approach fail?
Ross: If you go off brand, do you end up doing it too much? You don’t distribute it. Like I think you, there is naturally, and this is something we’re thinking about more: Outreach, of course, is one way to promote things, but you, you could make it prominent in your architecture.
Like, uh, we had it in our top nav for a long time, our trends report. And we’ll have it there again next year. Yeah, and we have it. It’s still at the top of our featured area on our blog. And that is going to give it the visibility it needs.
I mean, if your data is not credible enough, you didn’t actually get from your buyer persona. It’s hard.
Uh, it doesn’t look good.
The sample size isn’t large enough.
Uh, but I don’t think you can fail if you execute the content. Well, doing like one of these a year, it gets more delicate as you up the frequency more. Uh, But if you’re getting unique data and repurposing it, it can fail. Of course, it gets a little harder.
If everyone starts doing this, of course, you’ve got to be differentiated. Right.
Vince: Right.
Ross: Maybe that’s a potential failure rate. If everyone in the world listens to this and starts doing it. But today that’s not the case. Thankfully.
Vince: Yeah. I mean, so, so it sounds like in a lot of cases you might not even need to worry about having a blog, right?
And it could conceivably not even require a website, right? Like getting links back to it. But if you’re brand new and you don’t even have any of that, you could still potentially do it as just getting your name out there—brand awareness.
Can this work even if you don’t have a website?
Ross: Yeah. Although I, I mean, the leverage of having hosted on your site, uh, we probably wouldn’t recommend that generally.
It would probably say like spin up the blog. Uh, I’ve seen it done though. I mean, it’s often on the other side of the spectrum, where you just can’t coast anything on the site because the company’s so gigantic, you can’t get through any red tape.
Uh, I’ve seen that smaller size. If you’re spending that much on a report, I’d spend the same amount on getting some content section live. It should be relatively close first, and you’ll be able to do a lot of other stuff with that.
Vince: Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. I agree. Like, I’m fully on board for having the content-led outreach versus pitching like a PDF or something.
Yeah, let’s actually talk a little bit about the pitch process, too, because you talked a lot about making sure you’re not oversaturating the industry and like that could be a potential area where it could fail. Are you thinking about these kinds of markets first to validate, like, Hey, you know, this is, we are a shoe company, and we’re going to do this.
Like, are there enough people that I can actually pitch this to that I can get links? What does that process look like?
Do you consider the outreach markets when doing ideation for these campaigns?
Ross: Yeah, that question is an interesting dovetail from where we used to be, where we’d think so much about outreach markets. Like, is there food bloggers are there? This is a BLB space and that matter still matters.
Don’t get me wrong, but I think increasingly it’s just not as important within this process, because as long as you’re maximizing the audience, it could be only 20 people. That’s very feasible, but as long as it’s hyper relevant to you. And you’re getting all the secondary value. And that kind of goes back to, we’re not purely doing this for links.
We’re, we’re going to get some links from it, hopefully, but we’re going to have it live in a prominent way that’s going to build thought leadership for this brand and be used across the site, whether or not the outreach market is big or not, not really a huge deal, but I guess it does go back a little.
There is some consideration around the frequency idea, like by nature, there’s an element to that of, uh, if it’s consumer travel vertical, as we talked about, um, we do know, they kind of tie together. Like there’s enough things to talk about. That’s because there’s generally enough interest, which typically means there’s more outreach, but, uh, something we have completely pivoted from, from your days, Vince at Siege is like, we did more mid-tier blogging outreach.
Now, we do almost everything as a secondary thing. But it’s all data-driven now.
We’re not doing any kind of guide infographics or anything like that because we’ve seen less success.
Vince: Yeah. Yeah. Sadly, I don’t think my video about infographics pitching will hold up anymore.
Um, yeah, that, so it’s interesting. You bring some of that up too, because like, the high DA top tier, whatever you want to call it, like in my experience now, like I’m talking with all these different digital PR agencies and SEOs is a lot of times the, the story is really like the most important thing, as long as it’s like a strong hook and like some don’t even really like they validate way more towards whether or not the story has legs versus, you know, or like the data, you know, like if it’s interesting enough versus, yeah.
If there is an outreach market, you know, I just, that, that is a freeing way to think about it. I think, yeah, yeah.
Ross: Agreed. Unless pure SEO, you know, it’s just like, we’re truly thinking audience for this brand, it shouldn’t matter too much. We’re doing this well, which is nice to have this conversation.
We’re not doing really 19, not 1995, but 2005 SEO outreach anymore.
Vince: Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. The other thing I was going to ask is about, um, the content types that you’re doing, large data report, you know, you’re, you’re pitching this. What happens if you’ve run across, I mean, I’m sure you do this validation in the beginning, but like, you know, uh, other people have done this, right?
For instance, I wanted to do a state of link building report, and I went to look, and there’s been three other state of link building reports in the past couple of months, right? Muckrack Cision, both have a state of journalism report that they put out a month apart.
That, to me, is a limiting factor, but how do you view that? Is it just a matter of changing the angle, asking different questions, and analyzing what’s been done out there, or does it not even matter?
How much do you look at if competitors have done the same kind of report?
Ross: Yeah, I saw you share that Cision report, by the way, which is a great report, and I shared it with our team.
I think you hit on a good point that it needs to come from a point of credibility.
To me, you guys would be great for link building. But maybe that’s why you don’t want to do it. Bbut where your point of authority and positioning comes from probably matters most.
It is worth noting as kind of a caveat to this. We do, we did a trend or trends report in the SaaS space. It didn’t quite, I think we’d actually had, it’s still ranked page one. I think it’s probably gotten a good number of links. But it didn’t resonate like our content marketing trends report.
You could understand why. We do a lot of SaaS work, but we’re not necessarily SaaS authorities.
So that’s probably a comment on all that. Our trends, our content marketing trends report, has done really, really well. It is worth noting.
Another thing that I love about this is that it builds on itself.
Our year two, it’s almost like a hockey stick for whatever reason is that we can now compare year one data to year two. Yeah. And that is, I don’t know. That’s purely the reason maybe AI, I’m not sure, but, um, it’s hockey stuck in, like just how much pickup we’re getting in year two.
Vince: Yeah. And I’ve seen that after analyzing some posts, it’s like, you know, Anytime people re up there, update their posts on a yearly basis. You just see it go up.
You have so many more data points, right? Like there are so many more stories you can lean on. And, um, yeah, I think getting that first one out of the way seems to be probably the toughest, right? So
Ross: Yeah. Like having the fortitude to be like, we’re going to do this forever.
This is a long-term strategy we’re playing towards, and maybe. Right. We’ve just barely touched page one- not that ranking for content marketing trends is that interesting- but we’ve popped on there a few times this year. It’s hyper-competitive, but we’re playing the long game on this stuff, and it seems to be working.
Vince: Yeah, cool. It’ll be interesting to see how that grows. Cause yeah, I saw it very successful so far. Okay. So let’s set that aside, the product led to little PR thing. Um, what else these days, have been successful at Siege in terms of tactical link building.
Ross: We have identified and maybe this is good at the end of this.
Please don’t share this widely as a social clip. But I’ve realized that Ahrefs keyword difficulty is actually not that great of a keyword difficulty metric, but it is good for showing organic link intent.
The reason for that is that it measures the number of links to page one assets currently at the time of this recording—this is why I don’t want them to change it—it measures the number of links to page one assets, but it doesn’t look at optimization or domain rating at all.
Key Search has actually been better for that for us.
So we’re using Key Search because it uses a blended equation.
We’re also using Ahrefs keyword difficulty as a keyword difficulty score. So, if you combine those two, you’re actually considering overall difficulty with a strong signal of link intent.
If you lean into those link intent topics, it’s quite powerful for creating a snowball effect of link acquisition.
So that’s something we’ve been doing more since you were with us. And, uh, we learned from pain there, uh, over time because, for a while, we were just seeing who linked to the first result and low difficulty.
And then at some point I realized, Oh, Ahrefs is actually the worst place to be using, looking for a link intent. So we migrated to this process and of course it’s much more successful.
Vince: Yeah. That’s really interesting. The tool is called key key term, key search?
The tool is called Key Search?
Ross: It’s literally only keyword difficulty and it’s super cheap.
I think it’s about 19 a month. They pull in eight Moz metrics to do their calculation, but we’ve, I think it doesn’t have an API, which is kind of one of the weaknesses. But it’s really easy to just copy and paste the data, and it’s user-friendly.
So yeah, it’s to date the best keyword difficulty tool we’ve seen.
Vince: And then, so outside of that, I know, you know, you guys are still doing a lot of great design work. How does that kind of play into, and we touched on this a little bit, but I’d love to hear you elaborate a little bit more on like how about design work? Cause you also. Recently posted about this on LinkedIn and how the design work kind of plays a role in SEO.
Why is design so important in content marketing?
Ross: Yeah. And pitching for sure. I mean, having high-quality visual assets that reporters and bloggers can share makes life much easier.
From day one, Siege, we were primarily graphic design, and we’ve done more web design because that content experience is so critical. We’ve just ramped up that conversation over time.
We’ve been more aggressive telling clients, they need to implement these web design changes within 90 days, or we won’t hit our goals.
That has been more effective.
When there have been roadblocks, and yeah, we keep pushing that forward.
I’m learning more about blogs. We used to not care about giant hero images. Now we’re like, we need a small hero image for load time.
Thinking more about related linking. Uh, we’ve been testing more recently, more related links, post content, and I think we’re seeing a pretty, pretty big lift in being six plus post content. So that’s interesting, but, um, we’ll have more to share there because all of those things are related.
Vince: Sorry. Related links within the content, like linking to post content below the post, right?
Ross: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just kind of a scalable thing. I think I was just kind of pattern-matching some successful sites, and it seemed like pretty consistently they were using more than three, whether it was there or you do it in other areas, but by nature, you scale out this stuff.
It’s just a very easy to scale as long as it’s like tied to the concept, of course, like it can’t. Well, I mean, it might still do okay. It was kind of random, but, um, like we have digital PR posts, we should have six plus digital PR posts and it needs to look good. It could look sloppy. That’s kind of the, but if you have good designers, they, they’re pretty efficient at making it not look too sloppy.
So that, that matters.
Vince: Yeah. Yeah. I’ve been really testing out internal linking a lot more than I used to. I spoke to Nate Matherson, who works at, um, uh, Uh, cool kind of SEO tool called Positional. And one of the tools they have is this internal linking tool. Um, and you had him on the pod and he was talking about a study that Cyrus Shepherd did on internal linking.
And it was like, you know, seven links was like the kind of average, uh, seven internal links per post was helpful for ranking. And then, but there were also some of these metrics, like having no matching keywords links to a, to a page helps.
Some of these things that like I would have never thought of outside of just like, I always tried to match it kind of closely enough, right.
You know, this got really hyper. I focused on that kind of thing.
Ross: I saw that same study. That’s a great study on Zppy. And, uh, one exciting thing from it, that’s partially why I’m like, this is still inconclusive. Uh, but I, I, I think it still makes logical sense. I think his study showed after about 60 internal links, there are diminishing returns, which I think, unless you’re like the biggest website of all time, that’s kind of hard to do.
It’s just content-related linking. And that tends to not be exact match site-wide nav stuff, which is probably what his study covered. But that’ll be interesting to look at, um, because his study did see diminishing returns, but I think you’re at a good level around 50, which is probably too many anchor texts, that kind of thing.
Vince: Yeah. Well, Ross, I know you’re a busy man, so I’ll let you get back to it, but I really appreciate the time. Thanks for coming on. If you can catch Ross on LinkedIn, he’s very active there. It’s also active on Twitter. Maybe check him out on threads. He’s just dipping his toes in the water there. But yeah, thanks so much for coming on Ross.
I really appreciate it.
Ross: Yeah. Thanks for having me Vince. Great catching up.
Check out the BuzzStream Podcast
