Table of Contents
Amelia Selby works for SEO Travel, a unique digital marketing agency based in the UK with a great vision. SEO Travel is a non-profit agency that helps small—to medium-sized travel companies with smaller budgets.
On the one hand, it’s a fantastic goal, and they’ve raised over 100,000 pounds in three years for two educational charities: Zarach and Moving Mountains.
However, it also comes with the unique challenge of delivering results in digital PR on a lean budget.
So, I thought it was the perfect opportunity for a podcast!
Tips for Doing Digital PR on a Low Budget
Based on our chat, here are some great tips for doing digital PR on a small budget.
1. Leverage Free Tools
You can find free data like Google Keyword Planner, or Numbeoto create campaigns. Combine multiple data points to tell a unique story, such as creating indices that rank countries or cities based on specific criteria like internet speed, safety, or cost of living.
Instant Data Scraper is a free Chrome extension that allows you to scrape web data, helping you build campaigns without needing an in-house data analyst team.
Platforms like Pinterest and TikTok offer free data trends that can be used to generate campaign ideas.
2. Quick Response for Newsjacking
Small brands should focus on reacting quickly to breaking news. Journalists often include the first good pitches they receive, so being responsive can help smaller brands get featured in major outlets, even alongside larger companies.
Monitor free tools like X with the hashtag #journorequest (mainly in the UK) to catch journalist requests early.
3. Offer Unique or Emotional Insights for Quote Pitching
Smaller brands can stand out by offering something different. Avoid generic responses and provide unique insights that spark emotions like excitement, jealousy, or surprise. This helps cut through the noise of bigger brands.
Use anecdotes in your pitches to make your content more relatable and engaging for journalists and readers.
4. Optimize PR for SEO with Content Hubs
If you are trying to pass equity through to specific money pages, rather than linking PR coverage to a homepage, direct links to relevant landing pages or content hubs.
This ensures that the link equity flows to the commercial pages that matter for SEO and rankings.
Structure content hubs that combine valuable resources, like guides or data, to enhance their SEO potential.
5. Lean on Evergreen Content
Focus on creating evergreen content that can be reused for outreach over a long period. For example, campaigns based on seasonal or recurring events, like advice on how to deal with heatwaves, can be pitched year after year with minor updates.
Update data or refresh subject lines to keep the content relevant.
6. Be Selective with Media Databases
While media databases can save time, they are not always necessary. Building relationships with freelance journalists can be more effective since freelancers often write for multiple outlets and provide new referring domains.
If you don’t have a database, find journalists through Twitter or by manually researching publications. Often, email addresses follow predictable patterns.
7. Manage Client Expectations
Be transparent about the scope of outreach and results. Set realistic expectations, especially for smaller clients with limited budgets, and focus on maximizing each campaign’s value.
Transcript
Below is a full transcript of our chat.
Vince: Hello everyone and welcome to the BuzzStream podcast. My name is Vince Nero and today I’m delighted to be joined with Amelia Selby, the head of PR with SEO travel. How are you doing, Amelia?
Amelia: Good. Thank you. You? I’m
Vince: doing pretty good. It’s, I’m not sure when this is actually going to come out, but it’s hot and humid here in the summer, uh, in July for me, at least on the, East coast of uh, New York.
So remind me where you, you are based in Yorkshire, Yorkshire? Yes. Did I say that right?
Amelia: Yeah, so regardless of when it comes out, it will not be hot and humid. So it’s raining. Just rain,
Vince: rain, rain, rain. Yeah. Before I get into it, Any of this, I just want to remind everybody to like and subscribe, share the stuff with your friends.
We have a newsletter, at BuzzStream, uh, the more subscribers, the more activity we get on this, the more I can have great guests like Amelia on here to talk about the great stuff that they’re doing. Well so, Amelia, SEO travel was such a unique agency and what you guys do is really, really cool. So I want to give you a chance to chat a little bit about what SEO travel is and what makes you unique.
Amelia: Yeah. Thank you. I mean, that’s definitely. Kind of one of the reasons why we, we do try and reach out to spread the word, because I think as an agency, we are structured very different to other agencies and we are kind of trying to raise awareness of kind of the model that we’ve adopted and how it can work for other businesses.
So for context, uh, SEO travel. was founded 13 years ago because our founder Tom basically felt that there wasn’t a good digital marketing offering for small to medium sized businesses and he kind of wanted to create a solution for that size business that would effectively allow smaller travel companies to compete with kind of the really big industry goliaths.
13 years on small to medium sized businesses are still really at the heart of what we do and we kind of serve to offer affordable travel. But really effective digital marketing services for that size business. It does mean that we have to be a lot leaner than other agencies in how we operate and we can’t splash cash on hundreds of different tools to make our lives easier.
So yeah, as in the PR team and also kind of across the business. We’ve had to get really creative and rely on free tools and data in order to get big results. So that’s kind of one of the reasons why we often have to maybe watch the bottom line at SEO travel. But also, and probably what you’re referring to, Vince, is we give all of our profits to charity.
So 100 percent of profits go to two educational charities, one called Zarak, who’s based where we are in Yorkshire, and another called Moving Mountains, which is more of an overseas charity. And we’ve given away, I think in the three years since we’ve had the business model, um, 100, 000 to both of the charities.
And I think the thing that we’re really keen to push and to promote is that obviously, of course, giving and helping a good cause is at the heart of why we do it, but also it’s not purely selfless. And we actually feel that we’ve created kind of what we like to call, um, a virtuous circle. So. We felt that since doing this 100 percent profit giving model, which is what we call it.
We’ve been able to attract really good talent within the industry. A lot of the time when we’re hiring for a job, we already have a pool of people who have sent their CV because they’ve seen what we’re doing and they love what we’re doing and bringing on, you know, the best talent has enabled us to work with more clients.
to do better work for clients. And we’ve found that clients also want to work with us because of our values. And then kind of those two together have then enabled us to give more money to charity. We’ve been able to grow the business. So yeah, we kind of really believe that the approach. That we’ve taken has so many advantages and it is such a viable option for businesses.
So I definitely think the world would be a lot better place if kind of more people adopted it.
Vince: Yeah. I mean, and it’s so cool. You know, I’ve worked at some great agencies that have a charitable side and, you know, give to charities, but to be able to. Be a nonprofit as an agency. I just, I love that. I think that’s so cool.
I mean, my head obviously immediately goes to this idea of like, how do you do that? Like, you know, especially when it comes to like, I know it takes budget to do like building and to do great digital PR. So the first question I kind of wanted to ask is basically if a brand has a lower budget, I’m assuming It’s going to be a smaller, less known brand, right?
Do you find that it is harder to build brand awareness and run campaigns for a smaller, less known brand? Let’s start there.
Amelia: I mean, obviously, well known, bigger brands, it’s easier to get coverage because it’s a household name. So a journalist recognizes that, you know, if they include a quote from a well known name, their readers will be able to resonate because it’s something that they would know.
But I don’t think That stops you from getting coverage just because you aren’t one of those clients. So, you know, for example, if you’re trying to weigh in on a breaking news topic, so if you’re doing newsjacking, then of course being a well known brand will go in your favor, obviously. And you know, if you’re reading USA Today or CNBC and it’s talking about airport chaos or destination popularity, you are likely to see the big names on there.
However, we have got, you know, some of our smaller clients, maybe clients that You know, have three people working for them and two are the owner featured in places like the New York Times, USA Today, just by being on the pulse and being really quick to respond and also just by offering a really unique.
An insightful response. I think a lot of the time journalists will just include the first good pitches that they get for their story and kind of once they’ve filled up their story in their mind, they tend to then just ignore the rest. So I think that’s one thing that small brands can do. It pays to be quick.
A lot of the time that actually then just go in small brands favor because you’re not having to get quotes signed off by heads off and C suite and all of that. So actually. That is where, you know, smaller businesses shine. And I think the other thing as well that can help smaller brands cut through the noise of bigger brands is saying something different to what everyone else is going to say.
So, you know, if a journalist is asking for some insight into good travel deals. Don’t say book early, because everyone’s going to
Vince: know. The obvious stuff,
Amelia: yeah. Yeah, like share something different, you know, dish some, maybe some insider secrets or maybe even just give an opposing view. That’s definitely how we’ve been able to, to cut through the noise because obviously journalists will just get the same tips, just written slightly differently.
And if you can give them something that is going to, yeah, make their readers, um, Shocked or feel some sort of emotion, then it doesn’t really matter. As long as obviously you are a credible travel brand, it doesn’t matter how big you are.
Vince: Yeah. So you’ve never had a journal come back and say like, we don’t know who you are, right?
Amelia: No, never. Yeah. I
Vince: feel like that’s maybe the, the fear oftentimes for brands and agencies working with someone that’s like, are you, yeah, uh, are you well known enough to be able to speak as an authority, but yeah, to your point. If you can bring something new, bring something authentically new, I should say, it sounds like it works.
Amelia: Yeah, definitely. I think, you know, bigger brands, when they send through a quote to a journalist, they probably don’t have to explain who the business is, but maybe that’s something that I do try and do for the smaller brands is we kind of include a blurb below that highlights, you know, the person who’s commenting, how many years in the industry they’ve had, or if they’ve been, you know, You know quoted elsewhere that also helps but I’ve never had someone I mean unless they think it behind my back and just don’t bother reply I’ve never had someone say no too small.
Don’t know who you are.
Vince: Yeah So, uh, you also mentioned I really like this idea of saying something new and something that will stand out, right? So like can you talk us through let’s use that airport as an example that um, you know, like booking early Obviously like that’s the most obvious tip but like how do you say something that isn’t going to stand out?
I mean, it’s off the wall, but it’s still gonna stick out enough that this quote is, you know, that’s a very interesting tip and kind of strategy for this. But, but it can be tricky. It sounds like,
Amelia: Yeah, I think one of the things that we always try to do is when we’re putting together A quote, is we always try and include a couple of things.
So one thing is we make sure that what we’re saying will spark some sort of emotion. Um, because a lot of the times that’s what journalists want people to do when they’re reading their articles. So we’ll always try and make sure that whatever we’re pitching will spark some emotion, whether it’s shock or fear or excitement or happiness.
That is one thing that we find is really successful with cutting through the noise. So, you know, if we’re talking about good travel deals, it might be that we give some insight into something that people really didn’t expect to work or, yeah, something that might spark some sort of other emotion and jealousy.
So that, that’s one of the tips that we always try to do and something is we always try to include an anecdote because it makes people be able to relate to the point and the tip a lot easier. And obviously that is a big plus for journalists with their readers. So even just by doing those two things, when we’re kind of structuring our quote, we always almost have a checklist of when I read this, did I feel something?
What was it? If I didn’t. need to rework it, and also have we actually included a real life? example here. Um, they’re just things that, you know, are so easy to do and things that, you know, anecdotes, any travel expert will have hundreds of anecdotes, but it’s something that a lot of people forget, whereas that can really help you stand out.
Vince: Yeah, and we’re speaking specifically to like the quote pitching kind of side of digital PR So we’ll talk a little bit more about like some, you know content driven stuff But I want to dig in a little bit more of the quote driven, you know What are your go to sources or strategies for PR? Finding opportunities.
Are there ones that are better for smaller brands? Can you speak a little bit more to that?
Amelia: Yeah. So there are, obviously there’s lots of platforms that offer journalists, um, requests and suggestions. And a lot of the time they are Very expensive and small businesses just cannot afford them. But one thing that we we find interesting and it’s something that i’ve kind of monitored over the years is more often than not if you If you use twitter x whatever it’s called.
I still can’t get that into my head. Um, and And you follow the hashtag journey request a lot of the times A lot of the time we find that the requests that we see on like a platform For example a journalist request platform has already been on twitter two hours earlier You Um, so a lot of the time we just keep an eye on Twitter, the hashtag journal request, and it’s just constantly journalists asking for insight.
And that is obviously completely free. And a lot of the time you will probably I mean, if you jump on it there and then, you’ll probably beat the bigger brands who are waiting for it to appear on the platform two, three hours later. Um, so that is a really good tip of just looking for, um, on Twitter for journalist requests.
The other thing that we do quite a lot is we keep an eye on, Big publications and the journalists that we often see covering breaking news. So just keeping an eye on the journalist, keeping an eye on what type of journalists include quotes in their pitches, and even just putting some feelers out to say, Hey, I know you often like, you know, insight from experts.
These are my experts. If you ever need any support, I’m here potentially sending through a few quotes and we’ve been able to establish really good relationships just by doing that. Again, completely free just by being inquisitive and keeping an eye on things.
Vince: Yeah. Oh, I love that. Kind of the proactive quote pitching, like Get on their roster.
Okay. I wanna shift gears a little bit now into something that you and I talked about and previously to this. And it’s this idea of like, say you’re pitching a quote. Are we looking to build links to a homepage or are you doing more content driven, content led PR to get content there? Like what? What’s the strategy for a smaller site?
Amelia: Yeah. I mean, realistically for a small. business, it’s really important to make sure that you’re literally getting everything out of your PR efforts that you can. So I think we often, for our clients. Our PR is more with SEO as well in mind and making sure that we’re having an impact on the website and obviously helping to improve organic traffic.
So basically getting the most out of it that you can. I mean, obviously link relevancy and context is more important than ever. So for us, we always try and make sure that the links and the coverage that we get are going to relevant pages, because that’s more likely to deliver the bigger results than just a link to the homepage.
So what we’ll try and do is, for example, like in the quotes, if we, if we’re including an anecdote, for example, we’ll maybe think about, okay, maybe we’ll use an anecdote of like one of the destinations that are You know, our clients travel to, and that way maybe trying to get the journalist to link to that destination page rather than the homepage.
Just trying to be as clever, um, yeah. And then another thing that we do as well is, and I think is probably one of the most important. Underutilized kind of tactics are creating what we call content hubs. So rather than just hosting content that you’re going to try and get links to on a blog, obviously, when you do that, all of the link equity passes through the blog, which is obviously not the optimum place.
So creating kind of these content hubs within commercial landing pages, and then pushing the links through there. It’s kind of making sure that the link equity is getting passed through the commercial pages instead, which are obviously the pages that the clients want to rank. So I think it’s just with smaller brands, it’s more about being more strategic with what we’re doing and making sure that we literally are squeezing every last drop out of the PR that we’re doing.
Vince: Yeah. So just to clarify for me with the content hub idea. So like say it was, you had a travel brand and a hub page was, you know, It’s traveling to London and do you have kind of like a content hub on that page that had all of your links to, you know, your travel guide to London, the top 10 dining places in London, that, that kind of, is that kind of the thought?
So then you’re getting links to the travel page rather than the individual. Yeah, exactly
Amelia: that. So for example, you know, if you had done, say we had a client that was doing a, that had a piece of content on the best destinations for adventure travel, rather than it sitting under www. clientname. com forward slash blog, adventure travel destinations, we would embed it into their adventure travel landing page where they have the itinerary.
So it’d be www. clientname. com. Adventure travel forward slash adventure travel destinations, um, and kind of hosting it under there. I think obviously it can be quite difficult depending on how the structure of the site is and whether you have that flexibility, but it’s definitely something that, that we’ve started to do with some clients and yeah, it’s, it’s, you know, it’s pushing the equity through the pages that we want it to go to.
So yeah, that’s been really, really good for us.
Vince: Yeah. I like that. Yeah. And it probably works a little easier for a smaller site too. It’s not going to have. Yeah, I’d be bogged down with so much. So, okay. We’ve, we’ve talked about quote pitching. We’ve talked a little bit now about kind of passing link equity content hubs.
Let’s get a little more into other kind of tactical advice that you have for low budget clients. What kind of content do you put out? Are there any kind of, we have like the asset less content and then the. Content led, you know, digital PR. So like, let’s, let’s break it down. I want to get into this.
Amelia: Yeah.
So one thing for lower budget clients that we often think is obviously they, we obviously, we don’t do as much outreach for them as probably that the big brands do, or kind of, you know, we’re probably doing the same sort of hero campaign, but over three months compared to one month. different agency. So one thing that we always try and do is kind of have the two approaches of, you know, the reactive PR being very dynamic, the easy wins, so that you can jump on the timely stuff.
But when we’re putting together press releases or you know, bigger hero campaigns, focusing on things that are going to be a bit more evergreen so that, you know, we can continue to use them in the future. So, you know, for example, if, if you were a, I don’t know, you had a health expert that was talking about how to work, how to make working easier during heat waves, that can obviously be outreached any time throughout the year that we experience hot weather.
So it’s kind of, Trying to think of things that regularly happens. So, you know, an engaged, you know, jeweler thinking about celebrity engagements, you know, you can create content that anytime a celebrity gets engaged, you can re outreach it. So that’s the other thing that we really try and think about with the smaller.
the clients. Obviously we do need to have the timely aspect of getting them in the bigger publications but creating that content that will work time and time again that it might have taken us three months to put it together but we’ll also be able to outreach it for the next year because It’s not outdated within a month.
So that is one thing that we’ve found to be really successful. We’ve got, you know, some campaigns that we probably created two years ago that we still outreach when the time’s right and how, yeah, we’ve been able to get the most out of the money for them.
Vince: Do you update them? So they look fresh right before you’re pitching them?
Amelia: Yeah, I mean, you know, we can update the data if it’s, you know, we did it last year and we were pushing it out again this year. So from 2023 to 2024, we would just look and re update the data. Um, but. Essentially, it’s the same, the same campaign and, and sometimes if we do update the data, we just end the subject line, right, 2024 instead of 2023
Vince: and all of
Amelia: a sudden, it’s 90
Vince: again.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I like that. Okay. So what about like the city index studies? I know like, that’s like a popular thing. You do that kind of like, kind of bigger, more data heavy. Posts, I guess, should I?
Amelia: Yeah, we do. And I think that is also obviously in travel. It’s something that kind of goes part and parcel with a lot of our clients.
And we do the data heavy things and all of the data that we use is free. We don’t pay for any of the data sources. So there are essentially hundreds and hundreds of free data sources out there. And I think this is why the indexes work really well, because obviously you can’t just take a piece of data that’s already out there and re report on the findings, because.
That’s nothing new, but what you can do is obviously bring together all of the strands to create a different narrative. So, for example, obviously, like, I’m just trying to think that average Wi Fi speed ranking in every country of the world is publicly available. Um, so just commenting on that wouldn’t be news, but combining it with data on the availability of visas in that country, the average cost of living, That all of a sudden gives you an index that talks about the best country for digital nomads.
So that is something that we did actually right at the beginning of the remote working trend. We essentially just pulled together these various datasets and into a new narrative and it gave us something really, really newsworthy. And they were just pieces of data that were available online. We pulled it for every country, scored it, ranked it, got a campaign that got hundreds of links.
And. It’s amazing enough every single time, because interestingly, that campaign, the prime minister of Thailand mentioned it on live TV and I, the majority of it sat on my sofa.
Yeah. So free data is, yeah, you can do kind of any of the big hero campaigns without. The need for, you know, expensive tools.
Vince: Yeah. So do you do any like survey grabbing, you know, nothing that’s going to cost money. It’s all just free data wherever you can find it based on whatever kind of idea. So I guess let’s talk a little bit about how you kind of formulate those because you know, if someone’s trying to come up with a free data set to, you know, uh, or ideate a campaign where they can use free data outside of like an index, are there any other Types of content that you can do that with that.
Let’s talk about that a little bit.
Amelia: Yeah, one thing that I would say that I think has been Kind of really pivotal to us being able to replicate what the big brands are doing is every time we see a big brand do a big hero campaign asset, I’ll literally click on it and scroll straight to the methodology section and just try to understand how they’ve done it.
Um, and we basically have like this big bank spreadsheet of just all of these amazing campaigns that we’ve seen. And one of the columns next to the link is the methodology. So. We, you know, when we’re trying to get creative and think about how we can do stuff, we’ll basically just weave through all of those methodologies to see if it sparks.
some sort of idea. So I think that’s definitely a good place to start because a lot of the time you can just do what the big brands are doing. So another thing, I think a good example of this as well is maps. That was kind of a very big PR concept in recent years where, you know, people were comparing state by state or regional or international, um, data points for different places, you know, whether it was like.
Every city’s favorite cocktail or these countries, according to their local delicacies. And we had seen a lot of travel brands doing these map graphics and we saw the success and we wanted it for ourselves. So we actually did a campaign that we took the seven wonders of the world and ran it through Google Keyword Planner, which is free.
You have to have a Google ads account set up. So doing. You know, if you’re doing PPC or ads for your account, but actually getting the data was, was free to use then if you already had that. So we essentially just took the list of the seven wonders, ran it through every country, saw which was getting the most search volume in every different country.
And it probably took me an hour or so max, and it was completely free. And we do obviously have an, we do have an in house designer who was made as this beautiful, you know, map graphic to go alongside it, but there are so many free data visualization tools that. You’d be able to create a map graphic to display the information.
So that was simply because I had seen a map graphic. We sat down. We tried to understand how from the methodology they had done it. I thought, okay, well, we don’t have access to that tool. But what other tool can we find search data on a country level? And a lot of the time there are free, free ways of doing it.
Definitely.
Vince: Yeah. Do you ever get into like scraping data for free? Is that a free tactic?
Amelia: Not me personally, but the more tech people, yes. Um, there is actually a free Chrome extension that will basically scrape everything on a webpage. So, you know, I’ve spoken to people within the PR industry who work for bigger brands, and they’ve got kind of these data teams that create them tools in house to do all of these amazing stuff.
And we just do not have the resource for that. I have this very lovely little Chrome extension that. You can just pull everything on a screen and it kind of pulls it into an Excel format. It’s called Instant Data Scraper, actually.
Vince: Straightforward. Yeah.
Amelia: And I’ve done Spotify campaigns with that where I’ve scraped Spotify playlist because it will just scrape whatever is on.
And, you know, we’ve been able to say, Oh, these are the most popular songs for studying or, you know, housework or flying just because of an instant data scraper, a free tool that, you know, other people are probably paying for data analyst in house to do. So,
Vince: yeah.
Amelia: Yeah, there’s definitely a lack around everything.
Vince: Yeah. Talk to me a little bit about client expectations for something like this Like I know for me in my experience Obviously like clients want everything to go viral, right? And that’s not always gonna be the case So especially when you’re working with a lower budget like it can I know it can be Sometimes be hard to kind of squeeze the most out of a campaign to use that term again.
But yeah, how do you guys set expectations with this? I mean, is it just that the client knows when they’re going into it? Like, Hey, we don’t have a ton of budget. So we’re not expecting a million links out of this.
Um,
Amelia: that would be nice. Okay. It’s potentially worse with small clients because the person you’re working for tends to own the business.
So they’re really passionate about their brand. But I think, yeah, one of the things for us is really setting expectations. At the start, we’re very clear with, you know, the average amount of coverage that we get for clients. We’re very clear with the amount of outreach that we can do for the budget. And I think that’s the thing that has really helped us that when a client comes on board, you know, we don’t promise them the world just to get them to sign with us.
We are completely honest and transparent. That is one of our big values. So I think that really helps setting the expectations. At the, at the start, and I think the other thing is we have the confidence and we know that for what we charge, they’re very unlikely to be able to get as good a service and as good a result.
So I think that’s the other thing that I think once a client’s worked with us for a while, we’ve had clients that have worked with us for years and years and years. Because they know that’s the case. So I think as well, it’s also believing in ourselves that that’s the case. And the client only needs to go and inquire somewhere else.
And they also recognize that as well. Um, so yeah, it’s kind of setting expectations and also we do offer for the work that we get and, you know, the coverage that we do get, I don’t think they’d get it for that price. Anyway.
Vince: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So we’ve talked a little bit about like the content ideation and there’s a few more questions I have around that, but I also want to make sure we hit like the outreach and that side of things.
So let’s start with like. media lists, right? Like that’s a big thing. Media databases, that’s usually a big spend for PR agencies. Is that something that you work with? I mean, is that a non negotiable, you know, a non negotiable, like where you have to have that to work or can you build your own list?
Amelia: So for transparency, we do use a media database primarily because the way that our agency works is we probably work on 10 to 12 clients per person.
So it does help us cut time and Obviously with how the business is structured, it had to be when we got the media database cost signed off, we You know, had to really report on the ROI, what hours it was going to save us in order to be able to do other stuff for clients. However, I would say that we probably only use it for 60 percent of the journalists that we, we reach out to.
And we’ve only had a database probably for the last year and a half. So we never had one before that. So I, I do not believe that it is needed to get good results. I think if you’re the sort of agency that does the scattergun approach, where every piece of outreach is going to a hundred journalists, just because they wouldn’t mentioned a keyword six months ago, the media database, but.
If you’re more targeted and more strategic, which I think is more important for smaller clients, you definitely do not need a media database to get good results. We’ve also found recently that media databases tends to have a lot of staff writers on there. And we’ve particularly found in the travel industry that when you see these lovely roundups of, you know, the best villas in Spain, it tends to be the staff writers are Including the clients or the businesses that they can get affiliate links through.
So, uh, just can’t do that. So a lot of the time we and our clients get the links by targeting the freelancers because they obviously have, there’s no benefit to them of including an Airbnb link. So that’s the sweet spot and they don’t tend to be on the media databases. So. Yeah, you know, we find them through Twitter or Google or just scouring the publications that we want links in, in order to find who’s regularly kind of writing for those publications.
So, yeah, and I think the other thing as well that I, I think, If you’re savvy, most publications follow the same or a similar email pattern. So if you can find the email address of someone working at that publication, you can often guess the details of the person you want to contact anyway, at least after two or three attempts.
So yeah, I definitely don’t, it’s not, it would not be if I had to have an expense, you know, I could have one expense. It wouldn’t be a media database at all.
Vince: Yeah. What would it be?
Amelia: Probably an outreach tool. That is, that is the saving time. I’ve, I have sat there with an Excel spreadsheet of a hundred people and sent the emails out manually and it’s soul destroying.
Vince: Yeah. Yeah. That was a really interesting insight. The idea of like building relationships with freelance journalists rather than staff writers. I mean, do you find that you’re able to. Um, lean on repeat, uh, coverage from similar, like, obviously, like you’re in the travel space, right? So there’s like a finite number of travel publications.
Um, so does it, it sounds like it behooves you to really cultivate these relationships with the, even the staff writers, but it sounds like journalists probably a little better because they may be right for multiple travel publications. So is that something that you’ve found? beneficial, I guess?
Amelia: Yeah, definitely.
I mean, in the UK, we, we have a freelance journalist that we have a really good relationship with on regards to one of our clients who is a luxury active travel provider. And the journalist only writes about active travel. He’ll do like, oh, the best long active travel trips in January. And then in February, he’ll write something else about active travel.
and we can almost guarantee that every time he writes. an article around it, our client will be included. Um, and that has just come from continuously sending him the new trips, being the one that, you know, sends them a new insight. Oh, this is literally just happened in, I don’t know, Catalonia and we’ve got a trip there, so maybe you should include it in your next book.
Round up because do you know that this has happened and just being generally helpful to them and we’ve been able to foster really good relationships with freelancers that we almost have the confidence that if he writes an article, our client will be in it. And the other thing that’s really good about freelancers is if they write across a range of publications, it means that for the SEO side of things.
You’re more likely to get a new referring domain rather than just getting links and coverage on the same publication. So again, that’s what the freelancers have that the staff writers don’t, but again, you’re just squeezing more and more from your PR efforts.
Vince: Yeah, I love that. And I forget if you told me, is SEO travel just in the UK, like only serves UK clients or are you pitching internationally, pitching in the US, pitching in other countries?
Absolutely.
Amelia: Yeah, so we are international. So I would say probably we are 50 50 split U. S. U. K. now.
Vince: Okay. Is it a different beast pitching to the U. S. versus U. K. and other countries? That’s just kind of my, at least my experience, is That it’s, you know, the relationship building is, is maybe a little tougher here in, in the U.
S. And, uh, maybe it’s just because there’s so many. I’m curious if that, if you found that and then also what it’s like internationally as well.
Amelia: I think the PR, digital PR in the U. K. is oversaturated. So, it’s very hard to get relationships with journalists in the U. K. because, you know, When you hear how many emails some of them are getting each day, they obviously just, if they see a story that they like, they open the press release, they write it and that’s it.
They don’t need to communicate. Sometimes the story just comes up. Oh, you’re lovely. Okay. However, the majority of the time in the US, I don’t think I’ve ever got US coverage when a US journalist hasn’t told me that they’re going to cover it. It’s, it is a completely different, yeah, beast. I think the UK is so over saturated that it, It’s harder to have that relationship to, you know, say, hi, how are you?
They don’t, they don’t need the
Vince: chit chat. They just don’t
Amelia: care. Um, The US, yeah, definitely more, it’s a lot easier to have the relationships, the backwards and forwards and to say, Oh, and also here’s another story that, you know, for another client, if you are looking, um, so yeah, it is hard. And kind of trying to navigate that is, is difficult.
And I always say this to everyone, but Canadian journalists, I absolutely love pitching in Canada. I can get Canada in a top 10 and I get to pitch to them. They’re great.
Vince: Yeah, yeah, every Canadian is very nice, every Canadian I’ve ever met. Um, yeah, that’s really interesting, so I would have thought it was the other way around, but this actually kind of shines some light into a lot of the conversation that we’ve had internally and like with other guests around personalizing emails, right?
So, like, we talk a lot about putting those little, like, Hey, I saw you wrote this article about X, Y, Z. I loved the, you know, whatever part of it, like, there’s that level of personalization. There’s the level where it’s just like, Hey, since you write in X, Y, Z beat. I thought you’d be interested in this and then there’s like the third level which is kind of what you’re saying Sounds like is more appropriate for a UK journalist, which is just like here’s the Here’s my pitch, you know, like we don’t have to do this song and dance.
Amelia: Yeah, well, I would say though is it’s interesting because I think the thing for UK journalists that the personalization element that is really important for UK journalists is I would probably if I was going to send, uh, yeah, a pitch to UK journalists, I probably would make that my email body. The same. I think, you know, I’d make it concise, punchy, that’s what the journalists want.
But what I would personalize in the UK is the subject line. And what I would try to do is mirror exactly how they write their subject lines. So, you know, I would look at that journalist. Do they capitalize the start of every word? Do they have like a punchy little phrase at the start? And then. The kind of the headline and that to me, they literally, they scan through their inbox.
They see something written exactly how they would write it and it stands out. So Americans, I’m asking how they are and if they’re having a nice day. article, just writing the headlines for them. So I think, yeah, personalization is still really important. It just depends on the market for what type of personalization.
Vince: Yeah. Are you finding the personalization too in the U S do you still do that? Like headline subject line matching? Does that work?
Amelia: Yeah, I think it definitely does. And I think it obviously depends. What type of outreach it is, you know, if we’ve got a, um, so we’ve got a campaign that looks at, we’re comparing U.
S. states for something, you know, if it’s going to, A generic journalist at USA Today, more of a national journalist will have a very generic headline, but I definitely think, you know, you then contacting a journalist in Houston to write that. And so, yeah, still, I think there is the subject line personalization across the board.
Vince: Right, right. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so we talked a little bit about some of the free tools, free data, you got your scraper tool. What are some other free tools that you can recommend that people use that are kind of in your daily toolkit? Oh, keyword planner, that was another one you said.
Amelia: Um, one thing that we find really good for ideation is there’s a tool called answer the public, and you can essentially type in a keyword and it will show you what questions and phrases are coming up and people are searching for around that subject.
We find that really, really useful for trying to come up with ideas. You know, you can literally just throw in the most generic of your clients, key phrases, and then all of us, some of them get really weird and really niche and you kind of just have to overlook that, but some of the weird and niche ones can spark a great idea.
So. That tool isn’t free, but you are allowed three free searches a day. So give yourself a week to plan, but, um, um, yeah, I’m trying to think of other things that I would get hunter. io. Is, um, somewhere where you can verify email addresses. So, you know, if you’ve been trying really hard to find, um, the email format of a journalist, you just can’t quite get it right and you keep getting bounce backs, you can use that.
I think, again, I’m not exactly sure how the structure is, but you would add a certain amount of free search. It’s like
Vince: 25 free credits or something. Yeah.
Amelia: Yeah. So that can be, yeah, a really good thing to look at. And I think the other thing that a lot of people don’t realize as well is that a lot of.
social media platforms have their own free data. So, you know, Pinterest have a Pinterest trend section, which shows, you know, some of the things that people are searching on there, the most, the things that have spiked in popularity and, you know, Pinterest is that sort of thing is particularly good for like interior deco or, you know, wedding industry and for us honeymoon industry.
Um, so for example, we had some really good success when we were just scrolling through Pinterest data, the princess trends section, um, there was a, a rise in micro wedding searches. So we have like a large house rental provider. Um, and we basically just. Pulled this data and then outreached some small manner houses in the UK and sent it to journalists, and we got a link.
So TikTok also has free data in their creative center, and I feel like right now, if you mention TikTok in a pitch, it’s normally picked up because it’s the The hot social media hot thing.
Vince: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So
Amelia: that’s funny. There is loads of stuff that I think people just don’t realize. And one tip that I would say is a lot of PR agencies have blogs.
That literally are like 200 free data sources or 200 free tools. So yeah, quick Google and bookmark that I still reflect on all the time.
Vince: I’m working on one right now, actually for on the BuzzFeed blog. So there you go.
There you go.
Yeah. Okay. That’s super helpful. So last thing I want to get here is something that you mentioned earlier.
And I think it’s really important because there’s a lot of free data sources, like you said. And you talked about. Kind of creating a narrative out of free data. And that was something that really stood out to me because I think that’s. That’s very powerful. And I’m a big believer of data driven digital PR is kind of, to me, at least the going to be the future of digital PR.
So when you get a data source, talk us through kind of the ideation and kind of the storytelling that takes place or the conversation that takes place around kind of extracting that story because it’s really interesting to me.
Amelia: Yeah. So I guess it can kind of work from two different angles. So it can either be we’ve sat down and we’ve identified.
You know, a trend that is happening, something that people are talking about. So using an example for ease when we were just coming out of COVID. So it was, I think it was 2021. Um, a lot of people were talking about obviously the fact that we’re all working from home and in the business sections of kind of the news, they were talking about how they thought remote working and hybrid working was going to be here.
To stay and we all of a sudden thought, okay, so what does that mean for travel? People are going to be working abroad. There’s going to be workations. And it was before kind of the travel publications that started talking about it, and we were like, hang on, there is a thing, there is a thing here that is going to be huge.
How do we create the data, the narrative, the story around it? And so we basically just sat down and we thought, okay, so if we were going to look at the best places to do a workation around the world, what to us as people who could feasibly do it would be the main considerations. So we sit down and we start to talk about the different data points that, you know, would matter to someone who was doing a workation.
So the speed of the internet, how safe it is at night, or, you know, the general cost of living there, how much beers cost for an after work beer, all of the important things. And then we basically scouring the web for those data points. And, you know, we were able to find them on places like, there’s some websites called Numbio and Nomadlist, which essentially just compare cities around the world on different price points and safety elements and it’s all user fed.
And we were able just to bring together all of these data points. And take the story to journalists just as people were starting to talk about workations. So, you’ve kind of got that where it can be led by the trend already, which is kind of pulling it together. Or it can be when Every time I see a, A campaign or yeah, any kind of PR story, I save it.
We have this amazing catalog of stuff and understanding how they’ve done it. It can kind of come from that as well. Kind of having like an idea of Okay, what
Vince: reconstructing?
Amelia: Yeah.
Vince: Yeah.
Amelia: Or if we were like, Ooh, these used data on the most lit up cities at night, and they used. This really cool data tool that when you hover over a city, it shows you exactly how much light pollution there is in this city.
Okay, that’s a really cool data set, piece of data that’s free. What clients do we have? Click around in the tool, understand. Okay, well, what cities are the most lit up? Are there any cities lit up that we wouldn’t have expected to be lit up? You know, aside from like New York and Tokyo and London. Oh! That really small island is really lit up.
What’s going on there? And using the data, playing around, being creative with it to then find the story. So I think that’s the thing. I think sometimes you can have the idea first and it’s easy to find the data points. But a lot of the time it’s having the data points to then find the story from it. So what we always try and do is we’ve kind of got another, you know, another spreadsheet that anytime anyone in the team finds.
a data point, a free piece of data that, yeah, we don’t need it right now, but we just log it there. So, you know, we can just go back. So we’ve got kind of this long list of wine consumption per country or how stressed countries are and all of these different things that then when we’ve kind of got the idea, we can go through and be like, that works, that works, that works.
So. That yeah, those are kind of the two ways that we approach it.
Vince: Yeah, I love that. That’s both very, very helpful, actionable tips there. So Amelia, I um, I want to also give a chance to kind of Give some inspiration maybe for, uh, agencies or people who are thinking of adopting this model that you have at SEO travel, what would you say is kind of, um, the most important piece of this?
If, if people want to actually think about maybe turning their. Model into like the non profit model or maybe just going after the smaller brands, um, or maybe both. What would you say are some of the kind of the mindset shifts that have to be done or maybe some of the technical hurdles, um, that you’ve seen at least over the years of your time there?
Amelia: I think a lot of the mindset, mindset, That’s what the, it has to be the shift in mindset that, you know, just because we give a hundred percent of the profit to charity, it doesn’t mean that we’re not having a Christmas party. It doesn’t mean that, you know, staff aren’t getting salary increases when it’s deserved.
And I think that’s the thing. I think people think it has to be, Oh, that’s way to that end of the scale for me, that giving it all to charity, that’s going to be miserable. Like, I think it’s the shift in mindset. I think. It’s got to be important to you because I think that’s a lot of the time, you know, corporate social responsibility and, and giving.
If it’s just a tick box exercise to you and that’s, you know, it’s not at your core, there probably is no point in doing it to be completely honest. And I think that’s the thing, I think we’ve built Tom and Claire, the founders, who it matters to them. Their core values and we’ve kind of built a team of people who it matters to them as well.
So it’s the mind mindset shift of it doesn’t mean you have to forego all of the other nice stuff. It doesn’t mean that it has to be a rubbish agency to work at. That’s really cool. It also has to be genuine. I think that’s the other thing that, yeah, you have to genuinely believe in it. To, yeah, for it to work.
Vince: Yeah. Yeah. I see your, your dog’s trying to get in there. Love that
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guests. Yeah. Yeah. I really love that, Amelia. And hopefully, you know, people out there will take some inspiration from this and you know, you can build a really successful agency with really happy people. people, happy clients, happy workers, and still be able to give back.
I love that as a message. And what comes out of it seems like some really smart strategies and ways to think about this stuff that can be applied to any business because you are, it forces you to think more strategic and, and, uh, yeah, I just love, uh, I’m hoping that a lot of people really heed this call.
All right, Amelia, people can find you on LinkedIn. People can find seotravel, it’s just seotravel. co. uk. Check Amelia out on LinkedIn and remind her to like and subscribe. And Amelia, thanks so much for being here. This was really great and inspiring talk.
Amelia: Thank you so much.
Vince: All right. Take care. Thanks for listening, everybody.
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