a single source, nothing corroborates it

Build a stunt asset your money page can borrow

Nobody links to a product category page, so make something they will link to and point it at the page that pays. An agency that needed a gaming chair page ranked instead built a tinned Christmas dinner for gamers; it went viral and within three weeks the chair page ranked for over four hundred terms. The raw material is often already in your catalogue, as when two existing products paired into one story earned eighty links and moved a retailer from position thirty to first. One genuinely creative idea beats a hundred guest posts, and the links are the point rather than the coverage.

The method

1. 01

   When the page you need to rank is something no journalist would ever link to, invent a separate stunt asset that will get covered, then link the commercial page from it.

2. 02

   Comb your existing product range for two items that can be paired into a story, and you get a campaign with no budget, no shoot and no new product.

3. 03

   Back one genuinely creative idea over volume link tactics - a few minutes of the right thinking outweighs a hundred guest posts.

4. 04

   Chase press for the backlinks it produces rather than the coverage itself, because those links are what let you rank on the terms you actually sell against.

What it returned

• 400

  To rank a gaming-chair page before Christmas, the agency instead created a tinned three-course Christmas dinner for gamers; it went viral and inside three weeks the chair page was ranking for more than 400 keywords.

• 80

  After five minutes on the Missguided site she spotted dog jumpers, matched them with lookalike adult knitwear, and the campaign earned 80 links while the retailer went from position 30 to position 1 on its target term.

• £2k

  The agency went from launching with a single client on £2k a month to £2M a year in revenue inside 14 months.

• Carrie Rose, co-founder of the SEO agency Rise at Seven, uses press purely to win links that move clients up ultra-competitive search results.

Sources

• A crash course in getting press and building linksHarry Dry · Marketing Examples · Another example · undated