In her presentation for the 2019 Chiang Mai SEO conference, SEO consultant Stacey MacNaught said this:
Journalists have no access to data or premium tools—that’s an advantage.
Stacey MacNaught
Stacey MacNaught, SEO Consultant MacNaught Digital
What does she mean? Journalists often need to back up their arguments with data. And when they do, they usually mention and link to the source of that data.
For example, take our mention in Bloomberg. It came as a result of us having some unique data that helped the author make his point.
bloomberg mention
But here’s the thing: you can’t just create any old data, publish it wherever, and expect publicity. If you want to earn coverage from this tactic, you need two things:
Interesting data. When we say interesting, we mean interesting to relevant journalists.
Delivery mechanism. Having interesting data is a start, but unless you have a way to get it in front of the relevant journalists, you’ll struggle to earn coverage.
There are tons of ways to do the two things above. For example, you could create or curate data about a trending topic, then use a tool like Content Explorer to find relevant journalists and pitch your resource.
3 content explorer
That’s the “traditional” route and it works, but another tactic that worked for us is to create content around so-called “source” keywords.
Source keywords are the terms journalists are likely to be searching for when looking for facts and data to reference in their upcoming posts.
Examples include:
[topic] statistics
[topic] stats
[topic] facts
[topic] figures
To find these keywords, enter a few relevant keywords into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer, go to the Phrase match report, and use the “Include” filter to find keywords containing words like statistics, stats, facts, and figures.
4 keywords explorer
The workload like this whatsapp number list allows both the vendor and the affiliate to focus on. Clicks are the number of clicks coming to your website’s URL from organic search results.
Look through the list for a good keyword to target.
For example, if we owned a coffee site, we could potentially target either “coffee nutrition facts” or “coffee statistics.”
5 keywords explorer facts stats
From there, create a post by curating a list of up-to-date statistics (owned media). Then, reach out to any sites linking to competing but outdated statistics pages on the same topic to build links to your page (earned media).
We did this in 2020 for the term “SEO statistics.” As a result, our page has earned links from over 350 websites and ranks #2 for its main keyword.
6 seo stats
Learn how we did this step-by-step in this post or this video: