SEO
High-Quality Links vs. Low-Quality Links: What’s the Difference?
They are often seen as the most powerful way to rank a site.
But not every link is created equal.
Over time, the search engines have adapted their algorithms to account for links in different ways, narrowing their use for determining the suitability of a webpage as an answer to a search query.
In this post, you will learn what makes a high-quality link, where to find opportunities to build them, and how to evaluate whether a link is worth the budget and effort to get it.
How Do Search Engines Use Links?
Search engines use links pointing to a webpage to both discover its existence and also determine information about it.
Google mentions in its help documentation,
“Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”
Bing states in its Webmaster Help and How-To guide,
“Bing prefers to see links built organically. This essentially means the links are built by people linking to your content because they find value in your content. This is an important signal to a search engine because it is seen as a vote of confidence in the content.”
What Is Valuable About a Link?
We know that Google uses links like votes.
A link from a well-regarded website will have more clout than a lesser-regarded website.
Authority
This is often discussed as “authority.”
Many SEO tools will try to assign an authority metric to a website or webpage in an attempt to quantify the value of a link from them.
An authoritative webpage linking to your webpage can be a strong signal that it is itself an authoritative source.
In essence, an authoritative website is one that is considered by the search engines to be a reputable source of information about a subject – an authority in it.
Google will, in part, look at that site’s backlinks to determine its expertise and trustworthiness in a subject.
For instance, a website is considered an expert in interior design. It links to a lesser-known website about interior design.
The website by an expert in interior design is confident enough in the content of the lesser-known site that it’s willing to send its visitors there.
That’s a good, impartial way for the search engines to determine the reputation of a site and its authority on a subject.
Relevance
Authority isn’t everything, however.
Think of it like this… you’re going on holiday to a city you’ve never visited.
Who would you rather ask for restaurant recommendations: your friend who lives in the city, or a tour guide for a city 5 hours away from it?
Your friend who lives in the city is likely more of a relevant source of information on the restaurants in the area than the tour guide who doesn’t serve that area.
You might perceive a tour guide to be more knowledgeable about good restaurants, but not if it’s not their area of expertise.
In a similar way, the search engines will understand the value of a website in your industry linking to your webpage.
A website that reviews restaurants will be considered a more relevant source of information about restaurants than a local community group who had an outing to a restaurant.
Both sites may have a page talking about the “best sushi restaurant in New York,” but the restaurant review website will be more relevant in helping the search engines determine what to serve as an answer for “sushi restaurant in New York.”
Authority & Relevance
The best source of a link is a website that is both considered authoritative and relevant to your website.
What Makes a Link Low-Quality?
If we think of a quality link as one that is both relevant and authoritative, then it makes sense that the lowest quality link is one that is both irrelevant and not authoritative.
These sorts of links are usually easy to come by and can be self-created or requested.
For instance, a website that allows anyone to submit a link is unlikely to have highly curated content that would lend it to being authoritative.
The fact that anyone can add a link to the site means it isn’t likely to be particularly relevant to one industry or niche.
Links to your site from a website like this will be low-quality and generally useless.
At best, these links might have a little positive impact on your search rankings but at worst they could be perceived as part of a manipulative linking scheme.
Google has strict guidelines on what is considered a manipulative link.
You might want to familiarize yourself with Bing and Yandex’s definitions, too.
A Word About Paid Links
We all know by now that paying for links to aid rankings is against the guidelines of most big search engines.
In a best-case scenario, the link won’t be identified as having been paid for and you won’t see a penalty from it.
However, if Google detects that you’ve acquired links from websites that sell links, you may find the webpage it links to penalized.
There are legitimate reasons why links might be placed on websites for a fee.
It’s common practice to utilize banner advertising and affiliate marketing on the internet, for example.
In these instances, Google recommends that webmasters declare the links to be sponsored using the rel=”sponsored” attribute.
This indicates to Googlebots that the link is one that has been paid for and is not to be used for calculating PageRank.
These sorts of links have their own value for marketing and should not be discounted simply because they will not necessarily aid in search rankings.
A Word About NoFollow Links
Before Google introduced the use of the rel=”sponsored” attribute, it and other search engines were using the rel=”nofollow” attribute.
Putting a rel=”nofollow” attribute into the HTML for a link shows the search bots that they shouldn’t go to the destination of that link.
This is used by publishers to stop the search engines from visiting the page and ascribing any benefit of the link.
So, if a high-quality page links to your webpage with a link contain a rel=”nofollow” attribute, you won’t see any ranking benefit of that link.
Google announced recently that this attribute is a hint and therefore it might ignore it.
On the whole, this essentially makes a “nofollow” link useless for SEO link-building purposes as link equity will not pass through the link.
However, if people are following the link and discovering your webpage, I would argue it’s not useless at all!
What Do High-Quality Links Looks Like?
Low-quality links are usually those that are either:
- Irrelevant in helping the search engines determine your site’s authority on a subject.
- Or actually harmful.
I’m not addressing link penalties here, or even the sorts of link-building practices that will land you in hot water. For more information on that, see Chuck Price’s article on manual actions.
The low-quality links we’re talking about here are ones that you may well be going after but aren’t benefiting your site.
High-quality links are the Holy Grail of link-building.
They’re the links you show off in your “Team Wins” Slack channel and on Twitter.
They are hard to earn.
I also want to show you some “medium-quality” links.
These are the types of links that are good to get but perhaps won’t move the needle as much as you would like.
They form a part of a healthy backlink profile but aren’t worth your whole content marketing budget to land.
Low Quality: Low Authority/Low Relevance
The sorts of links you are likely to gain that are low-quality and low-relevance are ones that require no real effort to get.
For example, simply sourcing the links and asking for them or, in some cases, adding the link yourself.
Open Directories
These directory sites are very obviously low quality when you visit them. Typically they only offer one service – advertise your website here!
You do not need to pay for a link and everyone and their dog has taken advantage of this.
There will be links from websites in all sorts of industries with very little rhyme or reason as to why this directory exists.
Do note, however, that there are reputable local business directories that can help with verifying your business’s physical address and contact details—Yelp, for instance.
These listings are useful for local citations but are unlikely to really aid in boosting your site’s rankings.
The difference between reputable local directories and generic open directories is quite obvious when you visit them.
Comment Links
Forums ad blogs can be very relevant to a particular industry.
However, due to the ease with which anyone can add content to a forum page or blog comments, any links in that user-generated content are usually discounted by the search engines.
In recent SEO history, blog and forum comments were easy targets for squeezing in a link to a site.
The search engines became wise to this and started devaluing those links.
Alongside the rel=”sponsored” attribute, Google released rel=”ugc”.
This is a way for webmasters to indicate that the links within their forums are user-generated.
Low Quality: Low Effort & No Follow
Social Media Posts
Most large social media sites will use “no follow” tags on them.
However, Google did recently say that “nofollow” tags would be taken as hints rather than concretely respected.
Despite this, social media sites are not the place to go looking for backlinks to help your rankings.
Although social media sites themselves are often authoritative, they are full of uncurated content.
Businesses can set up their own social media pages with links back to their websites. They can talk about their sites in their posts.
These links are not unbiased. Due to this, they are largely ignored by search engines.
Medium Quality: Low Authority but High Relevancy
Small Industry Blogs
Most industries have a proliferation of blogs. Sites run by companies or individuals who want to share their knowledge and build their profile.
There are some highly relevant, niche blogs that might not be well-known enough to be getting their own authority-metric boosting backlinks.
They are, however, full of decent content and very relevant to the website you are trying to grow.
Small industry blog writers are often less over-run with requests to share content and add links than the well-known ones.
They are, however, keen to write and build community.
A smaller blog featuring your site is still a good reinforcement of your relevance to your industry.
This can help enormously with showing your relevance to search topics associated with that industry.
Small Industry Brands
There will be some staple brands in your industry that aren’t necessarily competitors but are tangentially related.
Think of paper manufacturers to your office supply store, for example.
A link from the paper manufacturer showing your store as their distributor can help show your authority in the industry.
Medium Quality: Medium Authority & Medium Low Relevancy
Local News Sites
Your local news site may report on anything to do with your community, or they might be more discerning.
Regardless, doing something considered locally newsworthy can get you featured a lot easier than in a national news website.
These are especially good links to get if you are trying to boost your local SEO efforts.
A link from a website known as a source of reliable local information could help the search engines to see your relevance to that physical area.
High Quality: High Authority but Medium/Low Relevancy
Some sites are extremely authoritative and hard to get a link from. These tend to be beneficial to your SEO efforts.
These sorts of links might not be highly relevant, however.
Although you will see a benefit to your search visibility, it may not help solidify your relevance for particular topics.
National News Sites
There are some national and international newspapers with extremely high authority websites. A link from these sites is worth the effort.
However, journalists are inundated with hundreds of press releases and article ideas every day.
It can be incredibly difficult to get featured, especially with a link.
The best way to get coverage in a national newspaper is to do something newsworthy.
Bringing it to the attention of the site’s journalists might help you get it covered, hopefully with a link back to your site.
High Quality: Medium Authority but High Relevancy
Big Industry Blogs
That website that everyone in the industry goes to for their news; your friends and family may not have heard of it, but your colleagues definitely have.
It’s likely to be a medium authority site according to authority metrics but it’s a leader in your industry.
It’s also very relevant to the website you’re promoting.
A link from a site like this will go a long way in showing your site’s expertise.
High Quality: High Authority & High Relevancy
Big Industry Brands
These are household names; the companies everyone in your industry (and possibly their families) know of.
These links are likely to be medium to high authority according to the tools but definitely leaders in your industry.
If you are linked to as a supplier or distributor, or even just mentioned in a favorable review, you are likely to see the ranking benefit.
Conclusion
A wide and varied link profile is good for SEO.
If you are actively looking to increase links to your site in an organic manner, it’s imperative you know how to generate high-quality links.
Don’t waste your time going for easy links on unrelated and low-quality sites.
Instead, focus your energy and budget on creating truly newsworthy content and bringing it to the attention of authoritative and relevant publishers.
More Resources:
SEO
WordPress Gives WP Engine Users A Reprieve
Matt Mullenweg posted on WordPress.org that WP Engine users have been granted a reprieve from the block on the WordPress plugin and theme repository until October 1st, allowing them to access updates as usual.
WordPress Versus WP Engine
Matt Mullenweg and popular web host WP Engine have been locked in a conflict for the past week over a commercial licensing fee that other web hosts pay but WP Engine does not. The issue between them stems from the frustrations on Mullenweg’s side with the perception that WP Engine is not giving back enough to WordPress in the way that they should. Prominent figures in the WordPress industry like Joost de Valk agree with Mullenweg that companies, including WP Engine, should give back more to WordPress.
WP Engine has offered their side of the story have gone as far as to send a formal cease and desist letter for what they perceive as an unfair attack on their business.
Regardless of who is right or wrong, WordPress users on WP Engine are caught in the middle of this conflict, with their businesses disrupted by Mullenweg’s decision to block WP Engine from accessing the WordPress.org plugin and theme repository, preventing them from updating plugins and themes.
Temporary Reprieve
Mullenweg posted on WordPress.org that he has heard from WordPress users and has decided to give the WordPress users a chance for WP Engine to set up a solution so that they won’t be inconvenienced. WP Engine has until October 1st to engineer a workaround.
He wrote:
“I’ve heard from WP Engine customers that they are frustrated that WP Engine hasn’t been able to make updates, plugin directory, theme directory, and Openverse work on their sites. It saddens me that they’ve been negatively impacted by Silver Lake‘s commercial decisions.
WP Engine was well aware that we could remove access when they chose to ignore our efforts to resolve our differences and enter into a commercial licensing agreement. Heather Brunner, Lee Wittlinger, and their Board chose to take this risk.
…We have lifted the blocks of their servers from accessing ours, until October 1, UTC 00:00. Hopefully this helps them spin up their mirrors of all of WordPress.org’s resources that they were using for free while not paying, and making legal threats against us.”
Read more at WordPress.org:
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Vladimka production
SEO
How to Estimate It and Source Data
Total addressable market (TAM) is an estimation of how much you could earn if you could sell your product or service to every possible customer in your market.
The basic formula for calculating TAM is:
TAM = (Total Number of Potential Customers) × (Average Annual Revenue per Customer)
Understanding TAM helps you figure out the size of your market and the amount of money you could make if you captured all of it.
TAM is also a key metric for startup investors. It shows whether a business idea has a big enough opportunity. Investors often look for a TAM that is “just right” — not too big or too small. A TAM that’s too large might mean the market is crowded with tough competition, while a TAM that’s too small could mean limited room for growth.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to estimate TAM using three methods, where people often make mistakes, and how to refine your estimations to make them plausible to investors or stakeholders and actionable for your business.
There are three approaches to calculating TAM. Depending on the available market data, your business model, and your stakeholders/investors, you should consider using the top-down, bottom-up, or value theory approach.
1. Top-down approach
The top-down approach starts with broad market data and narrows it down to estimate the market size for your specific product or service.
This approach is useful when there’s reliable, broad industry data available.
How to use
- Estimate the overall market size in which your product operates, usually obtained from industry reports or research.
- Apply a percentage that represents the portion of the market your product can realistically capture.
Example
If the global smartphone market is valued at $500 billion, and you are launching a new smartphone accessory, you might estimate that your product could target 5% of the market, which gives you a TAM of $25 billion.
2. Bottom-up approach
The bottom-up approach builds the TAM by starting with specific, individual data related to your business and scaling it up.
This method is great when you have detailed knowledge of your customer base and pricing. As far as I know, investors prefer this method, which offers the most accurate and actionable TAM estimation.
A few birds in the hand is worth billions in the TAM. Early-stage (pre-Series-B) startups shouldn’t worry too much about calculating a precise TAM. As long as it’s in the right ballpark for their thesis, investors care a lot more about the traction you can show with paying customers. That’s why bottom-up is far more convincing than hand-wavy top-down methods that only rely on finding a big enough pie to claim as your market.
How to use
- Estimate how many potential customers there are in your target market. You can do this by using sources like industry reports, census data, or research from trusted organizations (more data sources at the end of the article).
- Multiply this number by the average revenue you expect to earn from each customer (ARPU – Average Revenue Per User).
Tip
To calculate ARPU, consider the pricing of your product or service, how frequently customers will purchase, and the churn rate.
For example, if you charge $100 per month for a subscription service, your monthly churn rate is 5%; on average, a customer might stay subscribed for around 6-7 months, meaning your average revenue per customer would be around $600-700.
Example
Let’s say you have subscription-based software that helps small businesses manage their finances. You identify that 2 million small businesses could benefit from your software. If your ARPU is $600, your TAM would be 2 million customers × $600 = $1.2 billion.
3. Value theory approach
The value theory approach estimates TAM based on the value your product provides to customers and how much they might be willing to pay for it.
This approach is especially useful if you’re introducing a product or service that disrupts existing markets; traditional market size calculations may not accurately reflect the potential.
How to use
- Assess the value or cost savings that your product delivers to the customer.
- Estimate how much customers would be willing to pay for that value and scale it across the entire market.
Example
Suppose you have developed a new energy-efficient lighting system that saves companies $10,000 per year in energy costs.
If 100,000 companies could use your lighting system, and each is willing to pay $5,000 for it (because they’ll save $10,000), your TAM would be 100,000 companies × $5,000 = $500 million.
There’s also a fourth option — a middle ground mentioned by quite a few people who offered their insights for this article.
I’d say the best method to estimate TAM is usually a combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches. The top-down method gives you a big picture view using industry reports and market research, while bottom-up lets you build from the ground up using your own data and customer insights. This combined approach helps balance out the weaknesses of each method.
You may encounter the TAM, SAM, and SOM terminology and need to apply it if an investor requests it.
People who prefer this approach treat TAM as a “pie in the sky” number and further refine it with SAM and SOM portions of it.
- TAM (Total Addressable Market) is the total market if you could sell to everyone, everywhere. Your biggest possible opportunity.
- SAM (Service Addressable Market) is the portion of the TAM you can actually target based on where you operate and who your product is for. For example, if you’re a local coffee shop in New York City, your SAM might be coffee drinkers in NYC, not every coffee drinker worldwide.
- SOM (Service Obtainable Market) is the realistic piece of the SAM that you can actually win over, considering the competition and your strengths. Continuing with the coffee shop example, your SOM might be the number of customers you can realistically attract in your neighborhood, given factors like nearby competitors, your unique offerings, and marketing efforts.
TAM is typically used to make a compelling story about the potential for growth, so it’s easy to be over-optimistic and make mistakes that could make your TAM look better.
Here’s an example. I used a tool that calculates TAM automatically based on a URL to find the market size for netflix.com. The tool told me that there are 7B people who “need it (…) even if they’re not willing or able to make a purchase” and 6.3B ready to make a purchase. Something that I find hard to believe since there are an estimated 5.3B people with internet access worldwide.
Also, the way that the tool defines my potential customers doesn’t sound convincing to me, either, let alone logical.
Other mistakes you should avoid:
- Falling into the “everything trap”. This is when businesses assume that their product or service could appeal to everyone in the market, leading them to calculate TAM based on an overly broad audience.
- Sizing the problem instead of the market. This happens when businesses focus on the total number of people who might benefit from their solution without considering how many are realistically willing to pay for it.
- Overlooking market trends and dynamics. The market can grow or contract, consumer preferences can change, government regulations can influence the market, etc.
The basic data sources for TAM calculations are industry reports you can find on platforms like Statista and census data (like the US census data). However, there are other places where you can look for more detailed data.
Explore the market using search data
Search data is information about what people are looking for online. It can help you understand what customers want, where interest is growing, and what regions are most active.
Google Trends provides some of that data for free. For example, you can check if interest in a plant-based diet is still strong and where in the US you could find the most customers.
But that’s how far this tool goes. You don’t know what terms are “inside” the topic or how popular a keyword is (the numbers in Google Trends are relative). Also, sometimes Google won’t have the data, just like for the term “baby food subscription”.
Alternatively, you can use Ahrefs. I’m sure you’ll find more search terms there and a lot more data points. Let me take you through three examples.
Gauge demand with search volume
Search volume is an estimation of the average monthly number of searches for a keyword over the latest known 12 months of data.
High search volumes suggest a larger potential market. Low search volumes, suggest a smaller market (or that you will need to be more creative to find customers).
For example, while Google Trends didn’t have any data on “baby food subscription”, Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer shows that there are an estimated 1.2K searches per month in the US of that term. Plus, it shows you the forecast for that keyword.
If you’d be planning to start a new business in this niche, you’d need compelling arguments to justify a high TAM estimate, because the current demand for this type of service appears to be relatively low.
Learn what people want and how they look for it
Keyword research can tell you what people want in which countries. All you need to know is a few broad terms related to your product.
For example, for plant-based products, you could just type in “plant-based, vegan” and then go to the Matching terms report to see the popularity of certain types of products. You can also see if the demand for these products has grown or fallen over the last three months.
So, if you find that the demand for most vegan products has increased, you could assume that your TAM is going to expand in the near future because more people seem to be interested.
You can also use the tool to automatically translate these keywords and see what search terms people use to find the same products around the world and how popular they are.
And if you’re unsure what keywords people could use to find a product or service like yours, just use the AI suggestion feature.
Learn from your competitors
By studying the keywords your competitors are targeting, you can uncover untapped niches or areas where demand is high but competition is lower.
For example, say you’re a SaaS company offering a project management tool. If you used Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, you would find that one of your competitors ranks for terms like “engineering project management software”. This could indicate a niche market with unique needs, where there’s considerable demand but less competition.
While you’re at it, go to the Organic Competitors tab to see who else competes for the same audience. Chances are, you may find some new potential competitors.
Use S-1 filings and quarterly reports from public companies
Public companies’ quarterly reports (10-Q) and S-1/F-1 filings offer rich data for estimating TAM. They provide detailed breakdowns of revenue by product line, geographic region, and market segment, along with insights into market share and growth potential.
For example, if a company generates $500 million from a particular service and claims 10% of the market, you can estimate the TAM at $5 billion.
Both reports can also provide guidance on future growth trends, helping forecast your TAM’s evolution.
You can use AI like ChatGPT to analyze the documents for you (they can be quite complex). Here’s a sample analysis of an over 500-page F-1 filing by an Esports company.
Interview potential customers
While reports give you big numbers, talking to real people gives you the practical insights needed to adjust those estimates.
- By speaking directly to customers, you can gauge whether they actually need your product and how likely they are to adopt it.
- Interviews help you narrow down the customer segments most interested in your solution. Maybe not everyone is a fit, but if certain industries or company sizes show more interest, you can focus your TAM on those segments.
- Asking customers what they’d actually pay for your product gives you real data. If you know what your target customers are willing to spend, you can multiply that by the number of similar customers to estimate your revenue potential and refine your TAM.
Use PitchBook for investment and market data
PitchBook offers broader market data and investment trends. It provides reliable information on market valuations, funding rounds, and industry growth, which helps you gauge the overall size and growth potential of a market.
PitchBook also helps identify key players, making it easier to estimate how much of the market is currently being captured and what remains untapped.
For example, based on Stripe’s post-valuation of $152 billion and an assumed 30% market share, Stripe’s TAM would be approximately $506.67 billion (TAM = valuation/market share).
Other tools for SaaS companies
If you’re in SaaS, there are a couple more sources of data you may find especially useful: BuiltWith and Latka SaaS Database.
BuiltWith is a tool that shows you what technologies websites are using. This tool is great for identifying your ideal customer because you can see which companies use certain tools or platforms that align with your product.
Sidenote.
The Ideal customer profile (ICP) is a detailed description of the type of company or person who would benefit most from your product or service. It’s helpful mostly for a bottom-up approach to calculate market size, as it helps you focus on the specific segments of the market that are most relevant to your business.
Enter a competitor into BuiltWith, and look for the list of their customers. For example, here are some of the sites that use Salesforce. You can sort the list by employees or traffic to find the size of the company you think you could get on board.
The next one is Latka SaaS Database. If you can’t find a SaaS company on PitchBook or BuiltWith, there’s a chance you will find it on Latka. It’s a SaaS-specific database that tracks metrics like revenue, customer growth, churn rates, and funding for thousands of companies.
Knowing your competitors’ revenue and the number of customers they serve can help you better estimate the size of your potential market.
- Use competitors’ ARPU or ACV (Annual Contract Value) to estimate your own future metrics.
- Use the competitor’s revenue or valuation and apply a market share estimation to calculate TAM.
Final thoughts
Remember, TAM is ultimately an estimation. It’s natural to be slightly off, and you’ll probably need to reevaluate every year, after significant changes in the market or after introducing new products.
Generally, TAM calculations are not very accurate. At best, you’re relying on partially known variables (number of potential customers and average lifetime customer value). Industries also change so quickly that TAM calculations can become irrelevant within a matter of months.
What’s perhaps more important than the exact number is the methodology behind your TAM calculation. A well-thought-out approach demonstrates how seriously you take the business and the effort you’ve put into understanding the market.
Got questions or comments? Find me on LinkedIn.
SEO
9 Successful PR Campaign Examples, According to the Data
From Barbie-themed ketchup to exploding owl butts, these PR campaign examples prove that with the right data, timing, and a bit of creativity, you can win coverage and drive real, measurable results.
In this post, you’ll see the data behind nine successful PR campaigns, and hopefully get some inspiration for your next press idea.
9 popular PR campaign examples
This list is a real mixed bag of PR examples – from newsjacking, to content repurposing, exclusive research, and kooky brand stunts – but one thing they all have in common is measurable success.
In each section, I’ll do a post-mortem of campaign performance, share some analysis tactics, and round-off with a couple of quick tips.
Sound good? Let’s jump in.
Campaign 🍅👱🏼♀️🎀 | Heinz Barbiecue |
Brand(s) 🏷️ | Heinz + Mattel |
Links earned 🔗 | 62 |
Campaign type 📰 | Newjacking/brand collab/product release |
Global search volume 🔎 | 600 for “barbie ketchup” |
Search growth (YoY) 📈 | 200% for “barbie ketchup” |
Back in August 2023, when Barbiecore was all the rage, Heinz teased a mockup of two Barbie themed sauces: Kenchup and Barbiecue sauce.
Eight months later, for Barbie’s 65th anniversary in April 2024, Heinz and Mattel dropped the official Barbiecue special edition sauce.
Heinz first conceived of the PR stunt to build intrigue around the product months before it hit the shelves, then used public response as a litmus test for its success.
According to their submission in the Shorty Awards, they carefully coordinated their initial “teaser” drop to coincide with an uptick in audience discussions, following the film’s release.
To date, the Barbiecue PR campaign has earned Heinz 118 relevant mentions in top-tier media outlets like Bloomberg, Yahoo, CBS News, and The Standard, according to Content Explorer.
With zero dollars in paid promotion, it also generated 38 million organic social impressions and doubled average engagement rates.
Quick learnings
- Hijack trending cultural “moments”
- Time your PR campaign launch with peak online conversation
- Use teaser PR to gauge consumer demand and fuel future R&D decisions
Campaign 🛀 | Saltbomb |
Brand 🏷️ | Lush |
Links earned 🔗 | 142 |
Campaign type 📰 | Newjacking/product release |
Global search volume 🔎 | 1.3K for “lush saltburn bath bomb” |
Search growth (YoY) 📈 | 37K% for “lush saltburn bath bomb” |
This is another great PR example of a brand capitalizing on a film, and waiting for post-event discussion to pick up before newsjacking.
Following a veerryy controversial bath scene in the film Saltburn, UK cosmetics retailer, Lush, jumped on the opportunity to insert their brand into a cultural moment.
In February 2024, three months after the film’s release, they released the “Saltbomb”, a special edition, Saltburn-themed bath bomb.
Parodying some of the film’s most risqué moments, Lush didn’t hold back with their product marketing.
And we loved it.
The campaign led to 135 links, many coming from high DR (Domain Rating) publications, driving real, tangible organic traffic – including Global News, New York Times, Pop Sugar, and BBC.
Press coverage actually went above and beyond this, because Lush’s products are part of a few publisher affiliate programs – but affiliate links are a little trickier to track.
Here’s an example of what I mean.
The site Allure wrote up a feature piece on the Lush bath bomb, but their affiliate link navigates to a third-party platform before redirecting to Lush’s product page.
For that reason, the link doesn’t show up in Ahrefs’ Backlinks Report.
Instead, I found it by monitoring campaign-specific keywords in Content Explorer.
Beyond press and affiliate publicity, the Lush PR campaign was a winner on social media.
The photography and product descriptions made it perfect for meme-ification, which added thousands of views and impressions.
It also won big in search, with global keyword volume reaching 1.3K…
And the product landing page earned up to 800 monthly organic visits in its first month.
Traffic has remained steady since, averaging between 500 – 600 monthly visits, despite the product having been archived – pretty good going for a bit of trendjacking.
Quick learnings
- Scout for affiliate links – you won’t always know when a publisher plans to use an affiliate link, so searching for mentions of campaign keywords can help you find any affiliate coverage that has flown under the radar.
- Think about how your brand and its tangential topics can tie into cultural moments.
Campaign 👴🏻 | Eclectic Grandpa |
Brand 🏷️ | |
Links earned 🔗 | 98 |
Campaign type 📑 | Report |
Global search volume 🔎 | 4.8K for “eclectic grandpa” |
Search growth (YoY) 📈 | 215K% for “eclectic grandpa” |
Every year, Pinterest taps into their internal platform search data to post their trend forecasts in what is known as “Pinterest Predicts”.
Posting on Pinterest For Business (the company’s commercial arm), they categorize related high-growth searches, and assign them novel trend names like “Eclectic grandpa”, “Bow stacking” or “Cafe core”.
I took a look at the Site Structure report, and found that Pinterest’s most linked trend was in fact the “Eclectic Grandpa” which – in Pinterest’s words – is all about:
“Embracing ‘grandpa core’ and bringing eccentric and expressive elements for the ages to wardrobes. Think retro streetwear, chic cardigans and customised clothing. Because the coastal grandma aesthetic is so last year.”
To date, the trend has earned citations from 98 separate domains.
A look at the Backlinks report revealed coverage from Vogue, Elle, Who What Wear, New York Post, and Business Insider.
And it didn’t end there. The “Eclectic Grandpa” gets about a bit, cropping up 340 times in the articles I discovered via Content Explorer.
A considerable number of those DR 50+ mentions (150, to be precise) went unlinked based on Ahrefs’ Unlinked Mentions filter/export – links which could still be claimed by the Pinterest team.
Given the far reaching coverage, searches for “Eclectic Grandpa” keywords have shot up in the last year, growing to 4.8K global search volume (GSV).
By creating link magnet content, Pinterest has managed to drum up huge publicity – whether they pitched for it or not – making it a great example of a successful PR campaign.
Quick learnings
- Mine company data to publish new, unseen trends and insights.
- Come up with a unique name for self-discovered trends and/or theories so it’s easier to monitor uptake and keep track of press coverage.
- Track mentions – not just links – and claim any unlinked mentions to enhance SEO and brand authority.
Real estate marketplace, Zillow, surveyed 1,815 homeowners and found that those with lower mortgage rates are twice as likely to stay put vs selling their home.
By creating firsthand research tackling an issue close to their audience’s heart, Zillow earned 235 backlinks from the likes of Bloomberg, Yahoo, FoxBusiness, and Money.com.
Sites referenced the survey for multiple reasons; not just quoting one stat, but a whole variety, as evidenced in the anchor text of their backlinks.
Quick learnings
- Conduct your own surveys, asking questions which address a key problem in your industry, then quantitatively analyze the responses.
- Tease out multiple hard hitting stats to drive more coverage and link variety.
Campaign 🔮👨💻 | Future of Work |
Brand 🏷️ | |
Links earned 🔗 | 383 |
Campaign type 📑 | Report |
Global search volume 🔎 | 300 for “LinkedIn report” |
LinkedIn tends to keep their data under lock and key, but in their Future of Work report they released proprietary insights on the growth of AI conversations on the platform, plus the impact of AI on careers.
A great example of exclusive PR, LinkedIn’s report made a splash, landing 383 links in Forbes, Microsoft, Harvard Business Review, and CNET.
Quick learnings
- Think about what unseen or underground data you can harvest to generate exclusive research for your next PR campaign.
- If you have internal data, analyze patterns and trends to carve out a totally unique angle..
Tip
Personal finance company, WalletHub, compared the 150 largest metropolitan statistical areas, or MSAs, across 11 key metrics.
Combining primary data with third-party sources like the U.S. Census Bureau, GreatSchools.org, and Yelp, WalletHub created an interactive study ranking the most and least educated cities in America.
This is an example of a PR campaign that doubles as great content marketing.
It snagged 604 unique backlinks from heavy hitters like Wikipedia, Forbes, Business Insider, Bloomberg, and Yahoo – as well as tons of state publications.
Location based PR campaigns are an especially powerful form of PR, since they have both local and national appeal.
Here’s Tom Chivers, PR Expert and Founder of Sabot, explaining why localization really works for public relations campaigns – with a great additional point made by Co-Founder of Journo Finder, Veronica Fletcher.
Quick learnings
- Use superlatives in headlines (e.g. “Most”, “Least”, “Best”).
- Embrace ranking formats – comparisons make readers want to click to see how they size up.
- Slice and dice your data by location to get your campaign syndicated in both national and local publications.
Campaign 🍩 | “Go USA” and “Passport to Paris” doughnuts |
Brand(s) 🏷️ | Krispy Kreme |
Links earned 🔗 | 95 |
Campaign type 📰 | Newjacking/brand collab/product release |
Global search volume 🔎 | 45K for “Olympics Krispy Kreme Doughnuts” |
Search growth (YoY) 📈 | 4.4M% for “Olympics Krispy Kreme Doughnuts” |
Krispy Kreme rode the wave of Olympic interest this year by developing two special edition doughnuts: “Go USA” and “Passport to Paris”.
As we’ve seen already, popular PR campaigns don’t always neatly track back to the sources you’d expect them to.
Krispy Kreme earned only 11 links to their USA doughnut press release, and 20 to their Paris doughnut launch announcement. Not exactly groundbreaking.
But when you filter for mentions of campaign keywords (e.g. “Go USA” and “Paris”) at the domain-level, you find a whole lot more coverage; 95 links, to be precise, from major publications like Yahoo, USA Today, People, and the Food Network.
The special edition doughnuts also drive a cool 45K monthly searches, according to the Matching Terms report in Keywords Explorer.
Quick learnings
- Capitalize on high demand around recurring events.
- For campaigns that can’t be neatly tracked (e.g. no specific landing page, or product page) pay closer attention to homepage or domain-level links through clever filtering.
Campaign 🍟👞 | McDonald’s + Crocs Collaboration |
Brand(s) 🏷️ | Crocs + McDonald’s |
Links earned 🔗 | 516 |
Campaign type 📰 | Brand collab/product release |
Global search volume 🔎 | 18K for “mcdonalds crocs” |
Search growth (YoY) 📈 | 838% for “mcdonalds crocs” |
This next PR example is a campaign of multiple parts. It began with a pair of McDonald’s themed Crocs, and has extended to a full blown footwear collection…
And a novelty product: McDonald’s happy meal mini-crocs keyring.
The coordinated PR campaign has generated huge awareness for both brands, but tracking all the fragmented assets is no mean feat.
To get a better idea of overall brand awareness, I opted instead to search for co-citations at the domain level.
Searching in the Backlinks report, I applied filters for each brand name in the other’s backlink profile.
McDonald’s earned 260 links for “Crocs” related content, but Crocs was the real winner, landing 416 links for “McDonald’s” related press from media goliaths like Business Insider, Fast Company, and Entrepreneur.
From studying the campaign’s individual assets, I noticed something interesting: social posts have the ability to attract links.
Take for instance, this UGC post by Instagram food account, Snackolater. It landed 24 backlinks after sharing news of the happy meal mini-croc launch.
It had never occurred to me to track social media posts for links, but you can never tell how a journalist is going to reference your campaign, so it’s worthwhile setting up a backlink alert for all your assets just in case!
The growth of brand searches is a real testament to the success of a PR campaign, and this collaboration definitely delivers on that front.
Audiences are searching for relevant McDonald’s + Croc based keywords a total of 37K times a month on average, based on data in Keywords Explorer.
Quick learnings
- Sometimes, the “side” brand in a collaboration can snag more links. Keep that in mind for your next PR partnership.
- With two brands there are double the assets to track, including product pages, press releases, landing pages, and various social posts – make sure you have purview over the performance of all moving parts to track public relations campaigns holistically.
- Don’t forget to report on social posts, not just for impressions/engagement but for links.
Campaign ❎🍑 | Do your lesson, no buts |
Brand(s) 🏷️ | Duo Lingo |
Links earned 🔗 | 130 |
Campaign type 📽️ | Advert |
Global search volume 🔎 | 250 for “Duolingo commercial” |
Search growth (YoY) 📈 | 376% for “Duolingo commercial” |
Duolingo leaned into their weird yet wonderful brand of marketing with a hilarious superbowl ad featuring Duo, the brand’s menacing owl character.
In 5 (wild) seconds, we witness the explosion of Duo’s butt, and the growth of a mini Duo in its place, accompanied by a reminder to do our Duo Lingo lesson.
The ad creative was repurposed from a widget design that went semi-viral – Duo Lingo knew it worked, so they built on it.
And in a stroke of coordinated PR genius, they simultaneously sent out a push-notification to app users as soon as the ad went live.
“We decided to pair the ad with a coordinated push notification, which would hit learners’ phones right after the commercial aired, reinforcing the idea that Duo is always watching 👀.”
The YouTube commercial has earned 5M views and 130 links from Gizmodo, Lifehacker, and Indy100.
Plus 24M plays on TikTok.
The Duolingo team have written up a seriously funny play-by-play of the PR campaign here – they talk about everything from the lengths they went to to get the right “shine” on Duo’s buttocks, to carefully selecting the perfect fart sound effect. I recommend reading it, for a giggle if nothing else.
Quick learnings
- Upcycle owned content that has worked well in the past for your next PR campaign.
- Try a mixed-message approach to really drive the point of your campaign home.
How I found these PR campaign examples (and you can too)
I spent a lot of time:
There were so many awesome examples of PR, but I narrowed it down to the ones that drove either press mentions, links, search volume, traffic, or all of the above.
Final thoughts
The best PR campaigns aren’t just about links. They’re about creating conversations, driving awareness, and making a lasting impact on your audience.
Here’s a quick recap of some of the top takeaways:
- Time it right: Launch your campaigns when conversations peak
- Tap into unique data: Use exclusive insights to stand out
- Track holistically: Monitor links, mentions, searches, and social
- Rank and compare: Engage multiple audience “tribes” through rankings
- Take a local angle: Analyze multiple locations to win more press
- Collaborate creatively: Brand partnerships can amplify your reach
- Repurpose winners: Turn successful content into new campaigns
Success is predicated on a campaign meeting its goal(s), and while we don’t know exactly what these brands set out to achieve, their campaigns have enjoyed results that most of us would be pretty happy with.
Hopefully they’ve given you some inspiration for your next project.
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