SEO
5 Examples That Get It Right
It’s estimated that the average social media user spends roughly two and a half hours per day on social media.
So thanks to tactics like newsjacking, becoming top of mind for users has never been easier for brands.
In many instances, brands have used newsjacking to put themselves in the middle of the conversation and demonstrate their media prowess.
However, attaching your brand to a viral story and being tone-deaf on certain issues can land you straight in the middle of a tweetstorm of criticism.
So how should brands approach viral news stories, and is it worth it to newsjack?
Creating a successful newsjacking strategy can yield significant benefits for any brand. But it all comes down to execution.
What Is Newsjacking?
Newsjacking is a common media strategy wherein a brand markets itself using a viral news story.
For example, influencers on social media frequently use newsjacking to offer their own unique takes and build their audience.
However, this strategy is frequently adopted by major brands to help them trend and expand their brand reach. In rare cases, the brand can become the center of the news story for better or for worse.
Nevertheless, newsjacking is primarily about attaching your brand to an existing story, not making yourself the story.
The benefit of newsjacking is that it requires very little effort and just a bit of creativity to get your brand trending in no time.
There are several ways to newsjack a story using traditional marketing strategies, including:
- Advertising.
- Social media campaigns.
- Writing blog articles.
- Partnering with other brands.
- Sponsorships.
- Hosting events.
- Fundraising.
Most importantly, newsjacking is a tactic available to anyone with a personal or professional brand, so anyone can try it.
While newsjacking offers great benefits with very little effort, there are pros and cons to this tactic that every brand needs to consider.
Pros And Cons Of Newsjacking
As the proverbial quote states, “All publicity is good publicity.”
This is largely true in the social media age, although brands walk a tighter rope than political pundits and your average Twitter user when it comes to being edgy or relevant.
For this reason, there are many advantages and disadvantages to newsjacking.
Pros
- Capitalize on a news story with little effort.
- Massively expand your brand reach and take it to the mainstream.
- Cultivate massive social media engagement.
- Boost brand loyalty (if done properly).
- Illustrate your brand’s values in real time.
Cons
- Potentially harm your brand’s reputation.
- Mistime a story and fail to leverage its benefits.
- Appeal to the wrong audience.
So, to reap the full benefits of newsjacking, you need to know how to approach a story and what story to choose.
How To Leverage Breaking News
Find Trending Stories Relevant To You
First and foremost, you need to find the right breaking news story to news jack.
Smaller brands can benefit from researching trending topics in their niche using tools like Google Trends to find relevant trending topics.
As you can see, interest in crypto, in general, is dropping, but there are plenty of subtopics that are trending, which any brand can capitalize on.
Platforms like Semrush and SE Ranking also provide tools that allow us to explore trending subtopics in any given niche. For example, SE ranking provides a mind map and clusters for each trending topic.
For smaller industries, I recommend even writing about stories that will trend in the future that you can get ahead of.
For example, new technologies, such as ChatGPT and AI, offer opportunities for SEO brands to rank highly for those keyword searches as they eventually rise over time.
Additionally, you can find trending topics by searching for trending hashtags on Twitter, Hot Posts in Reddit communities, and by monitoring what people post on Facebook and Instagram.
Provide A Unique Brand Spin
Next, you need to offer a unique perspective that helps separate your brand from the competition.
For example, many brands during the pandemic, such as Uber and Busch, successfully created branded ad campaigns that were unique and tasteful, and consolidated greater loyalty with their customers.
Make your campaigns relevant to your brand and its customers.
For example, if you’re a car company, creating ad campaigns around the need for more electric cars or even poking fun at Elon Musk may be relevant.
However, commenting on other news stories that don’t relate to cars or transportation will appear inauthentic.
Appeal To Your Audience
We also need to consider what type of audience we want our brand to market to. Leveraging trending keywords can help you craft ad creative that speaks to your audience’s needs.
Additionally, cultivating your message for your audience makes you appear more authentic.
Finally, marketing to your audience will help your campaign over the right channels.
For example, professional brands in the academic space will benefit from writing about trending stories on platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter, as opposed to Facebook or Instagram.
Master Timing
Another key consideration of newsjacking is timing. If your brand is not capable of creating something quick, you could become irrelevant.
Of course, I recommend properly researching a news story before trying to make a marketing campaign out of it to be safe.
In many cases, it will require a lot of resources to act on a news story quickly and effectively, which may not be realistic for many brands.
Build Traction With Promotion
Once you model your ad campaign, you must promote your brand to reach as many eyeballs as possible.
Adding hashtags to viral stories will help your brand reach a wider audience.
Additionally, sharing ad creatives across all social media platforms and via email to newsletter lists will help you reach more customers.
Again, the key is to be quick, especially if you want to promote advertisements over standard or digital channels.
Use it Sparingly
Finally, I think it’s important to remember that newsjacking is not an everyday strategy, nor should it be used more than a few times a year.
Brands can take on a serious risk by engaging in newsjacking, and they could betray any authenticity they are trying to manufacture by engaging in this tactic too much.
For this reason, I recommend keeping a close eye on your industry for any trending stories and selecting only one that feels right for your brand.
Going out and seeking stories may be more costly in the long run and provide very little benefit.
5 Examples Of Successful Newsjacking
To help you strategize better, let’s examine some examples of successful and unsuccessful newsjacking.
1. Busch Beer Sponsors Dog Adoptions
One of the more heartwarming stories of the early pandemic was an effort by Anheuser-Busch to encourage more people to adopt dogs.
The company offered a free three-month supply of beer for anyone who adopted a dog from a shelter sponsored by the Midwest Animal Rescue & Services (MARS).
The story helped shine a light on an underreported phenomenon and helped the company gain wide acclaim across social media and its customer base.
2. Uber’s Ad Campaign: “Thank You For Not Riding”
Of all of the industries hit hardest by the pandemic, ride-sharing had to be one of the hardest.
However, Uber was not only able to salvage its brand but also capitalize on the pandemic with its “Thank You For Not Riding” campaign, where it encouraged drivers to stay home.
While the company certainly lost a lot of money because of the global event, this ad campaign helped forge greater trust and loyalty with its customers, which has been rewarded even more greatly in the long run.
3. Oreo’s Famous “Blackout Ad”
Perhaps the most infamous example of newsjacking occurred almost a decade ago at Super Bowl XLVII in New Orleans. After a faulty relay caused a power outage for a few minutes, Oreo responded with a real-time Twitter post that lit the internet on fire.
This very simple but expertly timed tweet remains one of the best examples of newsjacking done properly in the split second of a moment.
4. Budweiser Saves Its World Cup
During the 2022 World Cup, Budweiser – one of the world cup’s main sponsors for over three decades – received a rude awakening when it discovered that Doha had banned all alcohol from its sporting events.
While the company deleted a tweet, stating, “Well, this is awkward,” it responded brilliantly by awarding the beer it had promised for the cup to the winning country.
This story is a great example of how brands can pivot and manipulate a breaking news story for their own advantage.
In the same way that Oreo manipulated the Super Bowl blackout to its advantage, so too did Budweiser to newsjack the story and capitalize on it long-term, even if it lost out on tens of thousands of dollars in sales.
5. Google’s Year In Search
Finally, Google’s Year in Search is another creative example of a brand that is capable of capitalizing on trending news stories to tell its own unique brand story.
By putting its brand at the center of these news stories, Google helps form a stronger connection with its customers and reinforce its brand’s pre-eminence in the tech space.
Newsjacking Done Wrong
Of course, for every success story of newsjacking, there is one equally as dissatisfying.
Perhaps the most infamous failure at newsjacking came from Pepsi with its infamous Kendall Jenner ad.
While growing political unrest and hot-button social issues, Pepsi’s ad completely missed the point and embarrassed its reputation.
Let this be a lesson that political messages can serve as powerful themes, but they must be handled with grace and geared specifically for your audience.
Overall, newsjacking is a very effective strategy for increasing your brand’s reach and acquiring publicity.
However, newsjacking requires tact and focus for proper execution, as well as good timing.
Follow these examples above to successfully newsjack a story and help your brand reach new eyeballs.
More resources:
Featured Image: Yurii_Yarema/Shutterstock
SEO
Content Pruning: Why It Works, and How to Do It
Content pruning sounds pretty appealing: delete a ton of content and see your organic traffic improve. But pruning has risks (like deleting useful pages and useful backlinks), and benefits are not guaranteed: So how does pruning actually work? And when…
SEO
8 Free SEO Reporting Tools
There’s no shortage of SEO reporting tools to choose from—but what are the core tools you need to put together an SEO report?
In this article, I’ll share eight of my favorite SEO reporting tools to help you create a comprehensive SEO report for free.
Price: Free
Google Search Console, often called GSC, is one of the most widely used tools to track important SEO metrics from Google Search.
Most common reporting use case
GSC has a ton of data to dive into, but the main performance indicator SEOs look at first in GSC is Clicks on the main Overview dashboard.
As the data is from Google, SEOs consider it to be a good barometer for tracking organic search performance. As well as clicks data, you can also track the following from the Performance report:
- Total Impressions
- Average CTR
- Average Position
Tip
But for most SEO reporting, GSC clicks data is exported into a spreadsheet and turned into a chart to visualize year-over-year performance.
Favorite feature
One of my favorite reports in GSC is the Indexing report. It’s useful for SEO reporting because you can share the indexed to non-indexed pages ratio in your SEO report.
If the website has a lot of non-indexed pages, then it’s worth reviewing the pages to understand why they haven’t been indexed.
Price: Free
Google Looker Studio (GLS), previously known as Google Data Studio (GDS), is a free tool that helps visualize data in shareable dashboards.
Most common reporting use case
Dashboards are an important part of SEO reporting, and GLS allows you to get a total view of search performance from multiple sources through its integrations.
Out of the box, GLS allows you to connect to many different data sources.
Such as:
- Marketing products – Google Ads, Google Analytics, Display & Video 360, Search Ads 360
- Consumer products – Google Sheets, YouTube, and Google Search Console
- Databases – BigQuery, MySQL, and PostgreSQL
- Social media platforms – Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter
- Files – CSV file upload and Google Cloud Storage
Sidenote.
If you don’t have the time to create your own report manually, Ahrefs has three Google Looker Studio connectors that can help you create automated SEO reporting for any website in a few clicks
Here’s what a dashboard in GLS looks like:
With this type of dashboard, you share reports that are easy to understand with clients or other stakeholders.
Favorite feature
The ability to blend and filter data from different sources, like GA and GSC, means you can get a customized overview of your total search performance, tailored to your website.
Price: Free for 500 URLs
Screaming Frog is a website crawler that helps you audit your website.
Screaming Frog’s free version of its crawler is perfect if you want to run a quick audit on a bunch of URLs. The free version is limited to 500 URLs—making it ideal for crawling smaller websites.
Most common reporting use case
When it comes to reporting, the Reports menu in Screaming Frog SEO Spider has a wealth of information you can look over that covers all the technical aspects of your website, such as analyzing, redirects, canonicals, pagination, hreflang, structured data, and more.
Once you’ve crawled your site, it’s just a matter of downloading the reports you need and working out the main issues to summarize in your SEO report.
Favorite feature
Screaming Frog can pull in data from other tools, including Ahrefs, using APIs.
If you already had access to a few SEO tools’ APIs, you could pull data from all of them directly into Screaming Frog. This is useful if you want to combine crawl data with performance data or other 3rd party tools.
Even if you’ve never configured an API, connecting other tools to Screaming Frog is straightforward.
Price: Free
Ahrefs has a large selection of free SEO tools to help you at every stage of your SEO campaign, and many of these can be used to provide insights for your SEO reporting.
For example, you could use our:
Most common reporting use case
One of our most popular free SEO tools is Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT), which you can use for your SEO reporting.
With AWT, you can:
- Monitor your SEO health over time by setting up scheduled SEO audits
- See the performance of your website
- Check all known backlinks for your website
Favorite feature
Of all the Ahrefs free tools, my favorite is AWT. Within it, site auditing is my favorite feature—once you’ve set it up, it’s a completely hands-free way to keep track of your website’s technical performance and monitor its health.
If you already have access to Google Search Console, it’s a no-brainer to set up a free AWT account and schedule a technical crawl of your website(s).
Price: Free
Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar is a free Chrome and Firefox extension useful for diagnosing on-page technical issues and performing quick spot checks on your website’s pages.
Most common reporting use case
For SEO reporting, it’s useful to run an on-page check on your website’s top pages to ensure there aren’t any serious on-page issues.
With the free version, you get the following features:
- On-page SEO report
- Redirect tracer with HTTP Headers
- Outgoing links report with link highlighter and broken link checker
- SERP positions
- Country changer for SERP
The SEO toolbar is excellent for spot-checking issues with pages on your website. If you are not confident with inspecting the code, it can also give you valuable pointers on what elements you need to include on your pages to make them search-friendly.
If anything is wrong with the page, the toolbar highlights it, with red indicating a critical issue.
Favorite feature
The section I use the most frequently in the SEO toolbar is the Indexability tab. In this section, you can see whether the page can be crawled and indexed by Google.
Although you can do this by inspecting the code manually, using the toolbar is much faster.
Price: Free
Like GSC, Google Analytics is another tool you can use to track the performance of your website, tracking sessions and conversions and much more on your website.
Most common reporting use case
GA gives you a total view of website traffic from several different sources, such as direct, social, organic, paid traffic, and more.
Favorite feature
You can create and track up to 300 events and 30 conversions with GA4. Previously, with universal analytics, you could only track 20 conversions. This makes conversion and event tracking easier within GA4.
Price: Free
Google Slides is Google’s version of Microsoft PowerPoint. If you don’t have a dashboard set up to report on your SEO performance, the next best thing is to assemble a slide deck.
Many SEO agencies present their report through dashboard insights and PowerPoint presentations. However, if you don’t have access to PowerPoint, then Google Slides is an excellent (free) alternative.
Most common reporting use cases
The most common use of Google Slides is to create a monthly SEO report. If you don’t know what to include in a monthly report, use our SEO report template.
Favorite feature
One of my favorite features is the ability to share your presentation on a video chat directly from Google Slides. You can do this by clicking the camera icon in the top right.
This is useful if you are working with remote clients and makes sharing your reports easy.
Price: Free
Google Trends allows you to view a keyword’s popularity over time in any country. The data shown is the relative popularity ratio scaled from 0-100, not the direct volume of search queries.
Most common reporting use cases
Google Trends is useful for showing how the popularity of certain searches can increase or decrease over time. If you work with a website that often has trending products, services, or news, it can be useful to illustrate this visually in your SEO report.
Google Trends makes it easy to spot seasonal trends for product categories. For example, people want to buy BBQs when the weather is sunny.
Using Google Trends, we can see that peak demand for BBQs usually happens in June-July every year.
Using this data across the last five years, we could be fairly sure when the BBQ season would start and end.
Favorite feature
Comparing two or more search terms against each other over time is one of my favorite uses of Google Trends, as it can be used to tell its own story.
Embellishing your report with trends data allows you to gain further insights into market trends.
You can even dig into trends at a regional level if you need to.
Final thoughts
These free tools will help you put together the foundations for a well-rounded SEO report.
The tools you use for SEO reporting don’t always have to be expensive—even large companies use many of the free tools mentioned to create insights for their client’s SEO reports.
Got more questions? Ping me on X 🙂
SEO
Study Reveals Potential Disruption For Brands & SEO
A new study by Authoritas suggests that Google’s AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE), currently being tested with a limited group of users, could adversely impact brand visibility and organic search traffic.
These findings include:
- When an SGE box is expanded, the top organic result drops by over 1,200 pixels on average, significantly reducing visibility.
- 62% of SGE links come from domains outside the top 10 organic results.
- Ecommerce, electronics, and fashion-related searches saw the greatest disruption, though all verticals were somewhat impacted.
Adapting to generative search may require a shift in SEO strategies, focusing more on long-form content, expert insights, and multimedia formats.
As Google continues to invest in AI-powered search, the Authoritas study provides an early look at the potential challenges and opportunities ahead.
High Penetration Rate & Industry-Wide Effects
The study analyzed 2,900 brand and product-related keywords across 15 industry verticals and found that Google displays SGE results for 91.4% of all search queries.
The prevalence of SGE results indicates they impact a majority of websites across various industries.
The research analyzed the typical composition of SGE results. On average, each SGE element contained between 10-11 links sourced from an average of four different domains.
This indicates brands may need to earn multiple links and listings within these AI-curated results to maintain visibility and traffic.
The research also suggests that larger, well-established websites like Quora and Reddit will likely perform better in SGE results than smaller websites and lesser-known brands.
Shifting Dynamics In Organic Search Results
With SGE results occupying the entire first page, websites that currently hold the top positions may experience a significant decrease in traffic and click-through rates.
When a user clicks to expand the SGE element, the study found that, on average, the #1 ranked organic result drops a sizeable 1,255 pixels down the page.
Even if a website ranks number one in organic search, it may effectively be pushed down to the second page due to the prominence of SGE results.
New Competition From Unexpected Sources
The study revealed that SGE frequently surfaces links and content from websites that didn’t appear in the top organic rankings.
On average, only 20.1% of SGE links exactly matched a URL from the first page of Google search results.
An additional 17.9% of SGE links were from the same domains as page one results but linked to different pages. The remaining 62% of SGE links came from sources outside the top organic results.
Challenges For Brand Term Optimization & Local Search
The study reveals that SGE results for branded terms may include competitors’ websites alongside the brand’s own site, potentially leading to increased competition for brand visibility.
Laurence O’Toole, CEO and founder of Authoritas, states:
“Brands are not immune. These new types of generative results introduce more opportunities for third-party sites and even competitors to rank for your brand terms and related brand and product terms that you care about.”
Additionally, local businesses may face similar challenges, as SGE results could feature competing local brands even when users search for a specific brand in a regional context.
Methodology & Limitations
To arrive at these insights, Authoritas analyzed a robust dataset of 2,900 search keywords across a spectrum of query types, including specific brand names, brand + generic terms, brand + product names, generic terms, and specific product names. The keywords were distributed across 15 industry verticals.
The study utilized a consistent desktop browser viewport to quantify pixel-based changes in the search results. Authoritas also developed proprietary “alignment scores” to measure the degree of overlap between traditional organic search results and the new SGE links.
While acknowledging some limitations, such as the keyword set needing to be fully representative of each vertical and the still-evolving nature of SGE, Authoritas maintains that the insights hold value in preparing brands for the new realities of an AI-powered search ecosystem.
Why We Care
The findings of the Authoritas study have implications for businesses, marketers, and SEO professionals. As Google’s SGE becomes more prevalent, it could disrupt traditional organic search rankings and traffic patterns.
Brands that have invested heavily in SEO and have achieved top rankings for key terms may find their visibility and click-through rates diminished by the prominence of SGE results.
SGE introduces new competition from unexpected sources, as most SGE links come from domains outside the top 10 organic results. This means businesses may need to compete not only with their traditional rivals but also with a broader range of websites that gain visibility through SGE.
As Google is a primary source of traffic and leads for many businesses, any changes to its search results can impact visibility, brand awareness, and revenue.
How This Could Help You
While the rise of SGE presents challenges, it also offers opportunities.
Taking into account what we’ve learned from the Authoritas study, here are some actionable takeaways:
- As SGE favors in-depth, informative content, businesses may benefit from investing in comprehensive, well-researched articles and guides that provide value to users.
- Incorporating expert quotes, interviews, and authoritative sources within your content could increase the likelihood of being featured in SGE results.
- Enriching your content with images, videos, and other multimedia elements may help capture the attention of both users and the SGE algorithm.
- Building a strong brand presence across multiple channels, including social media, industry forums, and relevant websites, can increase your chances of appearing in SGE.
- Creating a trustworthy brand and managing your online reputation will be crucial, as SGE may feature competitors alongside your website.
Looking Ahead
While the long-term impact of SGE will depend on user adoption and the perceived usefulness of results, this study’s findings serve as a valuable starting point for businesses and SEO professionals.
By proactively addressing the challenges and opportunities SGE presents, you can increase your chances of success in the new search environment.
Featured Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock
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