It’s not uncommon for bloggers or reporters to write about a company or product without contacting that business for more information. When this happens with your business, you may not even know that you are being talked about. The first step, then, is to make sure you are aware when your business is being written about, which can easily be done with social media listening tools like Brandwatch or Sprout Social.
But once you know that you’re being written or talked about online, what else can you do? Following are four ways to take advantage of this free coverage to help build awareness and engagement with your brand.
1. Add to Press Section on Your Website
Articles written by larger, more well-know publications (e.g., New York Times, BuzzFeed) should be added to a Press section on your website. Even if the article you find is a few months or years old, you can still add it to this area of your site.
2. Connect With Authors
Simply follow the author’s social media profiles from your business’s account and the person account of whomever is the main media contact at your organization. You can also create lists on Twitter and add each author’s account, making it easier to keep an eye on their posts and continue engaging.
3. Update Inbound Links
Inbound links are still one of the top organic ranking factors. Having high-quality sites link to your site helps to boost the authority of your site and relevancy to certain terms and phrases. Most articles will contain a link to your website, but these links aren’t always the most ideal.
In a perfect world, all links would use keywords as anchor text, be “dofollow” and deep link to subpage not just the home page. However, it’s good to have a balanced profile that includes some “nofollows” and homepage links using your brand or product name.
Evaluate any links in these articles to determine if there are opportunities for improvement, such as:
- Update Broken Links: If links go to pages that no longer exist on your website, you should ask for them to be updated to the most appropriate page. You may also consider 301 redirecting the broken URLs to a similar page that is live.
- Deep Linking: Ask for deep linking to products or other pages, not just homepage, when it makes sense.
- Keywords as Anchor Text: Ask for links using keyword variations as anchor text.
- Get Rid of Spam: Spam sites can negatively impact your website, and you may need to request that links be removed from spammy sites. If you can’t reach the site’s owner or they refuse to remove the link, you can disallow from within Google Search Console.
4. Write a Blog Post About It
If you have a lot of coverage, you probably don’t want to write a blog post for every single mention. But don’t hesitate to blog about articles from well-known sources or those that are particularly positive or in-depth. Don’t simply copy/paste the entire article. Instead, write a brief one to two paragraph summary, link to the original article and include an image.
Don’t just read the article, pat yourself on the back and call it a day! Get as much mileage as possible out of articles or blog posts written about your company and/or products by including it on other owned and earned channels.
