How to grow your organic traffic with earned media

Earned media carries a ton of value, but not everyone understands how to measure its impact or grasp its full effect on your organic growth.

While it immediately provides increased brand awareness, earned media can also be an excellent vehicle for building brand authority as well as dramatically improving your off-page SEO.

Here at Stacker Studio, we’ve seen it work wonders with our brand partners, for whom we create newsworthy articles and syndicate them to our newswire.

To determine the short-term impact of earned media, we conducted an analysis of organic performance of 11 new brand partners across the first 90 days of their partnerships with us.

Here’s what we found:

I’m going to explain the entire process we used with examples so you can utilize similar strategies for your own content, SEO and digital PR efforts.

Tips for creating newsworthy content

Our goal is to create articles the publishers in our newswire want to run because they’re confident it’ll help them gain visits, clicks, subscriptions and more. We get a lot of feedback from our publisher partners that has informed our content strategy.

Here are a few of the insights we’ve gained after publishing more than 10,000 stories over the last four years.

Events and news pegs continue to drive high interest from our partners. For example, one of the largest local TV groups in the country has regularly published entertainment and lifestyles content tied to holidays, e.g. “Best Christmas movies of all time, according to critics,” and “50 cute baby names with holiday meanings.”

What this means for you: Think about other ways you can approach trending topics. I like to think of it as “timely evergreen” content. What information is useful/interesting all of the time but is particularly relevant when certain events happen? For example, holiday content can be republished every year, but also, articles about dating and love are nearly always relevant, but particularly so around Valentine’s Day.

For anything timely, you should be pitching at least a month in advance. Publishers often plan their editorial calendar for major events many weeks out. For example, a regional broadcaster reached out on January 4 asking when we would communicate our coverage plans for the Winter Olympics.

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What this means for you: For any timely pieces, make sure you get them into production at least two months in advance so they’re ready to be pitched/published a month before the relevant event.

People want to know about their specific locations. Local community outlets love to feature their cities.

What this means for you: Localization is key. If you have data that can be geographically broken down, always provide state- or city-based perspectives in addition to national.

A great example of a piece that’s both timely and localized is a series we did about rural hospital closures in various states across the country.

While this isn’t tied to a specific event, it’s certainly timely with regard to COVID’s impact on our healthcare system, and it’s an interesting examination of what else has negatively affected healthcare in this country. Each state could run a version of the story that centered their own area.

Promoting newsworthy content

The two primary ways to promote newsworthy content are to manually pitch it to reporters (the digital PR route) or to build syndication partnerships (like we do).

In the example story I listed above, we sent the national version of the article out to our newswire, and it was picked up more than 200 times. We also sent out localized versions to various cities featured in the report where their area is centered rather than part of the greater list.

Whether you’re pitching the content or syndicating it, two tenets always apply:

1. Focus on the publisher’s goals and their audience: Everything you create and send to a publisher should have their needs in mind. What has already performed well on their site? What topics have driven the most engagement?
2. Make it easy: All of our stories are available for free under Creative Commons, and we have a “republish” button on our site so anyone who wants it can easily syndicate it. The fewer barriers between your content and its publication on another site, the more likely it is to be republished. If you’re pitching, don’t make them email you several times before they see the full project: Provide everything up front.

Incorporating internal linking

Many marketers forget this final step, and it’s a critical one.

When you’re earning media, you can’t be putting promotional links in the stories you’re trying to pitch. News sites are understandably not interested in promoting your category or product/service pages.

Usually, they’ll link to your homepage or the page that has the original data/information you shared with them; they do this to cite you as the source of the information they’re sharing. In our case, since publishers are often republishing the stories in full, they also provide a canonical tag, which indicates to Google that our brand partner is the original source of the article.

These links and canonicals are already a powerful authority signal, but to maximize their effectiveness, consider where you can link to in your original article/report to give other relevant pages a boost. (“Relevant” being the key word here.)

That’s what internal links are: Links from one of your owned pages to another. Not only does this help Google better understand the content of each of your pages, it also helps distribute authority across your site when you earn authority signals like the ones I’ve referenced in this article.

Let’s say, for example, you work for a pet supplies company and you did a more tangential story about cat adoption statistics. Perhaps you can link from that story to a category page on your site featuring items first-time cat owners should own. Now you’re taking a more general piece and funneling the link equity to a page with more monetary value for your business.

Witnessing organic growth

When using this strategy, all kinds of companies, including startups, start seeing organic traffic growth a few months after implementation.

One of our clients, Sunday Citizen, is a newer brand that came to us to help facilitate their organic growth. After creating eight stories for them, we earned 1,000 quality media pickups (and utilized internal linking from their story pages).

As a result, we generated a 15x increase in their number of keyword rankings in the top three positions. In under a year, they saw a 5,000% increase in their organic traffic.

The method isn’t easy, as it involves original content creation and strategic syndication, but the brand authority and growth you can earn are invaluable. It’s the perfect marriage of content and SEO tactics, and if you implement this approach on an ongoing basis, you’re likely to see a steady increase in organic traction in the months and years to come.