At the MnSearch Snippet #15 event held at Spyder Trap in Minneapolis, MN on July 30th, 2014, Allie Gray Freeland presented her slidedeck "Getting Ink and Links".
1. GETTING INK AND LINKSMN SEARCH – SEARCH SNIPPETS #15: LINK BUILDING IN 2014
7/30/2014
@AllieGRayFree | #MNSearch
2. Hello my name is…
Allie (Gray) Freeland
PR Director at iAcquire & Clearvoice
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3. What’s on tap
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• Converge the practices of public relations and SEO to build juicy, authoritative news links
• Link reclamation
• Co-marketing
• Press releases
• Contributor journalism
• Tools and fundamental skill set you need for getting INK and LINKS
4. We’re all in this together
@AllieGrayFree | #MNSearch
The goal of public relations is to create attention, awareness, and
trust by getting other people to talk about your brand.
The goal of SEO now is to create attention, awareness, and trust by
getting search engines to rank your content favorably.
Even the process is now similar: reaching out to relevant publications,
making a timely, targeted, and relevant pitch, and providing great
content for the publisher’s audience.
5. Link reclamation
@AllieGrayFree | #MNSearch
• As a PR professional, you likely have a long list of media placements you’ve obtained. When
was the last time you shared that list with your SEO team?
• SHARING IS CARING
• Where to Start: Give the list of old placements to your SEO team and have them contact the
outlets, Boolean search terms within Google, monitoring tools via Meltwater/Cision/Vocus
6. Co-marketing Campaigns
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• Co-marketing = Two+ brands to work together create co-branded offer, campaign, study, or content
• The return = Companies share resources, piggybacked brand awareness, and capitalize on shared
results
• Where to Start: Find potential partners with the jet stream you need, identify goals, create assets,
pitch, and place.
7. iAcquire.com
Press releases
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• Releases that are optimized to include multimedia assets, social channels, and are keyword-
rich—while also having the fundamental principles of being newsworthy, relevant, and timely—
will get picked up
• Where to Start: 1) Create a list of keywords to target within future releases 2) Select a Google-
friendly distribution service 3) Write the release and optimize using 3-5 percent keyword
integration 4) Publish the release on your own domain, then wire service 24 hours after
8. @AllieGrayFree | #MNSearch
Contributor journalism
• You can’t rely on pitching 100% of the time; become a publisher yourself!
• If you are a good writer, start writing one post per week on publications with similar readership as your
business’ core audience… If you are a crappy writer, use tools like ClearVoice to find authoritative
writers in your space
• Perfect your pitch: Be unique, transparent, real, detailed, and professional – include concept and/or full
• article
• Target publications with contributor models (CMS access, baby!)
12. A Checklist for Ink and links
@AllieGrayFree | #MNSearch
q Do you have the tools you need to identify, track, and reach out to the news
media?
q Are you reaching out as real, authentic human being?
q Are you developing exclusive relationships and not “spraying and praying” with
“mass” pitches?
q Do you have a good story to tell?