Are you juicing the benefits from online media coverage?

Where a piece of online media coverage appears in search engine listings will influence the probability that the audience will see, read and respond to it. This, in turn, influences all kinds of audience behaviours, including performing a search for more information, or visiting the organisation’s website.  Getting media coverage at the top of search listings will contribute to brand consideration and move consumers through the buying cycle. Metricomm’s expertise lies in revealing how consumers respond to media coverage and how this impacts brand performance.

As digital PR agencies and SEO companies well understand, media coverage can also help an organisation’s page ranking by providing links from online news sites which are judged highly credible by the search engines when determining domain authority.

The more links a website has pointing to it, the more frequently search engine bots will find and index content on that site. What the SEO industry terms ‘link juice’ is a measure of credibility that can be passed between a news site and the company website, helping the latter to be viewed as a trusted source of information.

Digital PR often focuses solely on building the volume and quality of links leading to a client’s web domain. This can be important for all organisations, but especially for those operating primarily in the online world, for example businesses depending heavily on ecommerce. 

According to SEO experts Semrush, creating digital assets that journalists can link to is one of the most effective ways to improve SEO. However, there are many other benefits from digital PR, alongside generating raw link juice.

Instead of simply counting backlinks and classifying them as ‘follow’ or ‘no follow’ links to assess whether they are passing on link juice, it can be useful to put them in the context of other business outcomes from earned media coverage. Metricomm’s detailed insights into the effectiveness of online media coverage now include backlink analysis, but also quantify those additional benefits.

As with many other aspects of media evaluation, it’s not just about securing an article or securing a link. All links are not created equal, just as all articles are not of equal value in creating active audience engagement. It’s not just about ‘follow’ versus ‘no follow’ links either. Many links don’t actually result in increased website referrals. What makes a real difference is when a follow link is on a page within that site that is found in search results by interested readers, who actively digest the content and are far more likely to follow the link. For any marketing team, it is worth knowing more about where to find this engaged media audience because their interest in the topic and willingness to follow embedded links can genuinely help convert them into customers.

The power of online news containing links endures over time, so that links remain visible to people who find the content weeks or months after an article appears. It can be useful to know how news impact decays over time and for how long links remain and are still likely to be sending traffic and link juice. 

At the same time, backlinks from PR achieve differentiation from competitors, if companies are achieving backlinks from different news sites which create a variety of brand associations. Metricomm provides cost-effective analysis of how brands are positioned in online media coverage compared to others in their sector, identifying gaps and opportunities that can inform and maximise their link-building strategies.