I didn’t want to include the C word in this blog post (not that one) but, I’ll say it once and get it out of the way, if you’re struggling for inspiration and ideas have run dry, if Coronavirus is getting in the way of your campaigns and you need to adapt, why not use your time for a bit of strategy?
For some this may be like sucking eggs, for others this will change your life! So, let me begin:
You have your client and its domain – perhaps you’re about to begin a new round of ideation, looking to launch your new campaign, or are planning a schedule of targeted thought leadership articles… but you need some inspiration?
Firstly, using ahrefs, head to more > link intersect.
Once you land on the Link Intersect page, you want to see all of the domains that link to your client’s competitors*, but not yours in order to give you an idea of where you should be targeting or the type of campaigns you should be building. *If you don’t know their competitors, ask your client and do your own research – they’ll probably be different, with SERP competitors and commercial differing, but helpful for this task nonetheless.
Select ‘show link opportunities’ and I personally would filter by DR, to cut out a lot of the spam and directories etc.
Of course, you can export this list and sort through it in Google Sheets or Excel. Filter through the likes of Youtube and Google and you will begin to see publications cropping up which you recognise, and some you don’t.
You might even start to see trends, for example in the image below. This domain is missing out on a lot of links from local news sites, which its competitor is making a use of. So for this business, a local campaign would be beneficial, or a campaign that really lends itself to localised data or various local hooks:
Using this same logic throughout all of the intersected domains, you will begin to see trends in titles and different verticals. If the competitors can land links there with a campaign, so can you and this can help to steer your ideation. Maybe you’ve never thought of targeting music press, but the competition are all over it and this is proof it works.
To get even more detail and a further take on this and to understand exactly what content these publications want, select the number on the row of the publication in the competitor’s column to show all instances of links from that specific title to the competitor’s domain.
By doing so, we can see each news story by Yahoo, what the story is about and on the right, the original content or research. This is useful for inspiration and knowing what sort of content you should be producing for relevancy to the publication.
This intersection is domain wide, but you can limit this to specific areas of the site, if you know that your client and its competitors are all targeting specific pages and keywords with digital PR activity.
If this is the first time you have used this feature, have a play around with it and see what information you can get, it’s a really useful tool and can be a great source for inspiration when times are tough.
Enjoy!
