Software for SEO link building, social media marketing and public relations | BuzzStream

Ryan Pitylak is the CEO of Unique Influence, a full-service search marketing and digital PR agency. Unique Influence is not only a BuzzStream customer, they also provide content creation and link building services to a number of other BuzzStream customers.  I’ve known Ryan for a long time and I’ve heard great things about their work from our customers, so when he offered to explain how BuzzStream and Citation Labs ties into his processes for link prospecting and relationship management, I jumped at it. 

Background

75% of a website’s ranking in Google comes from its link profile, according to SEOMoz.  This means that the quantity and authority of the links pointing into your website are critically important to its performance. At Unique Influence, we help our clients increase the number of organic, high quality links from relevant websites across the web.

We build relationships with top quality websites that are:

• Contextually relevant – Websites that are in the same industry or share the same audience
• High authority – Websites that have a high number of quality inbound links
• High quality – Websites that maintain a high level of quality in the content that they post on their site

Two of the key challenges to building high quality links are:

1. Finding acceptable websites
2. Contacting the sites in order to establish a relationship

Our Workflow

We use SEO tools like Link Prospector from Citation Labs (in collaboration with Whitespark.ca) and Buzzstream to build these relationships.  Here’s how you can use these tools to find and create relationships with relevant websites:

Citation Labs

• We brainstorm search queries that will return websites that are relevant to our client. 
• We then use the Citation Labs Link Prospector tool.  Under the appropriate Campaign, we click on “Find Prospects” and define the search type, search depth and date range.  Then we enter our queries and hit submit.
• Once the report is complete we export a CSV file of the “paths” to get the full list of URLs that resulted from the search.

Excel

• We open this CSV file in Excel and filter the results.  For example, we may decide to eliminate duplicate domains or sort by a specific keywords etc.
• Then, we visit the websites in the list and check to see if these websites meet our quality filters.  We have a long list of qualitative quality filters, so most of the websites get rejected at this stage.  This is a critical step in the process because you want to make sure that you’re only building relationships with high quality, relevant websites.

Buzzstream

• In Buzzstream, we import the qualitatively relevant websites into the appropriate project.  These websites are imported as “Link Partners”.
• Buzzstream examines each URL for authority information, such as PageRank and MozRank. We look for sites that pass our quantitative screening process and weed out the websites that have low authority.
• Once we have a list of websites that have passed both our qualitative and quantitative filters, we will contact the owner of each website.  Buzzstream can track your communication history if you give it your imap server information.  Alternatively, you can BCC Buzzstream during your email conversations.
• We change the “Relationship Stage” for the Link Partner to “Attempting to Reach” in Buzzstream after we contact the website owner.

We update the Relationship Stage once we are successful at establishing a relationship with the website owner.

Using Citation Labs Link Prospecting tool allows us to define a universe of potential websites with whom we can develop relationships.  Buzzstream allows us to filter out websites with low authority and track the conversations we have with the website owners.

The fact that these tools work together is a critical factor in delivering success for our clients.  These tools allow us to successfully develop high quality link profiles for clients across industries and business models.  Citation Labs, Buzzstream and Unique Influence are the ingredients in a recipe for search engine optimization success.

Jeremy Porter has a post on Journalistics today about influence scoring and the challenges associated with it.  Jeremy’s post does a nice job of pointing out some of the challenges with trying to use influence scores like Klout, PageRank, etc..  Most notably, when looked at them by themselves, they’re not particularly useful because, unlike a search engine that includes both relevance and influence/trust in its algorithm, there’s no contextual relevance.  So Justin Bieber may have a Klout score of 95, but if I’m selling fly fishing equipment,  the guy with a klout score of 20 who only writes about fly fishing and who is very active in a number of fly fishing community sites is much more important to me.

I don’t think this problem is unique to klout…this is a very difficult problem to solve.  Frankly though, given the changed face of media, I’m not convinced it’s even a good idea to rely on fine-grained scores like this at all.  Knowing that one influencer has a score of 64 while another has a score of 78 might be useful in a world where a relatively small set of traditional outlets have significant reach (and you’re going to be extremely high touch with a small number of outlets), but when you have a completely fragmented landscape, you just don’t need to be this fine-grained.  It’s a bit of a dirty word, but frankly in a world where everyone is an influencer and where links and social mentions drive search performance, the biggest issue is scale – like it or not, you have to build a lot of relationships in order to move the needle for the business and spammy approaches just don’t work.  So the challenge is this – how do I build REAL relationships with LOTS of people without hiring an army of people to do it?  When you rely on these fine-grained scores, inevitably you get caught in the discussion of  “is this person really more influential than this person in my niche.”  It’s a total time suck and it really shouldn’t impact how you engage.

Given that you need to engage with a lot of people in order to have an impact, I think you’re better off thinking in terms of broad groupings – i.e., a person’s level of influence is either high, medium, or low.  Then you can focus your efforts on the thing that really matters – developing the processes and tools that will allow you to engage with more people (in a real, relationship-oriented manner).  Specifically, you need to reduce the time required to: 1) find out when influencers are talking about the topics you care about (so you can engage), 2) keep track of the conversations you’re having with influencers (so your conversations are more meaningful and relevant), and 3) engage with more people in less time without sacrificing personalization and relevance.

So, given this, you’re still left with the challenge of developing a methodology for classifying people into the “high/medium/low” influence categories as a starting point.   I think the details for this are probably best covered in another post, but at a high-level I think there are three things you look at:

• Are they relevant?  (using tools like listorious, alltop, google searches, monitoring, etc)
• What percentile do they fall into for some of the key engagement and reach metrics? (e.g., average comments, uniques, retweets)
• Who’s in their network (i.e., do they have relationships with some of the known influencers in the space)?

All of this info is available, the key is developing a way to quickly aggregate it and leverage it to classify people.  I’ll cover this in a follow-up post.