Newsjacking: The SEO Trick Your Business Needs To Boost Traffic
Team Streams
September 27th, 2021
Team Streams
September 27th, 2021
Trends come and go. We all have new obsessions from week to week but that doesn’t diminish the fact that even the most fleeting trends have their 15 minutes of fame.
But what does this have to do with SEO?
With newsjacking, you can jump on the bandwagon and take advantage of trends as they happen to improve SEO for your website and generate buzz around your brand.
In this article, we will explain everything you need to know about newsjacking, share some examples, and explain the impact that it can have on SEO when well executed.
Newsjacking is a term that was first used by the author David Meerman Scott in his book of the same name. He explains newsjacking as “the art and science of injecting your ideas into a breaking news story so you and your ideas get noticed”.
Basically, newsjacking is creating content around something that is trending and sharing it on your platforms. You use the attention that is already being put on the trending topic to bring attention to your business. You are essentially piggybacking on a trend to generate traffic to your website.
Still a little confused about how you can piggyback on trends through newsjacking? Take a look at these great examples to clear things up.
Do you know what a Peloton is? Essentially a bike machine for training. It released an ad that was instantly criticized for being sexist and conforming to outdated gender norms. The premise of the ad was essentially a woman “Peloton Wife” is given the workout machine for Christmas by her husband and then proceeds to use it every day for a year.
When the ad aired, American Gin owner Ryan Reynolds immediately cast "Peloton Wife," in a commercial for his Gin. The ad was written to seem as though it was a sequel to the Peloton ad.
In the ad “Peloton Wife” is sat at a bar staring into the camera. She sips on Aviation Gin as her friends offer her more gin and dish out compliments such as "You look great, by the way."
Remember when Trump was in office and he was hell-bent on building a border wall with Mexico? This had a lot of potentially negative implications for airlines flying from the US to Mexico.
AeroMexico took a creative strategy with their marketing in these times. Rather than adding new routes to other countries or pivoting their strategy away from the US, they issued DNA tests.
Their marketing team went to rural US towns and offered DNA tests to residents who wanted the border wall to be built. They were offering them discounts on flights based on the percentage of Mexican heritage that was found in their DNA.
The airline then followed up with a humourous TV ad that showed each of these people giving their views on the border wall and immigration law.
How did the examples above help the respective businesses improve their SEO?
As news trends online the search traffic relating to keywords around that piece of news increases. Google features articles about that story at the top of search results and top stories around trending topics get highlighted on social platforms such as Twitter.
When you react at the right time and release a piece of content that newsjacks a story, you can take your share of this additional search traffic and send it to your website.
In addition, news publications love highly topical stories. If you can reactively create content you can also pitch it to journalists and place a backlink to your website within the piece of content.
Newsjacking is a useful tactic that should be on every marketer’s mind. When you see the right piece of news and can quickly create a piece of reactive content you can see huge increases in search traffic.
See inspirations here:
If you need more help creating SEO friendly content for your small business website, MobileStreams has an easy to use tool that helps you check you have covered your SEO basics, and rates your content for you so you can be certain it will perform well before you publish. Sign up for a 7 day free trial now.