I accidentally got featured in The Guardian (here's what you can learn from it)

I share a digital pr tip each week which will make your job easier or increase your chances of securing coverage. This post has been taken from week 26 of my digital pr newsletter.

Most people will remember their first link/piece of coverage.

I actually don’t remember mine, but I do remember the first one I was proud of.

Back in 2012 I created an acne treatment affiliate website. The website was horrific, I was 22 at the time and I didn’t really know what I was doing.

After making only 1 sale, I abandoned the website some time in 2013, but before I did, I had this infographic (these were all the rage back then) made by my friend’s younger brother.

I popped it on a page on my website and called it ‘Acne Facts and Stats’ along with a little bit of content, and I kind of just forgot about it.

Then one day, long after I’d given up on the website, I decided to check it to see if it had made any affiliate sales (it hadn’t).

But I was dumbstruck to find it had been featured and linked to in The Guardian, TWICE in the same article.

They’d taken two of the stats I’d researched and used in my infographic, and cited my website as the source.

You can see one of them in the screenshot below. The links are both still there in the article too. Although the acne website is long gone.

That was the day I discovered the power of stats pages, almost by complete accident.

If you’re wondering what happened here, let me break it down for you.

1. A journalist decides to write a story about a particular topic (acne in this instance)

2. The journalist wants to include statistics for their article

3. Journalist searches Google for relevant stats

4. Journalists looks over websites that appear in Google search results

5. Journalists links to the websites they use as a source for the stats in the article

And that’s pretty how much I got my piece of coverage.

As bad as my acne website was, I’d managed to do one thing right. I’d managed to create a page about acne statistics and get it ranking in Google for relevant searches.

Beginners Luck?

This may seem like a fluke (and maybe it was a little bit), but I’ve utilised this tactic in a similar way with my Christmas tree website.

Back in 2020 I submitted freedom of information requests to find out how much each council spends on Christmas lights and decorations each year.

I pushed it out as a story and got coverage like this

But every year since then (2021, 2022, 2023) it’s been naturally picked up by other websites.

All because it ranks for things like ‘christmas light spend statistics’ (in the UK).

So what started off as a campaign, has also become a statistics page later on.

How You Can Replicate This

The good thing about this type of work is that you can apply it to pretty much any industry.

This can be particularly useful if you’re working in a niche that is difficult, perhaps B2B, or when you’ve got a client that keeps things fairly rigid in terms of topics you can push (IYKWIM).

It’s also kinda idiot proof, if 22 year old me who didn’t know what they were doing can have success with it, then chances are you could too.

So here are two ways I’d approach it

1. Gather Keyword Insights Using An SEO tool

If you want to create a statistics page, it can help to understand what words people are searching on Google. This will help you to understand what content you could create.

Semrush is a great tool to do this with, and they have a free 7 day trial here. (Just make sure to cancel it before the end of the trial if you don’t want to get charged).

The way this tool works is you enter in keywords and it’ll give you an estimate for how often those words are searched for each month on Google. It’s not particularly accurate, but it gives us some sort of benchmark.

For example, I’ve typed in ‘Christmas statistics’ and it’s given me a list of phrases that contain both the word christmas and statistics, along with their ‘volume’ which is the estimated amount people search for them each month.

One of the phrases it shows me is ‘christmas tree fire statistics’. It tells me that this gets 50 searches per month in the US (although we should take that with a pinch of salt, as most of those searches likely come at Christmas).

If I hadn't used Semrush, I’d probably have never thought of that as a possible content option for my Christmas tree website. I could now go ahead and create a stats page for it.

2. Optimise Existing Campaigns Using Google Search Console

Another thing you can do, and I talk about this briefly in module 5 of my digital PR course, is to optimise any existing campaigns using Google Search Console.

This tool basically shows you what words you’re appearing for on Google, but you need to either own the website to be able to get data for it OR have someone who owns the website grant you access to it.

This is also something that’s only going to work if you’ve done a data campaign, ideally one with some good stats.

Here’s what you’re going to do

1. Go to Google Search Console

2. Head on over to performance

3. Click ‘new’, then ‘page’ and enter in the URL of your campaign

Once you’ve done that, head on over to queries and play around with that by sorting it by impressions.

This is now showing you all the words your campaign page is appearing on Google for.

What you want to be doing is looking for any words that you rank reasonably well for, let's say on the first page of Google, that are informational queries related to your data piece.

For my Christmas lights and decorations campaign, we can see it ranks between positions 5 and 6 for ‘how much is spent on christmas decorations each year’, and ‘how much money is spent on christmas lights’.

So what I do is go and add those phrases to my content page (if I don’t have them already) and then I answer them. It should help me appear high for those searches on google, and then naturally obtain links.

Answer The Query On Your Website

I’ve added in the sentence ‘how much is spent on Christmas lights and decorations each year’ which should cover both of those phrases that appeared in Google Search Console.

I’ve then answered that question just underneath.

Rank For It On Google

After doing that, it’s helped my site to appear higher for some of those related searches. For example, in the UK, I now rank 1st for ‘how much is spent on Christmas lights each year’.

So next time someone is searching for stats around that, it makes my website more likely to be used as a source, because I rank highly for it.

For Best Results

One of the only downsides to stats pages is that it can sometimes be a waiting game, it took 3 years after I made that stats page for my acne website before it got featured in The Guardian.

For best results with stats pages, you ideally want to be doing it for something that is new, and also a hot topic (although bear in mind if it’s new data for it won’t appear in the Semrush tool).

Something that is being written about a lot in the media. For example ChatGPT.

This ChatGPT statistics page was created by the agency Root Digital for their client ToolTester.com, it’s been linked to by almost 400 websites. Including The Guardian.

Very nice!

So there you have it, the power of stats pages.

This post was taken from week 26 of my Digital PR Newsletter, if you found it useful you can sign up for future editions on DigitalPRNewsletter.com

— Mark

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