How Aldi is driving serious online rankings, drove 200,000 people by 8am this morning, got a product ranking no.1 in DAYS all through product PR and why (when done right) can be one of your biggest SEO, link and traffic drivers... (a thread)
(And why SEO can be short term too)
Aldi’s middle aisle has become of the most loved marketing tactics and now gone virtually. It’s essentially an aisle full of home/garden products at super cheap price and yes you can get a BARGAIN
One of their most popular products (every year) is the egg garden chair. Retailing at £149.99 you can’t get it any cheaper anywhere else
They bring it out same time every year and use product PR to build the hype
They got every national press and regional press talking about the egg chair revealing the date it will be online and a sense or urgency because “it will sell out”.
It’s essentially ... a drop. Think supreme drops, where the hype is huge. (Product PR)
All articles are linking back to the page with BUY HERE or EGG CHAIR anchor text , with links in the hundreds from high DA websites 60+
As a result ...
This morning when the egg chair dropped, 200K people was in the online queue waiting to buy one.
Google ranks that page 1st and 2nd for “egg chair” term. How?
👉🏼 it’s the most in demand page that users want for that term
👉🏼 because PR made it that!
👉🏼 a tonne of high quality links pointing to that page/sub category
And although the online queue highlights that the egg chair has sold out, users don’t care! they want to wait to see what other bargains they can find
Link and traffic numbers to this page is also huge ... sending signals to google that it’s what users want and now ranking 2nd
Other products on Aldi’s site are benefiting as a result and Aldi’s site wide authority is benefitting. They rank for a number of home product searches, theyve built the hype using product PR meaning they don’t have to spend money getting their products seen on ads.
Aldi aren’t anywhere on the shopping ads list, because they don’t have to be. Google serves them top rankings, the media recommend them as the go to retailer - they get the traffic for free.
We use this EXACT same strategy for all our clients. Product PR is one of the biggest...
Link and traffic drivers. Driving so many clients to higher positions with deeper level inbound links.
It doesn’t just work in fashion/home too - we do this for clients in jewellery space, automotive, gambling, beauty, travel, and even forex trading too.
Creating the hype and driving more people to search is what we do best. Getting a product trending, getting our clients at the centre of Cornwall holiday conversations, getting our jewellery client front and centre to every celebrity engagement article online
Product PR is hardly ever measured by or through organic search. It’s often a tactic used by traditional PRs, but knowing how to effectively drive links and rankings at the same time - is what makes it much bigger
Here's (some ideas) of what travel companies should be doing to get ready for the doors opening for international bookings ✈️:
👉Add "anywhere/anytime" selections into your booking forms - people don't know where and when they want to go, they just want to find a deal and a safe location. Don't rely on them knowing an exact date and location and instead be the experts that tell them the best places to go
👉Pull internal search and offsite search data and understand which locations people are "googling" the most. Where is most in demand, which location pages are getting the most traction, where does everyone feel safe to go
There's only so much talent in digital PR right now and if you haven't noticed, everyones hiring.
Senior people who have been there and done that in digital PR are extremely rare and it will cost you a lot to get recruiters to help, they come with pre-existing ways of working..
my advice... create them. Progress your team you've got, dedicate someone to training.
My focus is to create the next level of digital PR talent - we have 25 in our digital PR team alone and growing even further. International countries (europe mainly) is even harder ...
And our focus is to train the next german PRs, spanish and Dutch to our standard.
It's faster to do that in 6 months that to get someone in at this rate.
We’ve been thinking about completely scrapping emails and going 100% on slack. Here’s reasons why we WONT be doing that:
1. It’s hard to hold people accountable to deadlines on slack. As someone who must set 20 tasks a day to their staff, I can’t remember half of them. Email ...
Is easier traceable, easier to find the deadline and easier to hold someone accountable without going through hundreds more messages that you sent between setting that task and chasing for it.
2. Slack has become the way to “chat at the water cooler”. Small talk, gossip, generic
Chat, is a big part of our slack now. We have multiple groups to keep convos focused, but strict tasks, documents, convos all get lost in it. Use email to separate it out.
3. You can’t bcc - I use this a lot when keeping people in the loop
Building links on top tier domains in the financial/medical space builds trust and authority with Google
In 6 months, we drove a 329% increase in organic traffic for a forex trading client of ours and 53% increase in organic conversions. A thread on how...
AskTraders came to us having NEVER landed a link on a national press before. Most of their backlinks were niche domains, financial press, and blogs.
They'd heard of our work and challenged us to change that.
So we came up with 3 strategies...
1. Press had never heard of AT before and the brand was so low, we couldn't even track it. So we needed to build authority with the media and ran a newsjacking strategy.
We used AT's traders as well as our newsjacking team at Rise, to push comments and data
How we turned around a 3 year decline in organic for a client in the medical space in 2 months, improved conversion rate by 135%, got them to rank in the top 10 for their biggest keyword for the first time EVER and get shortlisted for an award for it...
This client had lost visibility after every single “core” and “medic” update in the last 3 years and had to triple PPC spend to compensate. @riseatseven lasered in on the technical issues that had never been dealt with and made some huge brave changes ...
So what did it involve...
Tech SEO ✔️
Content ❌
Links ❌
Removed over 54% of pages onsite becauce they were absolutely worthless
Approx 50,000 previously canonicalised pages were added to robots
The site was also duplicated across at least 20 sites owned by the Group