There are many ways to go about obtaining good search engine optimization (SEO). A popular strategy, used by many brands, is called Newsjacking.
What is Newsjacking?
Newsjacking is almost precisely what it sounds like. It’s the act of hijacking the current news and using it to your brands benefit by creating a post that connects the story to your brand’s product. It essentially helps a brand capitalize on the popularity of a news story to help amplify their own sales and marketing success. By doing so, it also helps your brand reach an even wider audience including tapping into a part of a target audience you may not have even knew existed
Breaking news happens all the time, everywhere in the world. Because of the popularity of social media, news stations have almost all resorted to sharing news stories online just as much as they do on tv. Everyone can access and read it on their phone. Some of the people that are reading these news stories or are somehow affected by them are part of your brand’s audience. Use this to your advantage by writing a blog post or launching a social media campaign that relates your brand to the event occurring in the news.
Your audience, plus other people will be more interested in reading it because they are most likely aware of what’s going on. The fact that you also know what’s going on solidifies you as an active brand. No one wants to read a blog post that is outdated and is about a story that is no longer relevant in current events. It will make your whole site look outdated and anyone currently accessing it will most likely back out of it before they are even able to become aware of what your brand has to offer.
Breaking news can potentially be a massive opportunity for you. The earlier you seize a story, the more likely it will benefit you in a big way. There are a lot of journalists that also use newsjacking and are just waiting for something big to happen. Don’t be the last one to the draw. Even if the news doesn’t seem like it even relates to you as a brand, don’t be quick to throw it to the side. Take the time to brainstorm on how you can use even the weirdest event to draw in peoples’ attention. Make the most out of every chance you get.
For Example:
Let’s say that you are a brand that sells running shoes. You aren’t very well known, but you’ve done everything you possibly can to increase your site’s SEO. All you need is just one of your articles to gain popularity to get the ball rolling. One day a big news story comes out about a professional athlete that has gotten a stress fracture in the arch of their foot. You realize that you can use this story as the base of an article about how the quality of a shoe affects foot health. You even have access to the results of some scientific studies that other people don’t have access to.
Keep in mind that this would only be a good idea to do if the athlete has started to recover. If the situation was different to where it was the Olympics and the athlete, who was a huge fan favorite, had a severe foot injury occur; using their pain to your benefit could potentially look very bad to on your part.
It really depends on how the article is worded, whether it has a sympathetic tone to it or not. You can also go a step further by getting an interview with the athlete themselves so that you gain some credibility in the eyes of your readers.
You absolutely must remember to be careful about what type of events you are utilizing for your marketing. Avoid newsjacking sensitive issues or natural disasters that caused a significant loss of life. You don’t want people to think badly of your business or be irreversibly offended by it. You’d be risking the loss of valuable clients and followers. It’s good to be aware of all the different types of news going on in the world.
The best way to have this awareness is by setting up multiple types of notifications across a variety of platforms, like Twitter and Google. They’ll quickly notify you when big things are happening in the media.
How to Use Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a service provided by Google that allows you to get notification emails when new results for a specific topic show up in Google search. You can get info about news, products, or mentions of your name, and a link to the source it came from, sent directly to you.
To create an alert, you simply enter a topic you want to follow and then customize the alert settings. Put a preference on the type of sites that you’ll see notifications from, like news sites, for example. You can set up several alerts under different topics. Then, as soon as you get a notified of a news story, jump on it and get your creative writing started. You’ll need to use your creativity to really be able to connect what’s going on to your brand.
How Does Newsjacking Benefit SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is about having a high-ranking site on Google, and other search engines’, search results pages. Newsjacking is probably one of the fastest ways to accomplish this if you do it correctly.
When breaking news comes along, and you make the decision to launch a social media campaign, try using the same hashtags that were used by the news outlets in their post. Breaking news gives certain keywords importance on Google because of how many people are talking about it. If you use the same hashtags or keywords in your blog post, it will give your page the same level of importance.
Google recognizes this importance and increases the rank of your brand’s page in the search results. Boom. Search engine optimization achieved.
