Recently, new internal analysis of our work here at Fractl has yielded a fascinating finding:
I’ll caveat that by saying this applies only to content that can generate mainstream press attention. At Fractl, this is our primary focus as a content marketing agency. Our team, our process, and our research are all structured around figuring out ways to maximize the newsworthiness and promotional success of the content we create on behalf of our clients.
Though data-driven content marketing paired with digital PR is on the rise, there is still a general lack of understanding around the long-term value of any individual content execution. In this exploration, we sought to answer the question: What link value does a successful campaign drive over the long term? What we found was surprising and strongly reiterated our conviction that this style of data-driven content and digital PR yields some of the highest possible ROI for link building and SEO.
To better understand this full value, we wanted to look at the long-term accumulation of the two types of links on which we report:
- Direct links from publishers to our client’s content on their domain
- Secondary links that link to the story the publisher wrote about our client’s content
While direct links are most important, secondary links often provide significant additional pass-through authority and can often be reclaimed through additional outreach and converted into direct do-follow links (something we have a team dedicated to doing at Fractl).
Below is a visualization of the way our content promotion process works:
So how exactly do direct links and secondary links accumulate over time?
To understand this, we did a full audit of four successful campaigns from