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A Guide to International Link Building and Outreach in Digital PR
The benefits of international SEO are vast. The digital PR experts at Reboot know this for a fact.
Reboot prides itself on its ability to successfully conduct PR on an international level. International outreach is a natural part of growth for any digital PR agency. If you do not expand your reach to an international level, you are limiting your exposure. That is why exploring global avenues is essential for SEO strategy.
Allow the Reboot team to take you on a journey, sharing top tips as we go, which will showcase how we have gained quality links at an international level.
Why You Should Have an International Approach to Digital PR
Thanks to interconnectivity, businesses today have more opportunities to expand their global reach. The era of the Internet and digital communications channels has established a new realm for businesses to explore and engage with international markets. Integrating an international approach into your business and digital PR efforts is a must for building brand awareness and will help your business flourish from top to bottom.
But why is international link-building an essential part of digital PR? Here are a few reasons:
Global Audience Reach
The Internet has made the enormity of the world smaller. Today, a well-executed international digital PR strategy infiltrates domestic borders. Businesses can tap into a global audience and extend their brand’s reach beyond what they thought possible. Tailoring your digital PR efforts to different regions and cultures takes it one step further. Creating content that resonates with local people will not only attract new global customers, but it will also boost your brand visibility tenfold.
Enhanced Credibility and Reputation
International link-building in digital PR can contribute to the credibility and reputation of businesses. If a brand’s content is in relevant international publications, trust and authority are established in the eyes of potential customers and partners. This enhances brand visibility and helps build a positive reputation—which influences consumer decisions.
Cultivate Brand Ambassadors
International link-building services provide brands with an opportunity to identify and cultivate ambassadors. Brand ambassadors spread the word about your business using different platforms. Influencers, bloggers, journalists, or satisfied customers who have a significant digital following and can easily amplify your brand message to their audience(s) make great brand ambassadors. Tap into networks and gain credibility and trust within new markets by building relationships with international brand ambassadors.
Competitive Advantage
Any good business needs a competitive edge. Utilising international link-building is one way to achieve it. Actively engaging with international audiences and adapting a PR strategy to fit the locale demonstrates a commitment to understanding and meeting the needs of diverse markets. It also positions your brand as a global player. As a global player, your business stands out from competitors solely focused on domestic PR.
Business Growth Opportunities
One of the other benefits of international SEO is its ability to open up new growth opportunities. Leveraging digital PR globally generates leads, attracts partners, and establishes a strong presence in foreign markets. Subsequently, a well-executed international PR strategy can pave the way for increased revenue streams, strategic partnerships, and business expansion.
Benefits of International SEO and Link Building
There are several benefits of international SEO and link building. Here are the key advantages:
Improve Organic Rankings
International link-building can boost your website’s global visibility and lead to higher rankings in international search results. Simply put, when websites from other countries link to your content, search engines recognise your website as relevant to a global audience.
Search engines receive positive signals regarding your website’s authority if the backlinks to your website are of a high quality and reputable nature, adding yet another boost to your organic ranking.
Increase Website Traffic
An increase in web traffic is another benefit of international SEO and link-building services. High-quality and reputable backlinks help to improve organic rankings but they also help to draw traffic to your site. As your website gains exposure in different regions, the opportunities to tap into new markets and audiences are plentiful. The result? An increase in website visits and potential conversions.
Enhance International Brand Exposure
International link-building exposes your brand to a broader global audience. Brand recognition and authority are amplified as users become aware of your brand through shared content and international links. Users are more likely to engage with the content they find, often through likes, shares and comments, which indicates to search engines that your brand is worth knowing and promoting.
Diversify Link Profile
Another crucial step for successful SEO is enhancing your backlink profile. International link-building services support this by adding depth and variety to the link profile. A varied link profile helps to establish your website as credible too. Search engines deem credible websites as natural and trustworthy.
Improve Domain Rating
But it’s not just your link profile that’ll get a boost. International link-building improves your domain rating too. Domain rating is a metric used by Ahrefs. It indicates the comparative potency of a website's backlink portfolio. Authoritative international websites linking back to your content will positively influence your DR. In time, these high-quality links increase DR and improve your position in the SERP, further reinforcing your site as a credible and trustworthy source.
Rank for Keywords Internationally
Gaining backlinks from authoritative international websites informs search engines that your website is also relevant to those markets. You can therefore leverage international link-building to rank for specific keywords in international markets. This helps to improve keyword rankings in specific geographic locales.
How to Nail International Outreach
1. Understand Your Audience
You need to understand your audience to create a press release that converts. It isn’t enough to simply send out an international campaign in local time and hope for the best. To maximise the success of an international campaign, you need to understand the cultural customs of the country and its press climate.
If you take the time to do your research and can realise the type of content journalists want to receive and how they want to receive it, your campaign will land with a far greater impact.
To generate purposeful and relevant ideas for reactive press campaigns, utilise calendars. Marketing and holiday calendars relevant to your country of outreach can provide endless inspiration, and intel, for creating campaigns that will land in the right place at the right time.
For example, a local calendar gives a better understanding of the days to avoid outreaching. A campaign sent in conjunction with a religious holiday or national celebration day is likely to receive less interest from journalists and even runs the risk of being missed.
2. Tailor the Campaign to Your Target Market
You must research the international market to make your campaign as relevant and newsworthy to your target country as possible. For a stronger hook, select angles, or reangle an existing press release, favoured by your country of outreach. Your press release must be as appealing to the country you are sending it to as a local press release would be.
Speaking of local press, don’t forget to target regional media with targeted hooks too. Approaching regional media might return more interest than reaching out to national media simply because regional media outlets tend to be smaller and more receptive to taking news stories.
3. Translate the Press Release
Consider translation for the best chance of getting your press release published internationally. International journalists will be more receptive to your story if your press release is in the target language. A translated press release saves busy journalists time, keeps the campaign message clear to its target audience, and introduces a level of cultural sensitivity. All of which can increase trust and credibility with the media.
4. Visualise the Data
Visualising data in a branded infographic can maximise brand exposure on an international level. Not only can visuals enforce brand recognition by comprising branded colours and fonts, but it's also a great way to present valuable insights and data.
Including visuals with your text will also help to engage with journalists. Journalists are far more interested in visually engaging content. If you provide journalists with visuals presented in an easy-to-digest (and download) format, you strengthen your chances of media coverage.
Plus, self-explanatory graphics transcend language. If you put the work in to provide clear and concise visuals, they will likely be published internationally.
5. Evaluate and Adjust Your Strategy
Regularly evaluating your global strategy is another part of international link-building services and a crucial step in improving campaign success. International outreach requires a nuanced approach. First, you need to understand and respect the target market. Second, you need to observe your strategy and tailor the campaign. What is and isn’t working for this market?
Don’t be afraid to adjust your strategy when dealing with a new international market, even if it means reangling mid-campaign and trying something new. If you aren’t taking the time to evaluate and adjust your strategy accordingly, you could be missing out on big wins.
Our International Outreach Results
The Campaign We Created
To celebrate International Women’s Day, we created a digital PR campaign titled Women in this European country are most likely to be successful.
The campaign utilised data from the European Institute for Gender Equality, The Global Gender Report 2021, and World Population Review. The factors taken into consideration in determining the best countries for women to work were:
1. The number of women in leadership positions
2. Labour force participation rate (economic opportunity)
3. Maternity leave allowance
Our Goals
Celebrating International Women’s Day was not our only goal. Another key objective for this campaign was to engage with a wider audience and enhance visibility on a global scale. We set out to achieve this by earning numerous high-quality backlinks from authoritative sites across Europe.
The Results
The campaign proved to be a huge success. By leveraging the various international link-building strategies mentioned in this article, we secured more than 60 links in countries across Europe, including Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Belgium, Denmark, and Hungary.
Because this campaign enjoyed so much success, we decided to rerun the study the following year. The bulk of the campaign stayed the same except all the data was updated using 2022 statistics, and outreach commenced one month before International Women’s Day 2022.
The 2022 version of the campaign was another big hit, earning a further 20 links from relevant, authoritative, and trustworthy sites.
Want These Global Results For Your Brand?
By implementing an international digital PR strategy you can harness the power of the Internet to reach new markets. For an SEO company that can deliver impressive global results through international link-building services, look no further! We are the ideal choice.
There’s a 70-strong team of highly skilled and experienced professionals at Reboot, with a proven track record of producing exceptional results. Our language skills are another big pro when it comes to international link-building. We are proficient in nine languages including French, German, Italian, Russian, and Romanian.
Our understanding of the ever-evolving world of SEO, coupled with over 15 years of industry experience, means we stay ahead of the curve in this constantly changing landscape. Our cutting-edge strategies are tried and tested too, through our in-house SEO experiments.
Our international link-building services are tailored to the needs and requirements of individual clients, and there is no task too big or too small.
Get in touch with us today to find out more.
