Media monitoring tool helps marketing agency to acquire an additional $660K in annual revenue through link building

About Media Monitoring:

Media Monitoring by Brand24 is an app you can activate on your Semrush account. It quickly tracks keyphrase mentions on the internet that can be turned into links. The app's innovation focuses on AI, machine learning, and continuous automation. Media Monitoring allows the user to track, analyze and report data on a selected brand or a key phrase. Features that support the marketer's work include Mentions Sentiment, Presence Score, and Links shared in conversation, allowing users to compare phrases over time.

Business Challenge: lead generation through link-building

Semcore, a Polish agency specializing in SEO and UX, was looking for new and creative ways of lead generation. They were already ranking #1 for some popular bottom-funnel industry terms like ‘agencja seo’ (seo agency), ‘pozycjonowanie stron’ (webpage positioning), and their city-specific versions. 

The organic acquisition was doing fairly well, so the agency decided to focus on referral traffic generation that would bring more leads and strengthen its website positioning on Google.

“In marketing, we pay a lot of attention to leads and traffic that generates them. We can see that if we don't focus enough on the link profile once every two to three months, it is immediately reflected in the traffic. It's one of the key things that can't be forgotten, as it risks losing more pieces of the puzzle”, says Marek Rychter, Growth Manager at Semcore.

Using just a couple of tools, Semcore was able to automate many link-building processes and generate $660K in annual revenue (around 30%) from leads coming through referral traffic. Read on to learn how they did it!

Solution: using the Media Monitoring app for link-building campaigns

Link-building for lead generation is quite demanding, as you need to target:

• Content that is highly relevant to your service/ product offerings 
• Topics that are as close to the bottom of the funnel as possible
• Domains that share your target audience

Finding such opportunities can be daunting, so Semcore came up with a way to get a refined reachout list with minimal effort. Here’s how it went. 
 

1. Brand monitoring

The first thing a customer considering your product/service or a potential link-building partner will do is google your name. This step can make or break your success, especially if your brand is not well-established. 

Semcore used the Media Monitoring app to find their brand mentions online and turn them in their favor:

— Mitigate any negative reviews, so if a future link-building partner stumbles upon them, they maintain a good impression of the company;

—Use a positive review as an easy link-building opportunity and reach out to the owner of the website with a link request.

To do this, Semcore simply entered their brand name into the app and received automated notifications whenever a mention was found.

2. Acquiring backlinks through popular industry terms

Besides their own brand, Semcore decided to target popular (and relevant!) industry terms that their target audience would use when researching topics around their services. This trick would allow them to receive traffic even from the most competitive keywords without ever ranking for them at the top of Google. For example, they chose the term “SEO”. 

To validate this idea, they:

   1. Used Semrush’s Keyword Overview tool to check the term’s monthly search volume and make sure it was worth the link-building effort. In this case, it was worth the hassle: 

   2. Next, using the Most Influential Websites feature in the Media Monitoring app, they found the URLs with the mention and their monthly traffic. This way, the marketers got a ready-made list of sites to outreach, along with a prioritization suggestion. The conversion from outreach to links from the mentions found in the tool was 5%.

Here is the analysis of the keyword ‘SEO’ in the Media Monitoring app: 

— The Presence Score allows you to measure your topic's online presence (popularity) at a given time. The scale is from 0 to 100, where 100 is a score achieved only by the top globally recognized brands, and 0 is for brands that have just started out.

— The Most Influential Websites table shows popular websites that can significantly impact your brand. Website strength is measured on a scale of 1 to 10.

—The Reach graph shows the estimated reach for all your brand mentions.

—Links shared in conversation is a list of the most frequently shared links in mentions collected for the chosen keyword.

This analysis helps to determine whether a key phrase is worth the effort of link-building.

“We search for various keywords, such as 'SEO,' 'website positioning', etc. We then monitor these words and search for articles in which they are included, and from which competitors are not linking. Articles acquired in this way generate high traffic,” explains Paweł Wołoszyn, Head of SEO at Semcore.
 

3. Filtering results to the most relevant

Once Semcore entered a few major industry terms into the app, the tool got flooded with mention results:

To sort through them and find the hidden gems, the agency used the built-in filters to filter by:

• Mention sentiment (negative/positive)
• Importance - based on source popularity, influence score, sentiment, and engagement (comments, likes, shares).

Now the agency is left with the best new link-building opportunity—much easier than sorting through all of the 20,000 blog mentions found before using filters.

Results

This workflow has helped Semcore gain hundreds of high-quality link-building opportunities and achieve:

• 20% response rate for outreach based on mentions found in the Media Monitoring App
• 5% conversion rate to mentions found in the tool
• 30% of the company’s revenue comes from their link-building efforts ($660K annual value)