Google Trends is a great platform that holds a wealth of data, making it a perfect source to support a wide range of PR campaigns. It essentially serves as a buzz tracker and can help track the coverage of successful campaigns.
However, for Google Trends to pick up your campaign there must be a certain amount of attention and buzz surrounding it. A multitude of factors need to be in line for this to happen, including search volume, blog post volume, and news volume.
Fortunately, there are now a wide range of helpful tools available to aid the tracking of coverage and links. Let’s take a look at our favourites.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a highly commended tool in the SEO world. While no back-link checker can crawl exactly how and where Googlebot crawls links, Ahrefs is considered one of the best technical SEO tools. It has a large link index that closely replicates Googlebot – meaning it has the capacity to pull link data from the web similarly to Google.
The link intersect feature is also effective in discovering publications that have previously linked to your client’s competitors. You can use this to identify potential quick wins for your campaigns, as well as see the type of content that is successfully working in your client’s industry.
SemRush
SemRush is also a handy tool for identifying potential quick wins for clients.
The tool includes a Competitor feature, which identifies a brand’s competitors and how they compare to your client. The competitors can also be filtered by the number of referring domains, as well as the total number of backlinks.
Semrush also includes a nifty comparison analysis feature. It analyses the link performance of your client and their competitors to produce a graph, so you can visibly compare the brand’s performance over the previous three months, one year, and two years.
Majestic
Majestic’s Trust Flow is a fabulous metric that is super useful when conducting link audits and identifying desirable publications for clients to be covered on.
Majestic determines a site’s trust flow score based on traffic that flows through a link, the relevancy of the site the link is featured on, and the links that link to the linking site (link Inception!).
During a link audit, Trust Flow can be used to identify topically irrelevant and low trust flow links to be removed or disavowed.
When it comes to prospective publication opportunities, the user can determine whether a site is worth targeting. By submitting the potential target publication’s URL into majestic, the tool will bring up the site’s topical trust flow – such as the relevant sectors the publication covers.
Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is a great tool that incorporates a lot of social to discover new ideas for content, as well as identifying relevant authoritative writers to target with a client’s campaign.
Buzzsumo includes a link alert feature, which can be set up to send alerts when a publication links to a client’s website – making it very easy to keep tabs on a campaign!
You can also use Buzzsumo to discover competitors’ most shared content and find out who shares it, as well as which publications are linking to their content.
Opensite Explorer
While all PR professionals are concerned about raking in the links, tracking coverage is also important as it not only still great exposure for your client, but is also an easy opportunity to get a few more links
The aptly named Link Opportunities feature includes an ‘unlinked mentions’ feature, which provides you with pages that mention the client but don’t include a link – by simply chasing up journalists, you’ll soon be raining links.
Crimson Hexagon
Using social listening tools such as Crimson Hexagon is also a great way to track media coverage for your client.
Crimson Hexagon is a great tool to not only discover the consumer sentiment surrounding your client’s brand, but also discover which publications are talking about them.
By conducting a refined search on the topic your campaign is based on, you can dig through the post list to see the publications that are talking about your campaign. This is a particularly helpful method when wanting to track coverage on international sites, as you can translate the key search terms into the languages you want and search for them simultaneously
No platform is perfect, and no platform will be able to find all the links and coverage you have acquired during a campaign. But by using all the platforms together, you are sure to gain thorough insight about the full success of your PR campaign.
