Using online polling to create high-value SEO campaigns

Natural links are the lifeblood of a healthy SEO campaign. Attracting those links often requires a significant investment of time and resources, and it’s important to take steps to ensure the content you create has the strongest possible potential to deliver value. This is where online polling can become one of the most powerful tools in an SEO professional’s arsenal.

Put simply, online polling allows you to create relevant, highly targeted news stories that you can leverage for a lengthy and multi-faceted link building and PR campaign. There are several dedicated polling and market research companies who can conduct large-scale online surveys on your behalf. The most effective polls will provide compelling, headline-friendly statistics based on simple yes or no questions – for example, “One in three British retirees fails to seek financial advice before cashing in their pension”. These statistics can be used to create news stories to attract links from local, national and industry-specific media sources, or used as the basis for a creative visual piece of content, such as an infographic.

You can also deliver an extra layer of value by adding more depth to the data you gather. The simplest way to do this is to split your data by region. For example, you might discover that pensioners in London are more likely to seek financial advice than pensioners in Edinburgh. By adding a regional angle, your company can target local press, usually an easier sell than the national media when it comes to promoting news stories. You could even put regional data into an infographic or virtual map, allowing users to compare their own local town or city against the rest of the nation.

The major benefit of using online polling in this way is that you have the potential to spin off multiple press angles from a single investment. A well targeted, industry-specific survey that generates an interesting headline on a national level but also provides regionalised insights can be used to generate press and PR across the board, making it much less of a risk than a link building exercise of more limited scope.

Here at Yellow Marshmallow, we’re experienced in running SEO campaigns at a local and national level. Get in touch today to find out how we could work with your business to generate compelling, linkable content at a budget that suits you.