Our Relevancy Tool has officially launched and what better way to celebrate than with a full lowdown of who it’s for, how it works and how it can grow your SEO and Digital PR performance. Combining AI and machine learning techniques, the tool generates quantifiable relevancy scores to support you:
- Make data-led decisions
- Easily evaluate multiple data points across any topic and industry
- Remove the guess work from correlating relevancy to growth
- Benchmark the relevancy of your coverage vs. competitors
Let’s get into it!
An Introduction to Digital PR and the Importance of Link Relevancy
What is Digital PR?
Digital PR is a channel that combines traditional PR tactics with tactics typically used for link building for SEO. Traditional PR focuses on building brand awareness through a combination of different media outlets, both online and offline, whereas Digital PR leverages purely online with the aim of securing backlinks from online media that will support the organic SEO performance of a brand's website.
At its core, Digital PR is about creating high quality, relevant and shareable content that brings value to the end reader. Content is designed to drive interest and engagement, with the secondary benefit of placing a brand at the heart of trending news stories. The more coverage a brand is able to secure, the more backlinks they will get back to their domain, which ultimately will support the organic growth of their site.
The Role of Backlinks in SEO & PR
Backlinks are one of the most significant ranking factors for Google, this makes it a key area for any brand to focus on if they’re looking to improve their overall organic performance.
A backlink is a link from one website to another and Google uses them as signals to determine trust, credibility and authority. When a high authority website, such as the Independent, links back to a brands website, Google sees this as a signal of trust and the fact a reputable website like the Independent is linking to a brand is a positive thing and therefore will positively influence the visibility and rankings of that brand's site.
With Digital PR, the main KPI is backlinks. All activity within a Digital PR strategy has the primary goal of securing backlinks back to the primary domain. There are secondary benefits for a brand engaging in Digital PR, such as brand awareness and generally building brand trust with customers, but ultimately all content that is created carries the sole focus of building backlinks back to the domain, as ultimately this is what is going to drive impact when it comes to improving organic performance.
However, it’s important to note that not all backlinks are ranked the same. Google doesn’t respond well to content on sites that have no real relevance to a brand. Instead, the search engine wants the web to be full of helpful content that offers genuine value to its readers.
The Need for a Relevancy Tool in Digital PR
The reason link relevancy is so important for Digital PR is that Google tells us relevancy is a factor they take into consideration when analysing the strength of their links. Simply put, low quality links that are not relevant will only have a negative impact on performance, rather than the desired positive impact brands are looking for.
As Google continues to place importance on helpful content and highly relevant links, PR professionals must be able to be more data-driven when it comes to the analysis of their work. Gut feeling should no longer be accepted as a measure of relevancy; it’s far too important of a factor for organic performance.
Having a relevancy tool removes the guesswork, giving the opportunity for brands to understand the links they are building and reduces the chances of a brand building backlinks that could cause harm to a domain.
Who Can Benefit from the Relevancy Tool?
PR Professionals
As a PR expert, demonstrating the relevance of coverage you secure for clients is crucial. The Relevancy Tool allows you to go beyond traditional metrics like reach and value, offering a way to quantify how well the publications align with your client's brand. Instead of just showing that coverage has been achieved, you can now prove that the publications are likely to attract readers interested in your client's offering.
The tool ensures that the websites you're building coverage on are not just high in reach, but also highly relevant to the brand, enhancing the overall value of your PR efforts.
SEO Experts
For SEO professionals, relevancy is key, especially when it comes to Google's criteria for a valuable backlink. In the past, links were often manipulated, focusing on quantity rather than quality. Today, Google prioritises relevance over sheer volume, making this tool invaluable.
It helps SEO experts quantify the relevance of a link to the domain it points to. Instead of relying on subjective judgments, you can use this tool to objectively measure how well a linking website aligns with your domain, making it easier to build a strong and relevant backlink profile.
Agencies & Businesses
Agencies often need to prove their value to clients, and this tool provides a quantifiable way to do that. In many industries, website relevance is still subjective, often judged on opinion rather than data.
With the Relevancy Tool, you can set KPIs and demonstrate exactly how many relevant websites you're targeting, showing your clients that you're receiving links from websites that are also highly relevant. This boosts your credibility and provides a more transparent way to track and report on the success of your campaigns.
In-House Teams
In-house teams can also benefit from the Relevancy Tool, especially when needing to report up to leadership or track progress internally. It allows in-house teams to go beyond basic link counting, focusing instead on the relevance of backlinks and provides a clear way to quantify the effectiveness of your SEO and PR efforts. There’s already plenty of quality metrics, but none quantifying relevance. This is your tool!
Content Marketers
Content marketers can use the tool to create more relevant content. By analysing websites with similar content, you can input them into the tool to check how relevant they are to your domain.
This helps ensure that you're drawing inspiration from highly relevant sites with strong topical authority. Instead of guessing which websites to emulate, the tool helps you identify those that are ranking for the right keywords and writing about the right topics, ensuring that your content strategy is more aligned with your SEO goals.
Why We Created the Relevancy Tool
The Problem with Traditional Link Metrics
Most traditional link metrics focus primarily on the overall quality of a website. This quality is often determined by how many backlinks that website has, with common examples including Domain Rating (Ahrefs), Domain Authority (Moz), and Trust Flow (Majestic).
While these metrics can provide valuable insights, they largely overlook an essential factor: relevance. One metric that attempts to address this gap is Majestic’s Topical Trust Flow, which evaluates the topical relevance of a domain or webpage within specific categories. For example, it measures how authoritative a website is on topics like "tennis" or "computers," based on the flow of trust through its links.
However, Topical Trust Flow has its limitations. It evaluates relevance based on pre-determined topics defined by Majestic and assesses how closely a site’s backlink profile connects to these topics. This approach prioritises a network of backlinks rather than focusing on the relevance of individual links or the page's content where the link is placed
The Need for Topical Context
To truly understand the relevance of a link, it’s crucial to go beyond generic metrics and assess how well the linking page and website align with your industry and content. This involves analysing the context of the page where the link appears, as well as the overall relevance of the linking website.
By focusing on topical context, we can better determine whether a link makes sense to search engines like Google. It’s not just about where the link is coming from, but also about how naturally it connects to your website’s industry and subject matter.
Getting Started: Key Features & How to Use Them
When we launch our Relevancy Tool, it will include a core set of features designed for a simple and intuitive user experience, without unnecessary complexity. After the launch, we’ll actively engage with our user community to ensure that future updates meet their needs and preferences.
Quantitative Scoring
The tool's key feature is its ability to provide a quantitative score that evaluates the topical relevance of backlinks to your brand's domain. Scores range from 1 to 100, offering clear insights into each backlink’s quality.
- Irrelevant (0–40): These links either lack relevance to your brand's core topics or come from sites with broad coverage, like regional news publications with an irrelevant category page.
- Slight Relevant 40–60): These links may relate to your main topic, but the linking site may cover a wider range of subjects.
- Relevant (60–80): These links may relate to your main topic, but the linking site may cover a wider range of subjects but the link addresses a relevant topic/ lands on a relevant category page.
- Highly Relevant (80+): These links are strongly focused on your topic and show high relevance, like a marketing-related article on a marketing-specific site.
Example scores:
- NOVOS to Topgear: 40/100
- McDonald's to Express/food-and-drink: 62/100
- NOVOS to Search Engine Watch: 100/100
Geographical Analysis
In the initial release, the Relevancy Tool will support three regions: the UK, USA, and Australia. As our user base expands, we plan to extend this regional offering.
Data Export
For users requiring deeper analysis or the integration of data into existing reporting workflows, the tool includes a data export function. This feature generates a CSV file containing your list of backlinks and their relevance scores. You can filter the export by date and brand, offering flexibility to suit your specific reporting needs.
Plan-Based Subscription Model
Our subscription model is tailored to meet the needs of different markets, whether you’re part of an in-house team or a marketing agency. We offer 3 subscription tiers, allowing you to manage multiple brands under one account at a lower cost compared to setting up separate subscriptions, which is ideal for teams or agencies that wish to scale their reporting as their client base or operations grow.
Where We See This Going
- Phase 1 of the Relevancy Tool focuses on reporting. We're providing you with a single metric per URL, delivered quickly and at scale.
- Phase 2 will emphasise analysis. Similar to how you'd use Semrush or Ahrefs, we aim to give you a relevancy score for your domain and track its growth or decline over time.
- Phase 3 builds on the previous phases by introducing benchmarking against key competitors. This allows you to compare relevancy scores across different levels of your site against your competitors (eg a specific inventory, service, campaign or product).
- Phase 4 moves beyond analysis and reporting to focus on prospecting. PR professionals can integrate the tool into their daily workflows, using it to identify high-quality, relevant publications for targeted outreach.
Link relevancy is more important in SEO and Digital PR than ever before, with Google emphasising the significance of the quality of backlinks from relevant and authoritative websites. Nonetheless, it’s key to strategically pinpoint where competitors have successfully acquired backlinks from authoritative websites that you haven’t yet secured.
Why not try the Relevancy Tool for yourself? Find out more and get started!