BuzzSumo:The Definitive Guide

Find Awesome Content Ideas With a Search

This is BuzzSumo’s bread and butter feature.

Just enter a keyword related to your industry…

…and get a list of the most popular content on that topic.

Don’t let simplicity fool you. This is a VERY powerful feature.

In fact, BuzzSumo’s keyword search helped me create one of my most successful posts of 2018: The Definitive Guide to Mobile SEO.

To date, this single piece of content has generated over 3,000 social shares, 398 comments and links from over 470 different domains.

Also, this post currently ranks in the top 3 for my target keyword “mobile SEO”.

And I got the idea for this post from BuzzSumo.

Steal Your Competitor’s Best Content Ideas

Did you know you can search in BuzzSumo with a domain?

Well, you can. And it’s REALLY cool.

When you do, you’ll see that site’s best-performing content.

And this feature helped me create one of my best-performing pieces of content… ever.

The content?

The Definitive Guide To SEO In 2021.

Not only has this guide racked up a boatload of shares and links…

…but it’s consistently one of my 10 pages in terms of monthly organic traffic.

Let me walk you through the exact process that I used to develop and create that piece of content.

First, I popped Moz.com into BuzzSumo search.

And I noticed something surprising right away:

The #1 post from the Moz blog (out of 400+ posts) was about… SEO in 2021.

Say whaaaaat?!

It gets better.

Find Untapped Keyword Ideas

This tool is pretty new to BuzzSumo, but it’s super useful.

Let’s say you’ve found a content idea in BuzzSumo’s Content Analyzer that gets crazy shares and links over time.

That might be enough to justify you writing about it.

But why not go the extra mile and check whether that demand extends to search?

All you need to do is enter your keyword, and you’re served up with search volume, CPC, and trend data.

If your keyword isn’t one that gets much traction in search – don’t worry.

BuzzSumo’s Keyword Tool also offers up hundreds if not thousands of keyword ideas that do.

Check out “related keywords” for keyword ideas that are broadly related to your query.

Or if you’re looking for exact match variations on your keyword idea, hit the “similar keywords” tab.

Then you can just optimize your content for topics that work in search and social.

And it goes without saying that SEO is definitely not about keyword stuffing anymore.

The more semantically related keywords you can include in your content, the better.

Uncover Untapped Long Tail Keywords With Question Analyzer

This is one of my favorite BuzzSumo features.

Why?

First, you can use the Question Analyzer to see the exact questions people are asking on Reddit, Quora and forums.

That way, you can get a list of burning questions in your industry.

Yup, that’s pretty cool.

But that’s not the main reason I use the Question Analyzer.

I mainly use this feature to find long-tail keywords.

Why?

Well, when someone asks a question on Reddit, it usually means they Googled it first… and came up empty.

In other words:

Lots of people are searching for that question… but the results stink!

So if you can create a piece of content that answers that exact question, you can get boatloads of traffic.

Here’s a real-life example:

Some time ago I decided to update this post.

So I added new screenshots, updated old content, and deleted outdated stuff:

I also realized that the title tag was leaving A LOT of traffic on the table.

You see, the old title tag was:

As you can probably guess, my target keyword for that page was: “YouTube SEO”.

And sure enough, my post ranked #1 in Google for that term:

But I also realized that I could get even MORE Google traffic to that page by including a long tail keyword in the title tag.

The question is:

What long-tail keyword should I pick?

Well, back in the day, I would fire up the Google Keyword Planner and type “YouTube SEO” into it.

But that would only give me super-similar variations of “YouTube SEO”.

(And as you can see, most of these variations have really low search volume.)

Instead, I logged into BuzzSumo and typed “YouTube SEO” into the Question Analyzer:

Then I hit the “Related themes” tab for a list of the top questions and categories that people asked about that topic:

One particular question stood out right away: “How to rank youtube videos?”

My post answered that question. But it wasn’t optimized around that term.

So I added a shortened version of that long-tail keyword to my title tag:

And it quickly hit the #1 spot for that long-tail keyword:

Which helped boost monthly organic traffic to that page by 23.49%.

Not bad.

Get More Results From Your Content With The Content Analysis Report

So you’ve found a proven topic.

Great.

The question is: what do you actually write?

Well, no tool is going to write a post for you.

(AI is good, but not that good… yet!)

That said, BuzzSumo’s Content Analysis Report can help you write stuff that actually works.

I’ll show you how this works with an example…

A while back I was sitting down to write my mobile SEO guide.

I already had an idea of how to structure and write the post.

But I used the “Content Analysis Report” to make sure my content would actually work.

First, I looked at what content type worked best for this topic.

And sure enough, “How-to Articles” did best:

Which was PERFECT because I planned on writing a how-to guide.

I also noticed that longer content about mobile SEO performed best (in terms of social shares):

I tend to publish long content anyway. But it was nice to get confirmation that longer content worked well for this particular topic.

So…

Publishing content based on proven topics and formats already puts you ahead of 90% of your competitors.

But as you probably know, hitting the “publish” button is only the first step.

To get your content to the first page of Google in 2021, you need to actively promote it.

That’s where Chapter 2 comes into play…

Find Influencers With a Keyword Search

This is by far the easiest way to find influential people in a specific niche.

Pop in a keyword… and get a list of peeps that write about that topic.

This tool searches Twitter bios, and lets you see what an influencer has “Shared articles about” or “Shared articles from” – but more on this later.

If you’re looking for influential Facebook pages or YouTube channels, you can find those in BuzzSumo too.

YouTube Influencers can be prioritized by relevance to your topic, total subscribers, video count, or total views depending on what you deem most important.

Find Quality Journalists To Pitch To

Building connections with relevant journalists can do very good things for your brand.

But how do you know who is relevant?

And, more importantly, how do you know what a “good” connection looks like?

Enter BuzzSumo Journalist Profiles.

This tool tells you everything you need to know about a journalist.

Interests.

Contact information.

Publications they write for.

All at the click of a button.

You just need to search your topic and look out for the journalist icon.

Here it is in the Content Analyzer…

In BuzzSumo Monitoring…

And in BuzzSumo’s Trending Tool…

When you find it, give it a click to pull up a full profile of the journalist.

This profile is awesome for helping you decide which journalists to prioritize.

Are you pitching an idea?

Or sharing your newest piece of content?

Check out “topics” to see if they already have an interest in your subject.

And – most importantly – pay attention to their content performance and followers.

This will give you an idea of the reach that they could generate for you.

Then all that’s left to do is contact them.

One more great thing about this tool is that it comes in filter form.

Meaning, you can view content written only by journalists if you want to.

Here’s where you can find that filter in the Content Analyzer…

What’s great about this is that you can go even more granular by applying extra filters.

Find journalists that write for B2B publications with a B2B filter.

And see which journalists are writing for your competitors with a domain filter.

Try out all the filter options to find a journalist that’s right for you.

Remember, a great outreach email or pitch is all about relevance and personalization.

That’s why a tool like this is crucial to the success of your campaign.

One last thing, and possibly my favorite way to use this tool.

Head to Twitter Influencers and type in your own domain into the “Shared articles from” search.

Then hit the “Journalist Profiles” filter…

This will show you all the best journalists that are already a fan of your work.

In other words, your warmest outreach opportunities.

These journalists are prioritized based on “Relevance”.

This is code for all the most important metrics that make for a good influencer…

Follower count.

Average retweets.

Reply ratio.

Even the number of times they have been added to Twitter lists.

So start at the top and work your way down.

Easy.

Turn Unlinked Mentions Into Backlinks

Usually, when someone mentions you in a blog post, they link to you.

Usually.

But there are times when someone mentions your brand… without linking to your site.

Here’s an example:

As it turns out, you can easily turn an unlinked mention into a backlink with a simple outreach email:

The question is:

HOW do you find these unlinked mentions?

BuzzSumo Monitoring.

Just add a new “Brand Mention” for your brand:

And you’ll see forums, blogs and news sites that mention your brand.

Results with a little link icon actually linked to you:

And results without, haven’t.

You can also sort by mentions with and without links:

Simple.

Enter: Monitoring

With Monitoring, you see the exact sites that JUST linked to your competitors:

It even shows you how many times that piece of content has been shared, your mentions over time… and the Domain Authority of the site.

Easy peasy.

See Who Links To You

You can ask BuzzSumo to send you an email alert whenever you get a new backlink.

Or create a Slack channel, so you never miss an incoming link or mention:

Or, if you want to get a better understanding of your content’s popularity, you can just review all of your new links once a week, or day.

(10x a day in my case????)

So:

What can you do with this information?

Track EVERYTHING

You can set up an alert for pretty much anything in BuzzSumo.

Your brand.

Your competitors.

Your content.

Your keywords and topics.

Mentions of journalists and authors you’re researching.

You can even track when a specific website publishes new content.

This 360 tracking is awesome for helping you find new content opportunities.

Take author and journalist alerts.

Not only are they great for helping you personalize your emails.

They can give you awesome new content ideas.

If a journalist has written about a certain topic, you can bet they’ve done their audience research.

That’s a ready-validated topic. Now all you need to do is add your own take.

What about competitor tracking?

Knowing who is writing about your competitors is vital.

That person will already be interested in what you have to say.

All you have to do is reach out to them and start building that relationship.

Monitor When and Where Keywords Are Used Online

In chapter 3 I showed you how to use BuzzSumo Monitoring to track conversations of your brand online.

But what you may not know is that you can also use BuzzSumo to track mentions of KEYWORDS.

For example, I’ve been tracking the keyword “Skyscraper Technique” since 2015.

This report lets me know whether or not people are still talking about The Skyscraper Technique.

(Fortunately, they still are.)

But you can also use this same feature to help get your content in front of people that are super likely to share it.

I’ll explain how this works with an example…

A while ago I published this voice search SEO study.

This post did great in terms of links…

…but I know it has the potential to get even MORE links.

So I set up an alert for the keyword “voice search”.

That way, I can easily find people that write about voice search… and show them my study.

In B2B? Use This Filter

For certain searches in BuzzSumo, you may stumble over some pretty irrelevant stuff.

For example, it turns out that “Seo” is a common Vietnamese last name.

So when I search for “SEO” in BuzzSumo, the vast majority of results are from foreign news sites:

But when I check “Only B2B Publishers”…

…I get a clean list of results:

Nice.

Case Study #1: How Rise at Seven won numerous campaign awards and boosted their client’s revenue by 55%

Rise at Seven uses BuzzSumo to brainstorm out-of-the-box ideas for client campaigns.

They get inspiration from other successful PR campaign ideas that gain big shares and links.

In this instance, a client came to them because they needed to boost their backlink profile in the US and Europe.

The client sold star map constellations.

Rise at Seven went straight to BuzzSumo’s Content Analyzer to do some broad research.

They looked at big topics like the “night sky”.

Then they checked BuzzSumo’s Topic Explorer and spotted something.

There was one topic that kept cropping up.

One that was written about in volume.

And that was: Light pollution.

And in BuzzSumo’s Content Analysis Report they noticed one more thing.

Engagement for “light pollution” was growing over time.

Next, they zoned in on the backlink profile of light pollution campaigns that had done well in the past.

They needed to check that links were coming from high authority publications.

Spoiler: They were.

That was enough to validate the topic. Rise at Seven was confident it would work.

The last bit of research they did involved Facebook Reaction data in the Content Analysis Report.

They wanted to look at the emotions surrounding “light pollution”.

From the data, they knew that their campaign shouldn’t be aiming to make people laugh.

Instead, it should be emotive, awe-inspiring, and highly visual.

They began to workshop a great idea.

They took the 27 most light-polluted cities in the world and used an interactive slider to show what they’d look like without light pollution.

Pretty awesome, right?

The results were phenomenal.

They bagged awards, including the Best Interactive Campaign of the Year at the UK Content Awards, and Best Use of Imagery 2020 at the Content Marketing Awards.

They landed their client 130+ links, including some from major publications like Forbes and Lonely Planet.

AND they boosted their clients’ YoY revenue by 55%.

Impressive.

Case Study #3: How James Got Featured on Mashable, Cosmopolitan, MTV, The Daily Mail, And More

James Brockbank used BuzzSumo to get links and mentions on authority sites like Esquire, Glamour, MTV, Bustle and more:

It gets better:

These links helped James’ client rank on the first page of Google UK for terms like “women’s loungewear tracksuits”, “slogan jumpers”, and a whole host of others… just in time for the Christmas season.

Overall, this single campaign boosted their search traffic by 87.9%:

Here’s the full story…

James’ client is the fashion eCommerce site Missy Empire.

According to James:

“Our client had been producing ‘style guides’ and other blog content but struggled to earn links.”

So he decided to try something new.

Case Study #4: How Matteo Got 190 Social Shares (And 64 New Backlinks) to a Brand New Blog

Last year Matteo Gasparello had a problem…

You see, Matteo had launched a brand new digital marketing blog.

And Matteo knew that, for his blog to stand out, he’d need to publish a piece of EPIC content.

The problem was:

What kind of content should he publish? A list post? A tutorial? How about a case study?

So he fired up BuzzSumo.

And he searched for terms like “video marketing”, “Facebook video ads” and “video advertising”:

Matteo quickly noticed that these 4 posts did REALLY well:

So he incorporated what he liked from those 4 posts into a guide: Online Video Advertising: All You Need to Know.

Considering Matteo’s blog was brand new, he knew that he couldn’t just “publish and pray”.

So he used BuzzSumo to find people that had shared content about video ads in the past:

As Matteo put it:

“Now it was only a matter of browsing through the results and contacting people that were really interested in video ads.”

And he reached out to those folks with a personalized (and non-pushy) email:

Because Matteo’s outreach emails were targeted AND respectful, he got lots of replies like this…

…and this.

And once Matteo started sending his excellent guide to people that were interested, the shares and links started to pour in:

Find (Quality) Freelance Writers

Finding a freelance writer is easy.

But finding a GOOD freelance writer?

That’s another story.

Fortunately, you can use BuzzSumo to find writers that actually know what they’re doing.

Here’s how:

First, search for your topic in BuzzSumo:

Then, keep an eye out for writers that tend to get lots of shares on their stuff.

Now:

Most of these writers are going to be big names… not freelancers:

But if you dig deep, you can find freelancers that know how to write kick-butt content in your niche:

Pro Tip: Click on the author’s name in the search results… and you can see everything they’ve published:

Find Keyword Ideas With BuzzSumo Suggest

This couldn’t be simpler:

Just type a keyword into BuzzSumo search…

…and see what they suggest to you:

And in the related topics:

Very cool.

Find Awesome Interview Opportunities

Interviews are one of my FAVORITE ways to get targeted traffic (and links).

The only problem is:

It’s REALLY hard to find high-quality interview opportunities.

Fortunately, BuzzSumo makes this process a cinch.

Here’s how to do it:

First, find someone in your niche that tends to get interviewed a lot.

(I’ll use my friend Noah Kagan in this example.)

Then, type his or her name into BuzzSumo search:

Why?

Well, unless someone is REALLY popular, they’ll only show up in BuzzSumo’s results if they’ve been interviewed.

For example:

When I search for “Noah Kagan” in BuzzSumo, 18 out of the 20 results are places he’s been interviewed.

Very cool.