How To Optimize Your Statistics Pages To Earn Links

You may have already heard that stat pages are a great way to build links.

You’ve probably also noticed that some stats pages are more successful at getting links than others.

So I wanted to know what separates the most successful statistics pages from the ones that don’t.

After researching and experimenting with my content, I’ve found five main things that seem to dramatically improve statistic post link attraction.

I’ll discuss each tactic in detail below and provide step-by-step instructions so you can replicate the results.

Incorporate press keywords

I learned reverse communication The hack is from Brian Dean, and it’s now my favorite strategy to include on any stat page.

In the case study he wrote, his content organically got over 5,000 links thanks to this method.

The idea is that instead of reaching out to journalists and content marketers and begging them to link to your content, they find your content when they search for data to support their argument and link to you naturally.

So start by finding long tail keywords that are clearly data looking – Brian Dean calls them “journalist keywords”.

To find these keywords, you can use several different tactics:

• Search for long-tail keywords on competitor statistics pages.
• Answer the “People Who Was Also Asked” questions.

Finding long tail keywords is very easy. You can Google your main keyword (eg, “SEO stats” or “training stats”), take the URL with the highest ranking, and put it into your favorite keyword tool. Then, you can look at all the keywords and long-tail questions that the page ranks for.

Here is an example of this in practice:

The other option is to look at the People Also Asked box for your main keyword:

Pro tip is to click on each question because it will generate more questions:

As you include the statistical answers for each question in your post, optimize them for featured snippets by setting up the phrase “people also asked” as a question and then answering it with a complete sentence.

This is an example:

How many people eat fast food every day?

Almost 85 million Americans eat fast food every day.

Find and update popular stats

Ahrefs has made it popular Link building study which showed how to create 36 backlinks (for free) to a stats page by emailing websites with outdated stats and offering more recent stats posted on the brand new stats page.

As a result, the publication quickly became the highest ranking position for the term “SEO statistics”. Two years later, he’s still in second place.

Step 1: Take the top-ranking URL for your keyword (eg, “SEO Stats”) and put it into your favorite keyword tool.

Step 2: Check out his backlink and see his most popular stats. You can do this by scrolling through the back cookie of the page and then doing a text search for the numbers you notice most frequently.

For example, this statistic (“one-third of Americans eat fast food daily”) seems to be common:

Step 3: Make sure the statistic is old (at least 2-3 years).

If so, try to find a more updated stat to replace it. If you can’t find a more recent stat, consider creating a new stat yourself.

For example, I was making a file Statistics page for chatbots And I found some dated stats on the number of people using chatbots by country.

So, I used Clearbit and another data-mining site to come up with more current statistics and then compared the new data to the dated statistics:

Step 4: Access websites with old statistics and provide updated statistics.

Most people don’t respond to the traditional “link to my stats page because it’s better than the old one!”

However, most of the people like to have updated content and thus, they might be willing to exchange their old stats with new ones that you give on a silver platter.

In fact, if you want to go a step further, you can even offer to refresh the entire page for them.

As mentioned earlier, this process helped Ahrefs get 36 links in a few weeks and catapult their page to the top of the search results.

Use the hub-and-spoke/skyscraper technology model

I’ve noticed that many of the most successful statistics pages are organized into a spoke/skyscraper axis.

HubSpot Marketing Statistics The page is an excellent example of a well-structured skyscraper-style stats page.

Specifically, it includes the following sections:

• Content Marketing Statistics.
• Social media marketing statistics.
• Video marketing statistics.
• Email marketing statistics.
• Lead generation statistics.
• Ad statistics.
• Marketing technology statistics.
• Sales statistics.

This page ranks well even for many of these “occurring” statistics keywords. For example, the general page still ranks second in the term “content marketing statistics”.

So next time you create a stats page, break it down into several categories and constantly update and build those categories.

Include the original data

Since the core of stat pages is data, creating native data is another great way to attract links.

However, most people assume that generating new data is time consuming and expensive.

While this is true if you intend to conduct a major ‘state of the industry’ study, there are plenty of ways to generate or extract original data for free (or for cheap).

Below, I’ll walk you through some of my go-to methods.

Clear general data

There is a lot of data out there that most people don’t want to organize.

Andy Christodina was the first to introduce me in this way. He told me he wanted to know Website average ageHowever, this statistic did not exist.

So he pulled out a list of the top 200 marketing sites (according to Alexa) and hired a VA to go to Wayback Machine And record the last time the website underwent a major overhaul.

The answer was two years and seven months.

Today, this single statistic has got over 1,000 backlinks from websites like HubSpot, Forbes, Wikipedia, the Content Marketing Institute, and other websites you could never buy a link from:

Leverage internal data

Another great way to create new stats is to pull in internal data.

Ahrefs has several excellent examples of this:

• 90.63% of content is not getting traffic from Google
• At least 66.5% of links to sites have died in the past nine years
• Are links still important for ranking? Study by Ahrefs

I want to point out that Ahrefs almost always creates a single post on each of these stats and later adds the stats to their other custom stats pages.

I found this to be a smart way to maximize the links you can get for a single stat.

For example, the first post you mentioned (90.63% of the content is not getting traffic from Google) has over 8,000 backlinks (3,000+ referral domains).

Without a dedicated post, this statistic could easily have been lost on a huge stat page.

So, consider pulling your most valuable stat and creating a post dedicated to promoting that stat and maximizing links.

Send customer surveys

If you have a large email list, another option is to survey your customers or audience. For example, Andy Crestodina conducts an annual poll of bloggers, which always gets a lot of attention.

He says it takes more than 100 hours to compile it, though you can see it’s worth the effort, since it’s pulled in more than 13,000 backlinks (over 3,000 referral domains).

If you don’t have a listing, you can also use a market research tool like SurveyMonkey or bullfishalthough this can get more expensive.

Create graphics

Content marketers need data to back up their claims, but they also need graphics and images to back up their claims. Therefore, I highly recommend creating graphs of your data as well.

For example, in a Google Lens search for the graphic below, you can see that a lot of different websites have shared it.

The best part about graphics is that you can take existing stats and make graphics of them with your branding (just make sure you credit the original source).

Oberlo Lots of examples:

If you don’t have a designer on staff, you can hire someone Even work or dribble to create graphics for you.

Start updating your stats pages now

Creating a great stats page is much more than creating the longest stat list out there.

It is about creating a resource that journalists and other content marketers will find useful and that can be used to support their claims.

Try some of these tips, and let us know if they help you generate more links!

More resources:

• How to build links you didn’t ask for
• How to Find and Improve the Best Player in the Game (Most Valuable Pages)
• Link Building Guide: How to get and gain links that boost your SEO

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