Delivering good quality links through proactive outreach

For 25 years, Crucial has been helping consumers get more performance out of their computers for over 25 years, through their innovative compatibility tools, making it easier to find the right memory or SSD storage for your computer. As a Micron brand, they are built on 45 years of innovating memory and storage solutions, that are at the heart of today’s cutting-edge technology. Crucial currently partners with Artefact to deliver their outreach, as part of their overall search engine optimisation.

Organically earn links amid fierce competition

The memory and storage industry is fiercely competitive, with rapidly evolving technology making it ever-challenging for brands to stay ahead of their competition.

Artefact’s challenge was to earn links organically across multiple niches, all the while appealing to Crucial’s target audience, which includes gamers, professionals and content creators.

Focus on cyber-security and gaming

Artefact currently manages Crucial’s outreach, in parallel to managing their SEO and media mix modelling and analysis. Outreach works to generate valuable backlinks from authoritative and pertinent external sites, serving SEO KPI’s of ranking and visibility. This has a knock-on effect on raising brand awareness.

We offered to initiate a suite of outreach campaigns, ranging from a focus on cybersecurity to gaming. We needed to create a campaign offering quality, original content to which online publications can link back. To ensure success we:

  • Developed on-site content to which journalists will want to link to add value to their stories

  • Targeted specific media demographics with precise angles to secure links

  • Created assets, such as data-led reports and design-led visuals, that are likely to earn quality links

One campaign concentrated on cybersecurity and data protection, which is relevant to Crucial’s external SSDs. Awareness days can provide opportunities to place Crucial at the centre of big conversations. We took advantage of World Back-Up Day to create a data-led piece on the world’s biggest data breaches.

Artefact created a page on Crucial’s website to highlight the danger of data loss from cyber-crime. This highlighted statistics on major regions dealing with the most losses through cyber-crime and the average cost of data breaches per region. Artefact also offered solutions on how consumers could minimise the risk of a cyber-breach.

The goal of this outreach campaign was to have authoritative websites and news publications pick up this information as part of World Back-Up Day. This would provide backlinks to Crucial’s website, increasing their brand awareness.

Coverage in leading publications

The cybersecurity campaign was a sucess, with links created by sector leading publications such as BetaNews and The Digital Journal, creating a total of 19 authoritative links back to Crucial’s site.  This generated a cumulative domain authority of 732.

“We are encouraged by the success we’ve seen from the cybersecurity campaign and look forward to partnering with Artefact on additional outreach opportunities. Artefact has shown a deep understanding and expertise supporting our overarching SEO goals”
Craig Smith, Director of Crucial’s Integrated Marketing.

In conjunction with other campaigns, Artefact was able to acquire 55 links from a range of websites including authoritative domains such as PetaPixel, Apartment Therapy and Interesting Engineering. Campaign pages ranked for more than 700 organic key words.

Combining links across campaigns, the average cumulative domain authority was 58% above target, with one campaign being 193% above target. The total number of links for the concurrent campaigns was 10% above target, with the leading campaign achieving a link count 90% above target.

In addition to Outreach, Artefact also manages Crucial’s organic search, achieving triple-digit growth through the use of featured snippets.