You’ve probably already heard that stats pages are a great way to generate links.
Also, you may have noticed that some stats pages are more successful at getting links than others.
So I wanted to understand what differentiated the most successful stats pages from the flat stats pages.
After researching and experimenting with my own content, I found five key factors that I believe will greatly improve the attractiveness of links in your stats posts.
Each tactic is detailed below, and step-by-step instructions are provided so you can reproduce the results.
Incorporate journalistic keywords
I learned the reverse outreach hack from Brian Dean. Incorporating it into the stats page is now my favorite strategy.
In a case study he wrote, his content organically gained over 5,000 links thanks to this method.
The idea is that instead of reaching out to journalists and content marketers and asking them to link to your content, they will find your content when they are looking for data to support their claims and will naturally link to you.
Start by finding long-tail keywords that are obviously looking for data. Brian Dean calls them “journalistic keywords”.
You can use several different tactics to find these keywords.
- Find long-tail keywords on competing stats pages.
- Answer the “Additional Questions” questions.
Finding long tail keywords is very easy. Google your main keyword (e.g. “SEO stats” or “coaching stats”) to get the top URLs and enter them into your favorite keyword tool. Then you can see all the long-tail keywords and questions your page ranks for.
Here’s an example in action:
Ahrefs screenshot, September 2022Another option is to check the “questions asked by others” box for your main keyword.
Screenshot of a search for fast food statistics, Google, September 2022Pro tip is to click on each question as it will generate more questions.
Screenshot of a search for fast food statistics, Google, September 2022Once your post includes statistical answers to each question, optimize it for featured snippets. Set the phrase “People Also Asked” as a question and answer as a complete sentence.
For example:
How many people eat fast food every day?
About 85 million Americans eat fast food every day.
Find and update popular stats
Ahrefs explains how to build 36 free backlinks to your stats page by emailing websites with old stats and providing the latest stats posted on your new stats page We have done a popular link building survey.
As a result, that post quickly became the top-ranking post for the term “SEO stats.” Two years later, it still holds the number two spot.
Screenshot of search for SEO stats, Google, September 2022step 1: Get the top URLs for your main keyword (like “SEO stats”) and enter them into your favorite keyword tool.
step 2: Check out our backlink profile to see the most popular stats. To do this, scroll through the page’s backlink profile, then repeatedly perform an anchor text search to find the number you noticed.
For example, the following statistic (“One-third of Americans eat fast food every day”) seems to be popular.
Ahrefs screenshot, September 2022step 3: Make sure the stats are out of date (at least 2-3 years old).
If so, try to find more updated stats and replace them. If you can’t find the latest stats, consider creating new ones yourself.
For example, I was building a chatbot stats page and found some dated stats on how many people are using chatbots by country.
So I used Clearbit and another data extraction site to create the latest stats and compared the new data to the dated stats.
Screenshot from Chatfuel.com, September 2022step 4: Accesses websites that contain dated statistics and provides the latest statistics.
Most people don’t respond to the traditional “because the link to my stats page is better than the old one!”
However, most people prefer the most recent content, so they may be willing to trade old stats for new stats they offer on their silver platter.
In fact, if you want to take it a step further, it can even suggest refreshing the entire page.
As mentioned above, this process helped Ahrefs gain 36 links in just a few weeks, pushing the page to the top of search results.
Use the hub and spoke model/skyscraper technique
I’ve noticed that many of the most successful stats pages are organized in a hub and spoke/skyscraper style.
HubSpot’s marketing stats page is a great example of a well-organized skyscraper-style stats page.
Specifically, it contains the following sections:
- Content marketing statistics.
- Social media marketing statistics.
- video marketing statistics.
- email marketing statistics.
- Lead generation stats.
- advertising statistics.
- Marketing technology statistics.
- sales statistics.
This page also ranks for many of these “spoke” stat keywords.
Screenshot of search for SEO stats, Google, September 2022Next time you build your stats page, divide it into several categories and continually update and build those categories.
Include original data
Given that stats pages are all about data, creating your own data is also a great way to gather links.
However, most people believe that creating new data is time-consuming and expensive.
This is true when doing a large “state of the industry” survey, but there are many free (or cheap) ways to create or extract the original data.
Below are some of my go-to methods.
Scanning of public data
There is a lot of data that most people simply don’t want to organize.
It was Andy Crestodina who first introduced me to this method. He said he wanted to know the life expectancy of the website, but that statistic didn’t exist.
So he pulled out a list of the top 200 marketing websites (according to Alexa), hired a VA to go into the Wayback Machine, and tracked the last time the website underwent a major overhaul.
The answer was 2 years and 7 months.
Today we have one statistic of posting over 1,000 backlinks from HubSpot, Forbes, Wikipedia, the Content Marketing Institute, and other websites where you can’t buy links.
Ahrefs screenshot, September 2022Utilization of internal data
Another great way to create new statistics is to pull internal data.
Ahrefs has some excellent examples of this.
I would like to point out that Ahrefs always makes a separate post for each of these stats and later adds the stats to other dedicated stats pages.
I’ve found this to be a clever way of maximizing the links I can get with a single stat.
For example, the first post I mentioned (90.63% of the content doesn’t get traffic from Google) has over 8,000 backlinks (over 3,000 referring domains).
Without a dedicated post, that stat could easily have been lost on the larger stats page.
So consider creating a dedicated post to pull your most valuable stats and promote them to maximize your links.
Send customer surveys
If you have a large mailing list, another option is to survey your customers or audience.
He says it took him over 100 hours to put together, but considering he’s organically amassed over 13,000 backlinks (over 3,000 referring domains), you’ll know it’s worth the effort.
Ahrefs screenshot, September 2022If you don’t have a list, you can use market research tools like SurveyMonkey or Pollfish, but they can be expensive.
Create graphics
Content marketers need data to support their claims, but they also need graphics and images to support their claims. Therefore, it is highly recommended to create a graphic of your data as well.
For example, if you search the image below with Google Lens, you’ll see that it’s been shared on various websites.
Google Lens Search Screenshot, September 2022The best thing about graphics is that you can use your existing stats to create those graphics with your branding (credit the original source).
Oberlo has many examples of this.
Oberlo screenshot, September 2022If you don’t have a designer on staff, you can hire someone at Upwork or Dribbble to create the graphics for you.
Start updating your stats page today
Creating a good stats page is more than just creating the longest list of stats in existence.
It’s about creating resources that journalists and other content marketers find useful and can use to back up their claims.
Try some of these tips and let us know if they help you generate more links.
Other resources:
Featured image: SEVENNINE_79/Shutterstock
