SEO outreach. Backlinks are the so-called SEO currency. Websites that have many of them are considered respectable and rank highly in Google.
Did you know that to rank in Google’s top 10 you must have a lot of backlinks? This phenomenon increases interest in the outreach service, which provides a good opportunity for sites to interact with each other.
Today we offer you to review the SEO outreach process and to understand how to properly build links and promote yourself.
Get comfortable, enjoy reading, and learn useful information!
What is Outreach in SEO?
In order to understand what is behind the outreach, let’s imagine the following situation. An online health food store offers a popular online edition to place an article on the page about healthy goods. If the parties reach an agreement with each other, both will win. The blog will give readers interesting content, and the online store can get more loyal customers. It is exactly how outreach for link building works.
SEO Outreach is one of the most effective ways to promote a business online. It consists of the establishment of contacts, the exchange of content and links. This method of business development is the main way to increase the link mass of sites. This promotion method involves personal agreements with the owners of sites or bloggers to advertise on a particular web resource. Most often it means placing material with backlinks, banners or brand mentions. Outreach allows the site to receive natural links on popular and trusted sites or in bloggers’ publications. When combined with active user clicks, such links have a much greater effect than other ways of popularizing and attracting customers.
SEO outreach is building outreach agreements for a company’s external publications to the main target audience location. Makes sense, right?
The main purpose of SEO outreach as a service is to build reciprocal backlinks to improve organic rankings and attract new audiences. Outreach helps not only build link mass but also has the effect of increasing brand awareness and maintaining audience trust.
High-quality and professional outreach can achieve the following goals:
- Increase brand or company awareness.
- Attract target traffic, including by engaging part of the donor’s audience.
- Building up the link mass of the site without the risk of over-spam.
- Improving the visibility of the site for search queries.
- Formation of demand for a new product or service.
- Increase in requests and sales.
Pros and Cons of SEO Outreach
Pros:
- Opportunity to reach the target audience. Outreach involves mass building contacts with those who are not interested in it beforehand. But there is one fundamental difference – you choose those web resources that, in your opinion, will help to promote the product among the audience that suits you.
- Fast and high quality results. This process is able to find and attract the desired consumer in a short time. If we talk about the growth of positions in the search engine, then, on average, it will take up to a month.
- Personalized advertising. Personalization greatly increases the chances of achieving the desired result. And posting on blogs and sites where the target audience spends time is another great way to make your brand known.
Cons:
- Risk of not getting results. In the process, you cannot do without prior analysis and preparation of a list of resources whose audience is of interest to the business. If you skip this step, consider your time wasted.
- Labor-intensive process. It is a whole system of repeated and sometimes tedious activities, performing analysis, identifying target resources, preparing a list of contacts, negotiations, etc. Precisely because outreach takes a lot of time, some companies hire professionals who are well skilled in the details of the work.
- Money risks. According to Ahrefs, the average cost per link is $361.44. A guest post can cost $77.80. It follows that outreach is still such an expensive service.
SEO Outreach Algorithm
Work within the SEO outreach direction takes place in several stages:
- Search for popular and relevant platforms of the audience.
- Identification of opinion leaders on the chosen topic.
- Finding contacts of resource representatives.
- Choice of format (interview, article, reference).
- Preparation of a press release with details and terms of cooperation.
- Composing a welcome letter.
- Contacting representatives and negotiations.
- Preparing content.
- Publishing and monitoring.
Top 8 Most Popular Backlink Building Strategies for SEO Outreach
Broken Link Strategy
Broken link building is a tactic that consists of several basic steps:
- You find a non-working ( so called dead) link on the website from which you want to get a backlink.
- You recreate the dead content from this link.
- You send the new content to the webmaster to encourage him to add a link to replace the 404 page.
And what makes this technique so effective is your sincere interest in providing value. You are not just asking for a favor – you are helping webmasters fix SEO problems on their sites. You may have a question about how to find opportunities in building a broken link strategy? The best way is to look for this on competitors’ sites. Here are some paid tools you should consider to speed up the whole process of building broken links:
Infographics
Infographics not only reinforce your credibility in a particular field or niche but are also a reliable way to motivate customers to share links with you. Various social networks like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn are full of users who want to express their ideas and thoughts. With this opportunity, they will gladly share links or posts that are relevant to their views.
Infographics are a popular tool for SEO outreach because they cover a specific topic. You can distribute it with a link both on thematic sites, and on photo hosting sites, such as Pinterest.
Guest Blogging
It is one of the long-standing and very effective link-building tactics. It works very simply. You write an article for another site in your niche. They publish it. Your link to yourself from that article. And that’s all. Some sites even create specific pages where they publish posts and popularize niche sites. The best thing, of course, is to look for thematic platforms and then post there. Most online resources, even if they do not say so, are open to guest blogging.
A guest post can be called quality if it contains:
- unique text;
- complicated content, written in simple language;
- examples;
- visual part: screenshots, illustrations, videos, infographics;
- links to useful sources.
Mentions Without References (Link Reclamation )
It is a method with a high return on effort, as long as you already have some information background and your brand is being talked about.
Sometimes people mention you or your business without linking to a specific platform. It happens more often than you might think. But with those mentions, you are already halfway to success (getting a link).
The main advantage of this method is that the person is already familiar with the business because someone has mentioned you. Therefore, it is the best reason to reach out to them and encourage them to pay attention specifically to your link.
In more detail, the process works like this:
- Tracking mentions of the brand manually or using specialized software on third-party sites.
- Find the contact of the person responsible for editing the content.
- Send a request to place a link instead of a mention.
- Set up tracking of mentions on an ongoing basis and periodically repeat the script.
Resource Page
Some website owners, bloggers, publishers, companies, have pages on which they recommend services that they like or trust. It might even be their partners. Next, everything is simple. You need to contact them and offer them useful material or a service that might work for this page. It is clear that success depends on the content of the letter.
Roundups or Interviews
It is an easy way because the people you will be writing to about the interview are experts who will want to share the link. To carry out the whole process you need:
- Find experts in your niche.
- Compose questions to be discussed.
- Add interviews to the website.
- Ask the person to distribute the link to the final post (social media, websites, email newsletter).
Post Exchange
This technique is great for developing a corporate website.
The process is also quite simple:
- Finding a site. Make a list of sites with blogs and platforms that interest you.
- Search for a contact. Find the contact person in charge of the website. Look for their social networks, find the mail, or fill out a contact form on the online resource.
- Proposal. Send a well-prepared proposal describing you or your resource as an author or a good platform, with examples of successful guest posts, suggesting topics for the site.
- Preparing the post. Write a really useful post, not for a check mark, but for yourself. Make it interesting and as detailed as possible in the subject you are working with.
- Posting. Send a well-written article, preferably in Google Docs and separately attach an archive with photos. It will speed up the placement of the article and receive a post from the contact person of the desired platform.
Writing a Review and Asking for a Link
It is a time-consuming way to get links, but you may combine preparing an interesting post to the blog and trying to get a backlink.
The work itself involves:
- Choosing a service or good that interests us.
- Writing a detailed review.
- Contact the service providers or store and share the ready-made review, hinting that perhaps the post will be of interest to their users and they will want to share it with them.
Doing such content solely for the SEO outreach is unproductive in terms of time commitment, but as an addition to the method of creating cool content, we recommend it.
Content Marketing Platform
- 100,000+ media publications;
- get backlinks to your product;
- scale work with content distribution.
How to Write a Letter for SEO Outreach
Now we are going to talk about writing letters because they are the key to working on outreach. Let’s start by saying that the subject line should be clickbait. It is also very cool to use pictures, gifs, and jokes. It will help interest the recipient and draw attention specifically to you. You have to bring a pleasant emotion.
Now let’s move on to the basic rules:
- Prepare a letter template. Try to prepare several types of templates, at least one for each type of collaboration. Include the address of the site in the subject line, and in the body of the letter refer to the person by name if you know it. Write literate, short and succinct, strictly to the point, use a business style letter, say right away what you want and what you offer in return. Analyze the results of the first newsletter and adjust the templates if it is necessary.
- Mailing. If the site has a feedback form, you should preferably use it for the first contact. You can use mailing services for mass mailings since you can configure them to send messages in such a way as to address each recipient by name. Wait a few days for a response. If there is no response, you can politely remind them of the letter. If you can’t get in touch by mail, try other ways. These can be social media, messengers, etc..
- Agreement. When the person gets in touch, discuss the details: Will the placement be paid or free? What will the link be? Is it possible to place an anchor? Who prepares the material? Clarify the topic, volume, pitch, number of images and links. Negotiate the terms of placement and the date of publication.
- Placement and Control. Send the ready material to the owner of the donor resource. Remind them of the agreements and the publication date. After publication, follow up on the agreements. Check out:
- Anchor and URL.
- Link attributes: dofollow or nofollow.
- Indexation.
- The presence of other links in the publication.
- The overall appearance of the publication, its structure, the presence of images.
If everything is fine, thank the site owner, ask for corrections if required and check them again.
Examples:
It was a helpful guide on how to achieve SEO outreach goals and build friendly relationships with other sites and platforms. We hope this was a useful article and you will get good results.
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