Outreach is critical to any SEO campaign as it's the most effective way of gaining high-quality backlinks for your website. If you want to grow organic traffic, then you need fantastic backlinks acquired through outreach.
Learn all about SEO outreach and how you can use it to grow your website and your business!
What is SEO Outreach?
Okay, let's start with the basics - so what's SEO outreach? SEO, as you know, stands for Search Engine Optimisation. SEO outreach is when you reach out to other people, brands, or sites with domain authority to get them to do something that will improve your SEO.
These should be brands that have a similar target audience to yours so that you're offering relevant content.
You may ask for a guest blogging spot on another site. Or, what people often ask for is a backlink to their site from a trustworthy website. We'll get more into backlinks and link building next.
Link Building
In this section, we uncover everything you need to know to build backlinks into your SEO outreach strategy. This includes why link building is important, how to get backlinks, and more!
Why Focus on Link Building?
Backlinks are one part of the backbone of any SEO strategy for optimising your site. A backlink is a link back to your site from another one.
There are 3 parts to any good SEO strategy - link building, keywords, and quality in-depth content.
Without all 3, your whole strategy will likely fail. You need to use all 3 elements together to improve your traffic and optimise your website for search engines. Keywords and content are part of on-page SEO.
Link building and backlinks specifically, however, are a crucial element of SEO outreach which is why we are talking about them now.
Get Noticed
High quality backlinks direct users from other relevant sites towards your fantastic content. By getting backlinks on some high-traffic authoritative sites, you can gain many more viewers and hopefully future customers for your brand.
It's much more about the quality of the links rather than the number. So when you're focusing on link building, aim for fewer links on high-ranking sites rather than more links on smaller sites.
Trust
Having links on credible sites with domain authority shows the audience that they can trust your site. A website like the Huffington Post, for example, would not be caught posting spammy links. If you can get a backlink or two on a site like this, this can do wonders for your brand reputation. At the end of the day, people trust whoever others trust.
Outreach Campaign
What you will need to do now is develop your outreach campaign. What are you going to do to fulfil your SEO and link building goals? There are a few things you can do which can get you great backlinks to your site:
- Fantastic content
- Guest posts
- Email outreach
- Social media outreach
Fantastic Content
The first thing you need to do is to create spectacular content that keeps your target audience coming back for more. After all, your website is the first basic thing you need to master before you start trying to move it higher on search engine rankings.
To achieve anything else, your website must first be up to scratch with great content.
Google wants new in-depth and well-researched information. Start by focusing on writing fantastic pages and blog posts that are relevant to the niche of your website. Include plenty of research, infographics, and quality links.
Then, when you're trying to get others to link to your site, you have something to offer them. You need to be able to show that you can offer valuable content to their readers.
Once your site is looking great, this can be a great drawcard to compel people to offer you backlinks.
Guest Posts
Offering to write a guest post on other blogs or websites is a great way to promote yourself, get new readers, and get a backlink from a credible site.
If you can get a guest post spot successfully, then the readers of that site will see your fantastic piece of content. In this way, guest posting can lead to an uptake in organic traffic to your website.
You can even add a backlink to your website either in the content or in your guest post bio.
Guest posting can help you get your name out there to a whole new group of people who otherwise may not have seen your work. So, it's worth reaching out to sites to see if they will let you write for them.
Guest posting is often used over other methods of SEO outreach strategies for link building, as seen in this graph:
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" alt="Outreach Strategies SEO's Choice" />
Email Outreach
How can you reach out to websites you'd like to get links on? One option is to simply email the website owner. This works more often than you may expect. Here are the steps you will take to identify a website you want a backlink on and contact the owner.
Find A Target
First, you need to find a good website that you'd love a backlink on. Find people who are bloggers in your niche and who run credible sites.
When you consider reaching out to them, consider that they are a real person running a website, just like you. Think about how you'd like to be approached if you were in their position. This should help you write something real and authentic that they may respond positively to.
Creating the Email
Next, you need to think about how you're going to word the email you send to this site owner. Remember that these are likely to be people who have a lot to do and not a lot of time to read emails, so keep it simple.
Make sure that you do the following:
Give them a reason to want to link to your website
Your site needs to be interesting enough to get them hooked. Perhaps you can link them to a compelling news story you've posted, engaging blog post, or other great content. There has to be something unique about your site for them to want to share it with their readers.
Tell them what you want from them
Be clear and direct in what you want from them. All too often, people feel bad asking for a favour and so they are extremely vague. This will get you nowhere as if the reader of the email doesn't know what you want, they are likely to disregard the whole message. Ideally, you want them to link your site on theirs or let you write a guest post for them.
Write an authentic message that shows you're genuine
You should personalise your message as much as possible. If the site owner suspects that you're a bot or have simply used copy and paste to send emails to a bunch of people, they are unlikely to respond to you or even read your message. Popular sites and blogs may receive countless emails asking for them to include content and link back to other sites, so make your message stand out by showing it is written directly to them. Here are some ways to personalise your message:
- Create an interesting subject line
- Address them by name
- Use a real email address
- Use an email signature
- Include something specific to their site
Example
Here's an example of a potential email using a tech blog as an example:
Subject: Opportunity for collaboration
Hey Laura
I came across your coding website the other day as I'm a tech aficionado myself. In fact, I run a similar blog: [link to interesting post]. I loved your article about the future of the coding industry.
I was wondering if you would be interested in having me do a guest blog post? I have some fantastic research into coding that I'd love to share. I would write a post of 1000+ words and include a link to my blog in my bio.
I look forward to hearing from you and discussing ways we can collaborate in future.
Social Media Outreach
Ever considered how social media can help your website get ahead on search engines? If not, it's time to start. While social media does not affect search engines and their ranking system, it can still help you to build your brand.
You can even guest post for the social media accounts of a brand on platforms such as Instagram or Facebook. Think outside the box when it comes to social media posting and create some informative, quality content.
To reach out, you may tweet or post tagging a person with your message on Twitter or Instagram. Or you may send them a direct message. These people may get thousands of messages a day, so do whatever works to get their attention!
The tips for outreach via social media are similar to those for email outreach. However, on social media, you need to keep it short and sweet. So stay personal and authentic but get straight to the point of why you're sending the person a message.
Conclusion
SEO outreach is commonly thought to be just about link building. That's a massive part of it, don't get us wrong, but there is a lot more to it than that.
You need to be authentic to connect others with your message and your content so it's a lot about relationship building as well.
You need to think of what your unique value proposition is that would make others want to offer you backlinks, guest posts, or social shares.
If you can think of what that is, then that's a fantastic start. Now turn it into amazing content and get started on your SEO outreach journey.
