This blog post was contributed by one of our talented outreach experts, Shrushti.
Backlinks are a powerful tool for improving search engine rankings, and 67.5% of marketers admit that link building has a direct impact on their search engine rankings. Do you want to build links? Is quality more important than quantity to you? Backlink outreach is a great way to get easy, high-quality links for your site.
Doing backlink outreach can be extremely time-consuming. It is an essential practice, though. In this article, we’ll bust the myths about backlink outreach and give you proven strategies that have worked for big brands. Here you’ll find tips to help you avoid the common pitfalls during a link building campaign and get the best results possible.
What is backlink outreach?
Backlink outreach, also known as link building, is all about getting other websites to link back to your website. Backlinks are a critical part of SEO because they help search engines determine the relevance of your site content. If a website links to yours, it’s giving you a vote of confidence that your content is worth reading — and search engines take notice. 85% of SEOs and marketers believe that link-building strategies have a direct correlation with enhancing the trust and credibility of a brand.
The more relevant backlinks you have, the better. The problem is that it can take months or years for people to find your website and decide to link to it. For many businesses, this isn’t fast enough — and that’s where link building outreach campaigns come in.
Backlink outreach involves reaching out to other websites and asking them if they’d be willing to link back to yours. The goal of any outreach strategy is simple: get other website owners (and their readers) interested in your business so they’ll want to share your content with their followers through a backlink.
Why is backlink outreach important?
The short answer is: it’s a numbers game. The more quality links you have to point to your site, the better your rankings will be, and the more traffic you will get from search engines. So, if you want to be at the top of Google for a specific keyword, there are two things you need to do:
- Find relevant websites that already link to content related to your niche (or link to your competitors).
- Ask them if they would be willing to link to your content as well.
Backlinks are one of the most critical factors in SEO (search engine optimization). They’re what search engines look at when determining how high to rank your site on their search results pages. The more high-quality backlinks you have, the better chance you have of ranking well. In fact, according to Moz’s link-building report, ‘the number of external links from other sites pointing at your site is still one of the top factors influencing Google’s ranking algorithms.’
If you want to rank higher than your competitors, you need to get more organic backlinks than them. And the way to do that is by reaching out and asking other websites to link to yours!
Backlink strategies and tips - an overview
A large number of SEO folks struggle with outreach. This is because they don’t have the correct link building strategy and tips at their disposal. They are missing specific skills that hinder their efforts, such as: sending a high volume of emails, organizing and keeping track of SEO outreach emails, and knowing what email subject lines to use. Using the tactics in this post will improve your link building efforts while ensuring your spend less time doing so
Planning your link building outreach campaign
If you have a website, then you need to get backlinks pointing at it. However, not all links will be created equal, so it’s essential to understand how Google ranks these types of links.
The first thing to keep in mind is that there are three main types of links: dofollow, nofollow, and noindex.
A noindex link won’t hurt your site but give it a huge boost either. A nofollow link will pass PageRank but won’t pass any credit for the anchor text used in your links — this means that if someone searches for “buy cheap laptops,” your link might show up as “buy cheap laptops” but wouldn’t count toward helping rank that page because it’s not passing any credit for the anchor text “buy cheap laptops.”
A dofollow link can be either rel=nofollow or rel=canonical, and both pass PageRank through to the destination page on which they’re placed. In addition, dofollow links can also pass some level of authority from the linking domain onto the destination domain — this is called ‘citation flow.’
The most important thing is to plan your link building campaigns, create a list of targets and think through how you will get them to link to your website.
Create a list of targets
The first step is to decide who or what you want backlinks from. You can use Buzzsumo’s 30-day free trial to find popular content shared on social media or Ahrefs for finding websites with backlinks pointing at them. You can even use Ahrefs to search for broken links related to your site or on your backlink profile, then use a broken link building outreach approach to try to get the website owner to fix the link or replace it with yours.
Use the above tools to get an idea of the domain authority of the website’s you’re thinking of contacting for link building opportunities. Not all backlinks are created equal, so this will help you decide which quality websites are worth approaching.
Find contact details
Once you have a list of potential websites and blogs, it’s time to find out how best to contact them. Google is usually the best place to start, but keep in mind that many companies hide their contact details on purpose because they don’t want unsolicited emails. If this happens, try using tools like LinkedIn or Crunchbase instead – these often have contact information for big brands and companies listed on there too.
Here is an overview of some of the most popular outreach link building strategies:
- Email outreach – This is an excellent way to reach out to websites linked to similar content in the past because they are more likely to link to your content. You can gather email addresses from places like WhoIsHostingThis, or by using the contact information found on their about page or blog post footers.
- Commenting on blogs – Find blogs in your niche that have recently published relevant blog posts and leave thoughtful comments on them. Commenting takes time, but if done correctly, it can be very beneficial for getting links from relevant sites.
- Guest blogging – Sending out guest posts can be an effective way to build links, but only if done correctly (our method is ‘ghost posting’. Make sure you write great articles and don’t just use guest blogging as an excuse to get links without providing any value!
Social media marketing - Social media marketing- can help drive traffic and build brand awareness for your site, making it easier for other websites to find you online.
Backlink outreach tips
- Research your target audience and prospects: before you send out any emails, make sure you understand who they are and what they want. You can do this by reading their blogs and websites, watching their videos, or using social media to get an idea of who they are and what they like.
- Personalized outreach: make sure that each email has a personal touch to it; don’t just send one template email out to everyone on your list! Instead, personalize each email so it feels more like a real conversation between two people (precisely what it should be).
- Follow up with people who responded: even if someone says no at first, don’t give up! Be persistent and follow up with them again after a couple of weeks or months. Chances are that if they were interested in your offer at first, then they will remember and respond positively.
- Find the right influencers in your niche and reach out to them directly: you can use tools like Buzzsumo or Ahrefs to see which influencers have published content on similar topics in recent months. Then, contact them via Twitter or email and ask if they would be interested in featuring your site in their next article. Most of the time, they won’t say no to free content because it also helps them build their brand.
- Use tools like BuzzStream or NinjaOutreach to quickly find relevant blogs/websites and contact them directly through email or social media (as mentioned above). Once again, make sure that you target only high authority sites that are likely to feature your content (and not just any blog).
- Determine your goal: What do you want to achieve? For example, if your goal is to get more traffic and improve your rankings in search engines, then focus on building links with high authority sites in relevant industries. If your goal is to increase brand visibility, then contact bloggers and journalists who are interested in sharing content about your business or product with their readers.
- Use your business data as a link bait: You may have information that is valuable to other sites in your niche or industry. You can use this information as bait to gain links from those sites.
- Write a guest post: If you write a great guest blog post and send it to the right site, you have a good chance of getting published on their blog and earning a backlink.
- Participate in communities: Participating in online communities like Quora and Reddit can help you build relationships with influencers who will write about your website and share it with their audience.
- Create content that people want to share: Create content that people will want to share with others, like infographics or videos that are fun or informative. If people like your work enough, they will share it on social media and link back to the source material on your website or blog post.
Wrapping up
In the end, the decisions you make will likely depend on your needs as a marketer and where you see your business going in the coming years. No matter what SEO strategy or off site SEO plan you choose to pursue, though, outreach is a vital component in any winning marketing strategy if you want to increase your website traffic.
