Link building is a fundamental aspect of SEO, crucial for boosting your website’s visibility and authority in search engine rankings. However, for beginners, navigating the intricate world of link-building outreach can be daunting. But fear not; we’re here to guide you through the process and help you master the art of building valuable connections!
What will you learn about link building outreach:
- What is link-building outreach, and why do you need it in your link-building strategy?
- This comprehensive guide will walk you through the essential steps of link-building outreach, from setting goals to crafting personalized pitches.
- Whether you’re a seasoned marketer looking to refine your strategy or a newcomer eager to learn the ropes, this article will provide you with actionable insights and practical tips to kickstart your link-building journey.
- How to create a worthy link building outreach strategies?
Let’s dive in and explore the strategies and tactics that will set you on the path to link-building success.
What Is Link Building Outreach?
Link-building outreach is a strategic process that can enhance your website’s visibility and credibility by acquiring backlinks from other websites or influencers. The primary objective is, of course, to improve the website’s search engine rankings. However, this task requires more than simply bombarding others with link requests (we never said it would be easy!).
Link-building outreach involves several key steps:
Identifying Relevant and Authoritative Websites
The first step is to pinpoint websites that are relevant to your niche or industry and have authority in their respective fields. These are the websites from which you’ll seek backlinks. To streamline this process, try investing in advanced software like Linkee, an AI link building tool, which automates the prospect vetting process, assists in previewing sites directly within its interface, and finds verified emails to facilitate outreach to prospects seamlessly. By leveraging tools like this, you can enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of your link-building efforts while focusing on securing high-quality backlinks for your website.
Crafting Personalized and Persuasive Messages
Rather than sending generic link requests, personalize your outreach messages. Tailoring your communication to each recipient demonstrates genuine interest and increases the likelihood of a positive response. Additionally, the messages should be persuasive, highlighting the benefits of linking to your content – we’re going to cover that a bit more later.
Building Relationships
The first steps will be the hardest, but successful link-building outreach relies on establishing and nurturing relationships with other webmasters. Networking will make it easier for you in the future, as you’ll get reliable partners who don’t need too much convincing.
Building rapport and credibility over time can lead to more fruitful collaborations. This involves engaging with other creators’ content, offering assistance when possible, and demonstrating mutual value. It’s all about relations, really!
Your goal is to persuade website owners or influencers that linking to your content will provide value to their audience. This may involve showcasing your content’s relevance, uniqueness, or usefulness and illustrating how it can complement their existing resources.
Outreach Methods for Beginners
- Email. Yes, yes, email! Despite its bad reputation, this traditional method is still the most solid and reliable outreach one, especially for beginners. Sending personalized emails to prospects may feel a bit inappropriate at first, but you’ll soon learn how to do this to succeed. Just be careful not to be marked as spam – this can leave your effort in vain.
- Social media. If you’re a social person, engage with writers and editors on platforms like Twitter before sending your link request. Establishing a meaningful interaction beforehand can increase the likelihood of a positive response, so don’t be too pushy and start slowly building a relationship.
- Comments. Engage in relevant discussions under articles on the prospect’s website. Once you’ve added value to the conversation, tactfully mention your content as a supplementary resource. Tactfully!
- Guest posts. Pitch your content directly through contributor guidelines on the prospect’s website. This approach allows you to provide valuable content while gaining a backlink to your site—indeed a win-win situation.
By following these steps, link-building outreach endeavors to create mutually beneficial connections that contribute to a website’s overall visibility and authority. Return here in a few months and see how easy it all looks after you’ve already done it.
Outreach Guide for Beginners. Why is Link Building Outreach Vital for Your Website?
Hopefully, we don’t have to tell you it is, but if you need to hear it, yes, link-building outreach can bring much value to your SEO activities and overall effectiveness.
But why?
Backlinks Signal Trust and Authority to Search Engines
Search engines like Google consider backlinks votes of trust and authority for your content. Pages with more backlinks, especially from relevant and trusted sites, are seen as more important and authoritative, leading to higher rankings for targeted keywords.
Backlinks Drive Referral Traffic
In addition to improving rankings, backlinks direct referral traffic to your site. Each link is a free advertisement and endorsement, bringing targeted visitors from authoritative sites to your own.
A well-executed link-building campaign can generate significant amounts of referral traffic, with some studies showing that nearly 20% of site traffic comes through backlinks.
Because link-building outreach helps you get high-quality backlinks from other relevant and authoritative sites in your niche.
How Does Link Building Outreach Work?
You already know that link-building outreach is a strategy to acquire backlinks from other websites. But that’s just the beginning, and we couldn’t leave you hanging! So here’s how it typically works.
Start by identifying websites that are relevant to your content and have the potential to link back to your site. These could be blogs, news sites, industry publications, or other authoritative sources.
- Craft Personalized Outreach Emails
Once you’ve identified your target websites, craft personalized outreach emails. Address the recipient by name and mention something specific about their website to show that you’ve done your research. Clearly explain why your content would be valuable to their audience and politely request a backlink.
Don’t be afraid to follow up if you don’t receive a response to your initial outreach. A polite follow-up email can help remind the recipient of your initial request and increase the chances of a response.
As mentioned before, building relationships with website owners and editors can help increase your success rate with link-building outreach. Engage with them on social media, comment on their blog posts, and look for other opportunities to connect.
Keep track of your outreach efforts and monitor your progress. Track which websites have agreed to link to your content and which haven’t responded. This information can help you refine your outreach strategy over time.
Link-Building Outreach Guide. The three steps to Successful Work
To effectively boost your online presence through link building, follow these steps:
1. Create Compelling Content
Generate original, comprehensive, actionable, and visually appealing content tailored to your audience’s interests and needs.
Tip: Balancing quality and quantity in link building is essential for a successful strategy. While building a sufficient number of links is important, prioritizing high-quality links is crucial for long-term success.
Here’s how to strike the right balance.
2. Identify Potential Partners
Use Google, social media platforms, and specialized tools to find websites, journalists, or influencers with similar audiences who may be interested in your content.
And, you may wonder, how do I do it?
- Prioritize links from websites that are relevant to your niche or industry. These links carry more weight regarding authority and relevance to search engines.
- Aim for links from websites with high domain authority, as they influence your site’s rankings more. Tools like Moz’s Domain Authority can help you gauge the quality of potential link sources.
- Build a diverse portfolio of links from different types of websites, including blogs, news sites, directories, and social media platforms. This diversification helps establish credibility and authority in the eyes of search engines.
- Pay attention to where your links are placed within the content. Links embedded naturally within relevant, authoritative content are more valuable than those in footers or sidebars.
- Avoid sudden spikes in link acquisition, as this can raise red flags with search engines. Instead, aim for a consistent, gradual increase in link growth over time.
- Editorial links, earned through genuine relationships and valuable content, are highly regarded by search engines. Focus on building relationships with influencers, bloggers, and journalists who can provide organic editorial links to your site.
- Regularly review your existing link profile to identify low-quality or spammy links that could harm your site’s reputation. Disavow any harmful links using Google’s Disavow Tool to maintain a healthy backlink profile.
3. Personalize Your Pitch
Finally, reach out to these prospects in a personalized manner, demonstrating that you’ve done your research. Clearly explain why your content is relevant and valuable to them, and politely ask for a link. Avoid generic pitches and make it easy for them to engage with your request. Don’t forget about e-mail etiquette and CTAs.
By following these guidelines and personalizing your pitch accordingly, you can increase the effectiveness of your link-building outreach and improve your chances of securing valuable backlinks.
Link Building Outreach Strategies
As you already know, outreach link building can benefit your website in a number of ways. But how to get down to it? There are a few strategies you can try to expand your link profile without spending a fortune.
1. Steal Your Competitor’s Links – the Skyscraper Technique
Have you ever heard about the skyscraper technique?
It involves creating content that is better than already existing texts. To do it, you have to find content that is already popular in a particular space and write something even better. Then, you can contact the website with the existing text and ask them to replace this piece with your content.
The goal is to encourage other sites to link to the improved piece of content (meaning your content), thus improving your link profile.
How to get down to it?
1. Perform a backlink gap analysis to find well-performing articles with numerous backlinks:
2. Do your research and create even better, more comprehensive, and updated content. Make sure your texts are longer, cover all aspects related to the topic, and include the most relevant information.
3. Reach out to the linking websites and show them that your article is more valuable than the one they already have on their page. Ask them to link to you instead of your competition.
2. Swap Broken Links
Broken link building is another link building outreach strategy that is worth considering. It involves analyzing industry-related websites, finding external links that don’t work, and then reaching out to website owners to offer them that they can replace broken links with links to quality, thematically-related content on your website.
This is an effective strategy beneficial for both you and these websites. Why?
Thanks to it, you’ll improve your link profile and the other website owners will be able to get rid of broken links, thus improving UX and ensuring their pages don’t generate errors.
How to get down to it?
- Find thematically-related websites where you would like to place a link.
- Check them for broken links using SEMrush.
- Determine what types of your content can be created or offered to swap the broken link.
- Reach out to the website owners and offer your content as a replacement for the link that doesn’t work. They’ll probably be happy to agree.
3. Do Digital PR
Digital PR is about using digital channels to promote a brand, product, or service. It includes activities such as:
- content creation,
- influencer marketing,
- social media,
- audience targeting.
Digital PR is a great way to build links to your website. How to do it?
Create content that is of top-notch quality, share it on social media or other relevant channels, and encourage your target audience to act the same way.
Make sure that these mentions include a link to your website. This way, you can not only boost your link profile but also improve brand recognition and reach more potential customers. Want to go even further? You can also contact influencers, and journalists or network with other industry experts and encourage them to spread the word about your content.
Want to learn more about digital PR? Check out our article: How to Use Digital PR as a Link Building Tactic
4. Write Guest Posts
Guest posting is a type of content marketing strategy in which a company or individual creates content for another website in order to gain exposure, backlinks, and drive traffic to their own website. The content can be anything, meaning blog posts, testimonials, product reviews, or even just a few sentences that can be quoted in e.g., an ebook.
Guest posting effectively expands your reach and builds relationships with other websites and their readers. In addition to driving traffic to your page, it can also help to build your reputation as an industry expert and thought leader.
How to get down to it?
1. Before you begin guest posting, you need to identify the target websites you would like to post on. Look for pages that have the same audience, are within your industry, and have a similar tone of voice. Do your research on Google. Use “guest post” + keywords that are of interest to you to find websites from your niche that accept guest posts or simply determine valuable sources and email them or send messages through contact forms.
2. Make sure that the website where you want to publish a guest post is thematically related to your page. Only then it can benefit your SEO, PR, and marketing efforts.
3. Check the parameters of the website using tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush. Be sure to pay special attention to elements like Domain Rating, URL Rating, the number of referring domains, visibility, and traffic.
How to check these parameters? Simply enter your website URL into the search bar and you’ll see the metrics below:
4. Reach out to the website owners and offer them a guest post.
5. Create high-quality content with links to your website. Use appropriate anchors. Make sure to write an article that is engaging and adds value for the website’s readers.
5. Exchange Links
When talking about outreach link building opportunities, we couldn’t forget about this method. Link exchange is an “agreement” between two websites to link to each other’s content. It’s a great way to get more backlinks to your website without having to constantly reach out to numerous people or pay for sponsored articles.
Such link-for-link cooperation is a simple way to gradually boost the link profile, network with industry experts, and reach new recipients on a regular basis. To get the most out of the link exchange, make sure to find websites that are related to your niche and have high-quality content. Also, pay attention to the parameters so that the backlinks don’t harm your website’s ranking.
How to get down to it?
- Find a website you’d like to obtain links from. Look for pages that are related to your niche and have good parameters.
- Look for a specific article where you would like your link to be placed. Check its visibility and traffic.
- Reach out to the website owners and offer them a link exchange. Tell them that they can get a link on your website wherever they like in exchange for a link from their website in your selected article.
6. Claim Unlinked Mentions
Link building outreach doesn’t have to mean creating new articles or updating your existing content. Sometimes other websites or people already refer to your content or offer but don’t provide a link to your page. As you can guess, it’s also a great opportunity to obtain valuable backlinks to your site at no cost.
How to get down to it?
- Set up alerts for your brand mentions and website to monitor when and where it’s referred to online. For this purpose, you can use Google Alerts, Mention.com, or other popular online tools.
- When you find an unlinked mention, reach out to the website owner and ask them to link to your website.
- Create content that is of value to the website’s readers. It’s the most effective way to encourage people to share your articles or other content pieces with their audiences. Thanks to it, your website will be mentioned more and more frequently.
Want to discover other methods of obtaining quality external links? Check out our ultimate guide!
Outreach Link Building Tips
- You already know some of the white hatoutreach link building techniques. But what to focus on to maximize your chances of success? Check out our tips below:
- Analyze your results and progress – to stay up-to-date with your outreach link building efforts, track your results on an ongoing basis. Analyze the number of backlinks that you’ve managed to obtain and the impact they have on both SEO and your business goals. Try to measure the success of your campaigns, meaning their impact on your traffic, visibility, and sales. Monitor the available data to find areas for improvement and make your link building campaigns even more effective.
- Do your research well – when building links through outreach, it’s important to do your research. So, find out more about the website you want to collaborate with. Be sure to always check its metrics and parameters, such as Domain Rating, URL Rating, visibility, traffic, and backlink profile. Select pages that can actually benefit your SEO, are thematically related to your business, and will help you reach more potential customers.
- Write personalized e-mails and make them intriguing – attract the attention of website owners by writing personalized messages with information about your product/service and its benefits. Explain why you’d like to start a collaboration with this particular website and mention the advantages for both parties. Also, try to make your message intriguing and gripping to encourage the addressee to learn more.
- Try social media outreach – link building outreach isn’t only about e-mails. Social media is an effective way to reach out to people and businesses you want to collaborate with. Share your content, comment on their posts, and engage with their posts to get noticed. Network with specialists from your niche, message them, and offer cooperation like a link exchange. So, if you don’t have a LinkedIn or Facebook account yet, it’s time to set it up.
- Create outstanding content that is linkable – good content is a must for link building outreach. People won’t link to low-quality articles, so write pieces that are informative, comprehensive, useful, and relevant. Also, work on your website design to make sure your content can be easily shared and referred to. Review your page and think about how you can improve UX.
- Benefit from link building outreach tools like BuzzStream or BuzzSumo – these tools can save you a lot of time and effort. They have automated features that allow you to find websites that are worthy of collaboration and contact them easily. With their help, link building outreach gets easier and less time-consuming. However, to choose the right platforms, you need to verify their quality on your own. So, if you aren’t sure how to do it and what to pay attention to, you can benefit from our professional link building services.
- Analyze your results and progress – to stay up-to-date with your outreach link building efforts, track your results on an ongoing basis. Analyze the number of backlinks that you’ve managed to obtain and the impact they have on both SEO and your business goals. Try to measure the success of your campaigns, meaning their impact on your traffic, visibility, and sales. Monitor the available data to find areas for improvement and make your link building campaigns even more effective.
8 Things You Need to do when strategizing your outreach campaign. Let’s summarize!
- Set Goals Based on Target Keywords and Pages. Define clear goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) for your outreach campaign, focusing on improving rankings for specific pages or boosting your site’s Domain Authority.
- Identify Top Link Prospects. Use tools like Ahrefs or Majestic to find authoritative sites related to your niche, prioritizing those with high domain authority scores and existing links to competitors.
- Organize Prospects into a Spreadsheet. For easy reference and tracking, keep track of potential link partners in a spreadsheet, including their website, contact information, existing relationships, and past outreach efforts.
- Create Value-Packed Content Assets. Develop standalone content assets that provide genuine value to others, such as data studies or in-depth guides, to establish yourself as a trusted expert in your field. Do your part of the job, and do it well!
- Personalize and Segment Your Outreach. Craft personalized messages for each prospect, using their name, referencing past articles, and explaining how your content can benefit their audience to increase the effectiveness of your outreach efforts.
- Make the Link Request a Naturally Contribution. Frame your link request as a natural contribution to their content rather than a favor you’re demanding, encouraging editorial links to occur organically.
- Always Include Multiple Polite Follow-Ups. Persistently follow up with prospects via multiple emails over an extended period to nurture quality linking relationships and increase the likelihood of securing backlinks.
- Monitor and Expand Your Link Portfolio. Regularly monitor backlinks gained and track the effectiveness of your outreach efforts. Continuously optimize your list of link targets by replacing underperforming prospects with better ones.
Link building outreach is a crucial aspect of SEO that helps to improve your website’s ranking in the search results, reach more potential customers, and boost your traffic and recognition.
By using the outreach techniques described in this article, you can acquire backlinks that will enhance your link profile and take your SEO efforts to the next level.
Not sure where to start? Contact us today to find out how we can help you improve your link building efforts!