From an SEO context, blogger outreach is the process of reaching out to key influencers in order to acquire high quality links from other websites to your own.
“There are many techniques for building links, and while they vary in difficulty, SEOs tend to agree that link building is one of the hardest parts of their jobs. Many SEOs spend the majority of their time trying to do it well. For that reason, if you can master the art of building high-quality links, it can truly put you ahead of both other SEOs and your competition.”
---Paddy Moogan, The Beginner’s Guide to Link building
Firstly, let’s go further in depth with the importance of link building in SEO. Search engines primarily use links to discover new web pages and to help determine page rankings in their search results. The more high-quality external websites link back to you, the more likely it will be that you will rank well in search results.
Links from high quality, relevant websites can also lead to an increase in traffic to your website and can help establish your brand as an authority within your niche.
Now that we know why link building in itself is important for SEO, the next question is: where does outreach fit in with all of this?
Outreach is arguably the most important part of the link building process. Publishing a quality piece of content and sharing it socially will do very little to build links without doing proper outreach. While search engines do evaluate the quality of your content, you still need links to rank well in results. As well as gaining links, another goal associated with outreach is building long-term relationships with key influencers in your industry and increasing your authority.
Just hopping on your computer and sending out emails without an outreach strategy is a waste of time, energy, and will most likely leave you fuming in frustration. For this reason, there are steps you need to take in order to increase your chances of success. As long as you have some high quality content ready to go, here’s what you need to do:
The main question you need to ask yourself is: who will be interested in what I’ve written?
Go for a meaningful blog, with themes that fit in with yours. If you are an SEO blog, there is no point in outreaching to a blog about shoes and expecting them to link back. Ensure you know what kind of blogs you’re outreaching to so you are assured that your content will actually interest them.
In outreach, you want to acquire links from strong blogs. These are blogs which already have a decent authority and number of links pointing back at them.
It doesn’t always have to be a key consideration, however in some cases, you might have to consider whether geography matters. For example if a blog is aimed at an audience in a specific geographical location. You might also want to consider how trustworthy the blog is. After all, you don’t want to outreach to a low-quality blog full of spam links.
The key to outreach is thinking about reciprocity --- do something nice for them and preferably, they’ll return the favour. With this in mind, you need to ensure that your emails are worth their time!
Leave some room for trial and error, however you can use the following email guidelines as a starting point:
So what does a generic email look like? Here is an example of one featured in Ahrefs’ blog:
Source: Ahrefs
You can see how a blogger would immediately see this and think “template”, with their mouse going straight to the delete button.
You can weigh up how much personalisation you need depending on how important the influencer is. For more important ones you want to write fully customised emails, however for the less important you’re fine to use a template-style email. Don’t just copy and paste it over and over again though, you still have to make sure that you are changing them up to suit each influencer.
So now that you know how to structure your email, what are your outreach options? There are so many different options out there, but here are a few simple ones just to get you started:
The last step is following up the emails you sent out. A good rule-of-thumb is to wait around two days before deciding to follow up (unless it’s over Christmas or any other holiday, so be aware of timing). Remember that you don’t want to appear naggy or desperate, so if you follow up and still get no response, then just assume they aren’t interested. To help generate a response, it might even help to create a sense of urgency, stating that your deadline is approaching.
Remember that link building through outreach is by no means an easy process. It takes a lot of experimentation, and a lot of drawbacks, however in the long run you will surely reap the rewards of all your hard work!
From an SEO context, blogger outreach is the process of reaching out to key influencers in order to acquire high quality links from other websites to your own.
“There are many techniques for building links, and while they vary in difficulty, SEOs tend to agree that link building is one of the hardest parts of their jobs. Many SEOs spend the majority of their time trying to do it well. For that reason, if you can master the art of building high-quality links, it can truly put you ahead of both other SEOs and your competition.”
---Paddy Moogan, The Beginner’s Guide to Link building
Firstly, let’s go further in depth with the importance of link building in SEO. Search engines primarily use links to discover new web pages and to help determine page rankings in their search results. The more high-quality external websites link back to you, the more likely it will be that you will rank well in search results.
Links from high quality, relevant websites can also lead to an increase in traffic to your website and can help establish your brand as an authority within your niche.
Now that we know why link building in itself is important for SEO, the next question is: where does outreach fit in with all of this?
Outreach is arguably the most important part of the link building process. Publishing a quality piece of content and sharing it socially will do very little to build links without doing proper outreach. While search engines do evaluate the quality of your content, you still need links to rank well in results. As well as gaining links, another goal associated with outreach is building long-term relationships with key influencers in your industry and increasing your authority.
Just hopping on your computer and sending out emails without an outreach strategy is a waste of time, energy, and will most likely leave you fuming in frustration. For this reason, there are steps you need to take in order to increase your chances of success. As long as you have some high quality content ready to go, here’s what you need to do:
The main question you need to ask yourself is: who will be interested in what I’ve written?
Go for a meaningful blog, with themes that fit in with yours. If you are an SEO blog, there is no point in outreaching to a blog about shoes and expecting them to link back. Ensure you know what kind of blogs you’re outreaching to so you are assured that your content will actually interest them.
In outreach, you want to acquire links from strong blogs. These are blogs which already have a decent authority and number of links pointing back at them.
It doesn’t always have to be a key consideration, however in some cases, you might have to consider whether geography matters. For example if a blog is aimed at an audience in a specific geographical location. You might also want to consider how trustworthy the blog is. After all, you don’t want to outreach to a low-quality blog full of spam links.
The key to outreach is thinking about reciprocity --- do something nice for them and preferably, they’ll return the favour. With this in mind, you need to ensure that your emails are worth their time!
Leave some room for trial and error, however you can use the following email guidelines as a starting point:
So what does a generic email look like? Here is an example of one featured in Ahrefs’ blog:
Source: Ahrefs
You can see how a blogger would immediately see this and think “template”, with their mouse going straight to the delete button.
You can weigh up how much personalisation you need depending on how important the influencer is. For more important ones you want to write fully customised emails, however for the less important you’re fine to use a template-style email. Don’t just copy and paste it over and over again though, you still have to make sure that you are changing them up to suit each influencer.
So now that you know how to structure your email, what are your outreach options? There are so many different options out there, but here are a few simple ones just to get you started:
The last step is following up the emails you sent out. A good rule-of-thumb is to wait around two days before deciding to follow up (unless it’s over Christmas or any other holiday, so be aware of timing). Remember that you don’t want to appear naggy or desperate, so if you follow up and still get no response, then just assume they aren’t interested. To help generate a response, it might even help to create a sense of urgency, stating that your deadline is approaching.
Remember that link building through outreach is by no means an easy process. It takes a lot of experimentation, and a lot of drawbacks, however in the long run you will surely reap the rewards of all your hard work!
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Hey Ben! You got some awesome tips here. I was wondering if you do build up your relationship through social media first? Or do you believe that a brilliant pitch can do the job alone?