Blogger outreach can be difficult, and most of us hate it, but backlinks are one of the biggest ranking factors, and Google loves them.
Specialising in SEO made me realise a long time ago that I had no choice but to use blogger outreach.
Once I figured out how and who to reach out to, I managed to increase our blogger outreach success by 4X.
Today, I’m going to share the exact steps with you.
Blogger Outreach – Quality over Quantity
While many focus on doing as much blogger outreach as possible, it is important to realise who you choose determines the value and quality of the link.
When it comes to link building, one of the most important things that I learned was understating how quality over quantity will change rankings and my overall SEO efforts.
To help you understand what I mean by quality and how it can transform your work, I will discuss the exact key metrics we focus on when deciding who to reach.
And if you are fed up with not hearing back from any of your outreach like we were, don’t worry, we are going to share with you the secrets to our successful outreach strategy.
Our four steps to success:
- Website prospecting
- Mutually beneficial outreach approach
- Supporting our outreach blogs
- Build and sustain long term relationships
Step 1 – Website Prospecting
Before any blogger outreach, we first chose the keywords we wanted to rank for and then used the metrics below to analyse and pick the most fitted bloggers.
1. Domain age – We use the domain age to analyse and quickly determine the potential quality of the site. In general, the older a site is, the more trust it has built in Google’s eyes and the longer it has been around, the more time it has had to create a sizeable backlink profile with real ranking power.
2. Referring domains – The number of referring domains a blogger has and the authority of those referrals all impact the quality of the link they can give. If the links they own are more relevant to the niche keywords that we would like to rank for, then the more valuable they will be.
3. Domain relevancy – Relevancy has been considered a ranking factor for quite a long time, and we always use it to narrow down our blogger outreach options. We carefully analyse all the other existing articles and keywords to make sure we only reach out to those who are most suited.
4. Page relevancy – Similar to domain relevancy, we take into account page relevancy for each blogger outreach. I know from experience that one of the keys to achieving maximum success is to choose bloggers who already have relevant posts to my product and services. This way, I can 100% capture audiences that are already reading and engaging with similar posts.
5. Website design – It is not a secret that a well designed SEO and user friendly website will rank better in search engines. Therefore, the better the design, the higher the site will rank, and the more authority it can pass through the link to us.
6. Anchor text in the link – For a while, I monitored our own rankings closely and found that links with anchor text closely related to our targeted keywords provided us with so much more value.
Step 2. Mutually Beneficial Outreach Approach
At the beginning of our blogger outreach journey, we found the whole process to be slow and painful.
My team and I reached out to multiple websites and requested links, but most of our attempts did not even get a response.
We recognised the increase in the popularity of blogger outreach called for a fresh approach.
For most bloggers, their blog is their job, and there are far too many companies who reach out and offer low quality content that disregards the blogger’s whole platform and audience.
So we focused on providing value by creating original articles that were engaging and written with their target audience in mind.
But let’s be clear writing a great post is not easy and takes a lot of planning, research and practice.
The secret to our approach:
1. Original – We researched to find ideas and pitched topics that we believed they needed on their blogs. For every article, we crafted unique, attention grabbing and strong titles. We also write the posts ourselves because we know Google loves original content.
2. Well researched – Instead of just writing low quality content, we focused on writing and sourcing only accurate information.
3. Engaging content – One of the causes of outreach failure is offering content that is not engaging. Bloggers want posts that can engage their audience because that is how they build loyalty and trust. So by focusing on writing promising introductions, we got more and more bloggers to accept our outreach and content.
4. Structure – We designed the structure of each article based on the blogger’s platform and audience and avoided using one template for all. When it came to adding visuals, we only ever created relevant and informative images that were useful to readers and enhanced the content.
5. SEO – We research keywords and fully optimise every article to help it rank and drive traffic to the blogger’s website. This practice makes it clear that our blogger outreach is not just about earning a backlink and that our content will contribute to their website and help build their credibility.
Step 3. Supporting Our Outreach Blogs
This is where most agencies and other businesses fail. Once they have the link, they move on.
Instead, we stayed in touch and made sure to promote our outreach blogs wherever we could.
Social media – We share the content on all our social media platforms, reply to comments and make sure to engage as much as we can to improve the content’s visibility and user engagement. This is a win-win for our bloggers, our clients and us.
Email marketing – Depending on the client and the content that we have produced, if we see fit, we share the content with their email subscription list.
Support our bloggers – Supporting our bloggers is easy, we just make sure they know that we care about their content. We work with them across multiple digital channels, follow them on social media and make sure to like, share and engage with their content.
Step 4. Build And Sustain Long Term Relationships
Since we treated every blogger outreach with care, we have built lasting relationships that have led to more link building opportunities for our clients and us.
The extra attention we paid to create high quality content for our bloggers also helped us become regular contributors on their platforms.
They were happy to offer us more links in the future because they liked our work, and there was mutual trust.
So much so that when they couldn’t help, they referred us to their friends who had relevant blogs.
Over time, we managed to create a large database of high authority bloggers.
The database gives us the ability to successfully reach out and earn our clients quality backlinks from some of the best credible sources.