How to do SEO outreach

Do you want to know how to do SEO outreach?

Your company's SEO outreach efforts will determine the success or failure of your website. SEO outreach refers to all the activities, processes, etc. that bring your company's website and its potential customers closer. The aim of all SEO outreach efforts is ultimately to get more sales, leads, and other marketing information. Search engine optimization is always a work in process; there is always a scope for improvement. An important part of this outreach process is backlinking.

Backlinking is still considered to be the central pivot of all your outreach processes. Without backlinking, your website will not get the ranking it deserves and it will lose out on most of the traffic and leads. These market opportunities will be grabbed by your competitors. Backlinking takes time and is dependent upon the quality of your content and the value it delivers to your readers. Unethical backlinking is penalized by search engines.

SEO Outreach strategy- An Overview

SEO outreach is simply not just pitching your client's content to off-site publishers, its goal is much broader. This process touches many facets of SEO as well as your client's branding, marketing and sales strategies. Your company's SEO outreach process hinges on backlinking. These backlinks should connect to the company's website in such a way that the latter is visible to search engines like Google, Bing, etc. More and better backlinks mean more leads and more revenues.

Any search engine optimization agency should have 6 pillars in its SEO outreach process. The first one is sticking to best practices in link building. Webmasters must keep on finding what is recommended and what is not by Google and other search engines. You also need to identify your Target Audience or Markets. What kind of buyers will be interested in your content, and why? Ask yourself - who are the right publishers - which publishers complement your content?

Moving onto persuading publishers - how do you convince your potential partners to link their content with yours? How can you forge stronger relationships with your partners? Is your content consistent with that of off-site publishers? Conversely, is their content in sync with yours? Finally, your SEO process must be open to modifications. Analyze what works and what doesn't with your process. Does your SEO process generate revenues? Is it targeting the right audience?

How to do SEO outreach?

This section explains in detail the SEO outreach process and all the underlying factors. There are at least 3 key drivers for the success of your process: Relevance, Creativity, and Value. Relevance means your publishers must have relevant content for your target audience. Your content should also add value to your buyers. You won't get the attention of your publishers unless you have very high-quality content on your website that benefits publishers.

Even if you have high-quality content, you'd still need lots of creativity and imagination to earn the trust and respect of your publishers. Please note that these 3 key drivers are not just prized by your competitors, they are also valued by Google and the other search engines. Now let's look at the pillars of the outreach process. First off: link building - is the content relevant to the linking as well as the linked pages?

Do Google and other search engines trust the linking page? While linking, avoid those sites that have been penalized for unethical practices. Look out for old websites, those websites which update content regularly, and those which follow the best practices in web design. In addition, check websites that are popular and draw large volumes of high-quality traffic. These websites must have a good number of social shares (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) too.

Outreach process - citation & trust flow

Please avoid websites that have a very high number of outbound links. These links may have been purchased by the publisher. Connecting with these websites will harm your website. Check out the citation and the trust-flow in the connecting website. Citation flow refers to the number of links pointing to a site, while trust flow is the overall quality of links. Please check whether there is an adequate balance between citation and trust-flows in the SEO process.

While you are targeting off-site publishers, please check for website diversity. This means your backlinks' distribution should be as natural as possible. If your link profile comes from the same kind of websites, Google and other search engines will probably penalize your website. Your SEO outreach process must also consider domain and page authority of the linking website. The older the linking website, more effective will be your outreach process.

How to identify relevant publishers? Your search agency needs to talk to the client's staff to find out relevant websites, blogs, and other resources for link building. By conducting some advanced searches on Google, Bing, etc., the search agency can find out those publishers that are open to link building. Simultaneously, the SEO agency can investigate the link building activities of the competitors, and discover publishers which are open to accepting guest posts.

Pros and Cons

Pros of the SEO outreach process

Improves rankings in search rankings
Increases organic website traffic

Cons of SEO outreach

It takes time
If not done well, your website may be penalized

SEO outreach process - more tips

Your content has a large role to play in your SEO outreach activity. Content development is usually a collaborative effort between the agency and the client. In most cases, the agency takes a lead in content development. This process comprises 4 key steps. In the first step, the agency identifies the big picture. Next, it develops themes around that big picture. For example, a manufacturer selling 'green' products would emphasize sustainability, environment, etc.

Next, the agency would develop the 'secret sauce' of the client website. This means identifying and developing key topics around those themes. Content production is the next activity. Agencies and clients need to work together to bring out articles, brochures, whitepapers, and other meaningful information. Content production is largely the responsibility of the agency. The client just gives technical inputs to the latter. This stage can be followed up by sending emails to customers, and other partners.

Lastly, the agency and the client analyze all the content that has been published. Redundant articles are discarded while topical ones are included in the website. All that content which is relevant, and is of value to the customer is retained. This how dynamic and fresh outreach content is generated. Since content development is an iterative process, agencies need to stick to some kind of a production protocol. In the absence of this protocol, confusion would follow.

Topic Development and How to Pitch

It's very difficult to get your articles published in a quality publisher because the competition is so intense. However, you could do a few things to get attention from publishers. For instance, updating an old article - your agency scans all the articles of the targeted publisher and finds one that doesn't have much relevance. The agency, therefore, pitches to the client for writing a new article. Also, updating a missing category: is there a scope for a new category?

Identify a gap within the category - the agency sees there are several gaps in a given category and pitches for writing on those missing topics - or identify inadequate articles. Similarly, your agency finds that some topics haven't been adequately addressed and there is scope for further expansion. Try initiating a debate: This works in opinion-piece publications. If the agency feels a debate or an argument can help its client, it triggers that argument.

Another option is to leverage trending or hot topics - sometimes, your agency spots some topics that need detailed insights. It pitches the publication about its story ideas and presents the client's view cloaked as opinion pieces. Targeting people engaged in social media has also proven effective - often one can see some influencers engaging with the content of the client. The agency can target these people and ask them to write engaging content about the client on 3rd party websites.

Publisher communication and your SEO outreach process

While reaching out to your targeted publishers, two things are very important: scalability and personalization. Every client has to make multiple pitches to multiple publishers in a given month. This means mobilizing resources on a big scale so that your work gets done effectively, and on time. Similarly, your communication to your targeted publishers ought to be customized and personal. Mass mailing the same communication won't help and can only damage the credibility of your client.

So how do you do SEO outreach?

This process rests on some pillars. Those are: posting guest articles or guest posting, adding links to the articles, reaching out to bloggers (also known as blogger outreach), local listings, and writing product reviews and sponsored posts. In addition, many SEO agencies use directories and catalogs, claim unlinked mentions, and recover lost backlinks for the SEO outreach process. Longform articles, research-based posts and infographics do very well in SEO outreach activities.