How to Use Outreach SEO for Link Building: An In-Depth Guide

Depending on your niche, you want to answer only the most relevant queries.

An example query looks like this:

Short, concise, and straight-to-the-point answers work the best. Try to never exceed 300 words, unless a longer answer is specifically asked for; journalists are busy people and they have no time for looking into each essay-length answer.

I’ve found that short, 100-word answers work the best. Answering even one question, but doing that thoroughly, and providing real-life experiences does the trick.

This is only three sentences worth of text, but it still got used and linked. This tactic is completely white-hat, and the link is as natural as it can get.

Additionally, if the media outlet field is not anonymous, you should always check out its parameters. Our rule of thumb is that anything with less than 5,000 organic traffic is pretty much a no-go, unless it’s extremely targeted, and the audience fits right with what we’re looking for.

Linkody Backlink Checker – Competitor Analysis

Linkody has been a vital part of our strategy at Chilli Fruit for a good while now, as it provides excellent data and is presented in an easily-readable form. The tool is a backlink checker which analyses websites in terms of their off-page profile.

Everything starts with establishing who the main competitors are. The more referring domains they have, the better, as it means there will be more opportunities for outreach.

Over 7,600 opportunities right there.

The referring domain of each of our competitors is filtered in terms of their DR; Linkody integrates with Moz’s database, so the metrics are as accurate as they get. As soon as the app has gathered the referring domains, we filter them and put everything into a spreadsheet for easy access. We then evaluate each site in terms of its relevance, traffic, and type, then choose the preferred template to reach out with. This works best with SaaS companies since they seem to have the most competition to choose from.

The logic of that entire ordeal is plain and simple — if a site has linked to a competitor, why wouldn’t they link to our client?

SEMRUSH and Screaming Frog – Building a list for outreach

One particular feature of SEMRUSH is Rank. It’s a database of websites in specific countries listed by traffic. SEMRUSH allows you to export up to 30,000 websites; which is a great starting point when conducting a campaign for one country.

Of course, all of these sites are only filtered by traffic so you don’t know which ones are good for outreach.

Sites as shown in SEMRUSH.

Sites after exporting them to CSV.

To filter them out, I like to use Screaming Frog, a website crawler.

First, I need to set the configuration.

All the boxes have to be unticked here, as we’re only looking at the code.

I only tick the first four boxes in the Extraction tab.

It’s vital to set the maximum number of redirects to crawl to 20. This lets Screaming Frog reach the final version of the site and scrape the necessary information.

Finally, tick the top four boxes.

After I’ve exported the sites from SEMRUSH, I filter them by traffic and put them into Screaming Frog bit by bit, for example 2,000 sites at a time.

I then crawl the URLs and pull out meta descriptions, titles, and H1s. This gives me some info about what the sites are about, and makes it way easier to sort the wheat from the chaff.

After the crawl is complete, I put everything into a spreadsheet and begin reaching out!

Ahrefs

There is one particular feature in Ahrefs that is incredibly useful when looking for sites to reach out to.

It’s called Content Explorer, which lets you find pages within the exact niche you’re looking for. You enter a keyword, and the tool provides you with a list of pages from all over the internet which contain that particular phrase.

Over 1,700 potential opportunities.

Still, while SEMRUSH lacks a little something in terms of providing you with information about the site, Ahrefs’ Content Explorer is unable to establish what country the traffic is from.

That is pretty unfortunate because such a feature would make our lives so much easier.

After I’ve gathered the sites from Ahrefs, I again filter them and look for some golden nuggets.

Hunter, Voila Norbert, and Find That Lead

All three of these tools are email-finding and contact list building software. They search for any information that can be used to find the owner of a certain email, such as their name, location, company name or title within said company. Hunter and Find That Lead are great for checking out the entire domain for email addresses, whereas Voila Norbert comes in handy when looking for the email of a particular person.

Bouncer is an email verification tool that allows for checking the validity of single or bulk email addresses. While all of the previous tools have this feature, Bouncer is much more effective in determining whether an email address is real. Not once have I had a situation where Bouncer told me that the email address was valid and it bounced back, whereas with other tools, this has happened on multiple occasions.

How to use the outreach process for link building

There are a couple of steps and link building best practices that are worth considering.

Finding appropriate websites.

First of all, you should establish some criteria that make a prospect a good one.

Is the site thought-leading or authority-based?

Informative, educational, and/or entertaining?

Proprietary, related to the industry you work in?

What minimum traffic level are you aiming for?

Be sure to set your (and/or your client’s!) expectations straight from the beginning, so that you don’t bite off more than you can chew.

The next step is to figure out which sites have the best authority, and then follow the link to each of them individually. The more sites that you find, the more potential you have for outreach.

Ideally, the websites should be within your niche, or at least adjacent to it. Not only does this increase the value of potential backlinks, but improves your chances of getting them in the first place.

At times, you may find yourself in a situation where there’s simply a low amount of opportunities within your niche. A good way out of that is to go for exchanges with SaaS businesses. These often have high parameters, and this alone can get you to the top of search results.

After you’ve established what you’re looking for, utilise the tools mentioned above to find these sites.

Hunting for emails

Now that you’ve got your list, you need a way of contacting the webmaster. By using Hunter and Find That Lead, I’m able to find the email address about 90% of the time. In the event that I can’t locate it, I go to LinkedIn and look there. FTL has a built-in LinkedIn email finding feature. If I still can’t find what I’m looking for, I message support. On the off chance that it works, it’s worth trying that way as well. For one, you might get redirected to your target’s marketing department immediately.

I like to keep my website database and emails in one spreadsheet for clarity.

Your choice of email address types is pivotal here. Support and sales will rarely land you a reply, let alone a partnership of any sorts. The most success I’ve had was with messaging somebody that takes care of SEO or other marketing efforts. Oftentimes, these people know what link exchanges and guest posting are, which is half the battle. Customer service specialists rarely care about such issues.

There’s also the option of contact forms. Although tedious, using these lands a pretty good response rate.

Email hunting tools aren’t always that great for foreign sites. German webmasters, for example, like to practice putting spaces in between characters of email addresses to prevent tools from scraping them:

Still, Germany is pretty easy to handle manually, as most of their domains have a page called Impressum, or Imprint in English, wherein an email address can be found.

That is just one example of a country-specific characteristic, each state has its own culture and you can expect different things when going through the site.

Crafting the perfect message

The message depends on which tactic you employ.

Blogger outreach

When looking to publish a guest post, you’ll need a truly convincing and well-written pitch. The topics you propose to write about have to be in accordance with the content that’s already on the site. A good way of finding topics for a specific website is to investigate to see what their blog is missing.

Be sure to include your past content in the pitch so that your respondent can see the value you can bring to their blog. More often than not, the webmaster will appreciate your interest in their blog, as long as you’re concise in your message and offer some real insights.

Partnerships

Online businesses like to exchange links since this works to their benefit. To make sure that the process is as easy as possible for the webmaster, a good practice is to find blog posts on their site that you think would benefit from adding your link to them and send them in your message.

Going for a two-way exchange is the best for your site, as you don’t have to add any links to your pages. Instead, you get to provide the backlink on a different site for your partner; your link juice doesn’t suffer, you get a link, and your partner gets a link, so everybody is happy.

There’s always the option of offering money, too. This works particularly well with information and authority websites. These aren’t as willing to go for link exchange, as they don’t have any other way of making money besides advertising; unlike online businesses such as SaaS companies. Nevertheless, it’s imperative that you’re careful when going for paid links, since this tactic is frowned upon by Google.

In all of these cases, the message should be straight-to-the-point. You’ve got something of value to offer, and you’ve got something to gain. Describing both of those things works best. Keep it polite, short, and sweet so as not to waste anybody’s time. Nobody likes to get essays in their inbox.

It’s worth mentioning that including too many links in your message reduces its deliverability rate. We’ve also had multiple accounts where putting both too many links and images has caused the email to be deleted automatically.

Contributing to roundups

Roundups are an excellent way of scoring powerful editorial links. These often go viral and are, as a result, hugely influential. The more high-profile the roundup, the better.

Since roundups have strict deadlines, and are usually published at a set time, you’ll need to pitch your idea early in order to get it accepted. If they accept your contribution – which is often contingent on paying for their service or offering them something of value – be sure not to miss the deadline.

The post can be submitted as a guest article, or you might be able to get them to include your link in the roundup at no charge if they like your idea or have space for it.

Follow-up messages

If you didn’t get a response from your initial outreach email, it’s important to follow up. This way you can show that you’re serious about the relationship and have some patience. Send the follow up after a couple of days, and another one after one and a half to two weeks have passed.

It might be worth going for a more informal tone in this case so as not to come off too pushy or desperate; simply keep things friendly but don’t sound clingy by being overly enthusiastic.

If they still don’t reply after a third email, it’s best to stop there. Alternatively, you could contact them on social media. When you’re sure that you’ve exhausted all of your possibilities with that particular person, either stop, or look for another email address.

During the holiday season, people are often out of office. Don’t get discouraged, and, more importantly, be patient. The more messages you send out, the better your results will be in the end.

Streamlining the process

Make sure that you’re using spreadsheets to track all of your efforts. Here’s what an example spreadsheet can look like:

If you’re sending out thousands of messages, it’s easy to lose track of what you’re doing – which leads to lost opportunities. Doing periodical inbox checks is what works the best.

Each week, I prepare another spreadsheet with opportunities that we’ve found for the following week. This way, I can go through it and see what’s worth contacting and what isn’t.

Another trick I use is adding the email to Google Tasks Board to respond to it later.

While replying as quickly as possible is generally good practice, it’s sometimes worth keeping someone hanging for a couple of days. This is especially useful when going for paid opportunities and trying to negotiate the price. If the webmaster follows up, it’s a telltale sign that they’re desperate for your business, which is solid grounds for negotiation.

Another useful tip to consider is looking into a website’s parameters when negotiating the terms.

Similar drops in traffic are a valid argument.

Wrap-up

Outreach is a great way to increase your website’s rankings. By reaching out to other websites and blogs, you’ll find more opportunities for guest posts or lead generation. The tips in this post should help guide you through the process of creating outreach emails that are effective at generating links and leads from popular industry websites. If these principles sound interesting, but overwhelming, consider partnering with one of our skilled marketing experts who can take care of everything for you! Perhaps you have already used some of these techniques on your own? Let us know what worked best for you in the comments section below.