I once worked for a fitness coaching company that was solely concerned with helping people achieve their fitness goals, but I always felt there was more. Personally, I wanted to put their name out there and establish their expertise. I started with creating useful contents, such as workout plans, tips, and advice. I then proceeded to contact some fitness influencers with large followings for more credibility and visibility for the brand, and it felt like getting a stamp of approval from a trusted friend. Now, how is this story related to backlink outreach?
The fitness coaching brand is the website, the popular fitness influencers are the other websites, and then sharing my content with their followers is a form of backlink. Got it now? Moving forward, I will take you guys on all there is to know about a backlink outreach, as well as some extra tips that worked for me.
What Is Backlink Outreach?
Backlink outreach refers to contacting other websites to secure a link back to a page on your website. The backlink sends digital signals to search engines that your site contains valuable information, ultimately boosting your SEO ranking. It’s a strategy used to increase the number of backlinks to a website. This can be done through email outreach, social media or networking.
Effective backlink outreach involves creating engaging content that others will want to link to and building relationships with website owners and influencers in the building. Backlink outreach simply involves marketers contacting other websites to secure links back to their sites, aiming to improve their search engine rankings and online visibility.
Key Points
- Backlink outreach entails contacting websites to gain links back, enhancing SEO credibility.
- Effective outreach demands strategy, personalised pitches, and metric tracking for optimisation.
- Backlink outreach is about getting other websites to link back to yours, which boosts SEO ranking. It requires strategy, personalised pitches, and tracking metrics for success.
Types of Backlink Outreach
There are different types of backlink outreach and they include:
#1. Broken Link Building
Here, the first thing to do is to pick a tool. You might decide to go for Semrush or Ahrefs; they both work fine. Then you think about the sites you want the links from and this site should be in your niche. You can use your tools to find links that go nowhere (broken links) , something like 404 pages. Don’t just go for anyone because it’s not all that will work for you; find something that fits your content.
Have you seen one? Nice. Make sure your content is already prepared and ready to shine on the spot. It needs to be useful and on topic. To reach out, you have to contact the site owner or the person in charge. The conversation must be friendly but straight to the point. Give them the idea of using your content to fix the broken link. Don’t forget to tell them the exact spot of a dead link on their site. And that’s it. You are doing them a favour and you get a link back.
#2. A-B-C Link Exchanges
It is also described as a swapping link. It simply means you will like a site and the owners of the site will link back. It’s a very classical and easy way to get backlinks. One thing you should know before you venture out is that Google is not a fan of this back-and-forth game.
Do you still want to find your way around it? Cool, that’s why I’m here anyway to pull you through. You need to create and set up another site that’s a third site. You must not create the third site yourself; you just need another site. Then you will use it to swap links. That way, you are not directly trading links with your main site.
Confused? Let me explain with an example so read carefully. So I’m going to mention three sites: Site A (which is a fitness site), Site B (a relatable health site) and Site C (a government health organisation website). That’s my third website. So here is what I do: I reach out to Site C and ask them to add a link to my website (Site A) on their resource page under a relevant category like “Fitness Resources.”. Since Site C is a government website, they are more likely to link to me if I can demonstrate that my website provides valuable and accurate information.
Once Site C adds the link, I can then ask Site B to link back to me (Site A) in return. I can say something like, “Hey Site B, I noticed we both have links on the government health organisation website (Site C). Would you be willing to link to my website as well, since we both provide information on health and fitness?”
By getting a link from Site C first, I’ve established a connection with Site B through a third party, which makes it more likely that they will agree to link to me.
#3. Relationship-based Linking
I think this is the most popular currently. It consists of communities of bloggers and editors who can exchange links easily through software. All you need is links from even one website that you can offer to these bloggers; if they like your offer, they will link you back. You can join them almost instantly and start exchanging backlinks. It’s easier than others.
#4. Unlinked Mentions
You will use tools such as Ahrefs or Semrush to find where your brand pops up online. Does it link to you? If yes, skip to the next one, but if not, it’s time to reach out. Remember, your target is mentions WITHOUT links.
Explain the situation to the owner of the website and suggest that adding a link will further help the readers. They should be something you will be offering in return because you are asking for a favour. It can be exclusive content, a discount, or a link to another website. If you get no reply, you can follow up because most emails get missed.
#5. Skyscraper Technique
This is very competitive because it requires creating an improved version of an article with numerous backlinks. You need to first identify an article that has numerous backlinks. Create an improved and better version of the article and convince those who linked to the original piece to link to your content instead.
If you want to speed up the process, you can directly contact those sites that link to your competitor’s articles and suggest a new version to them. Aim for something that sets your article apart from the original one.
Since yours is the newer version, it should contain updated and more accurate information or the incorporation of insights from recognised industry experts.
#6. Connectively (HARO) and Similar
Their own unique way of building backlinks is to respond to journalist queries. This platform helps to provide expert quotes to writers who will link back to their websites if they like their output.
But it has a limitation: you can only link to your homepage. It’s also hit-or-miss and requires numerous pitches to see significant results. If you are looking for less competition, you can go for the paid platform. These paid platforms are not saturated, offering better chances of success. Platforms such as Terkel and Qwoted can send you journalist’s queries to which you can respond, potentially earning valuable backlinks.
#7. Digital PR
In digital PR, you have to get your brand to be popular online and use those valuable backlinks. First of all, dig up some interesting data; the most valuable is from government sites, Google Trends, and statistics sites. When you get one, your job is to find the story there and make it interesting.
Now create something unique and shareable. It could be anything, including a blog. Now read it slowly as you are reading and think about who would want to read it. If you are targeting journalists and bloggers to cover your topic, tools like Woodpecker are perfect to reach them. It lets you send personalised emails to a bunch of people without breaking a sweat.
You can create infographics about the benefits of meditation, and then you can find relevant journalists who write about wellness using tools like Pitchbox. Then you can send it to the journalists using software like Woodpecker. Your email can go like this: “Hey, I saw you are into wellness. Check out this interesting information on meditation. I thought your readers might dig in.”. If the journalists like the infographics and include them in their next article, they will link back to your websites.
How to Conduct Backlink Outreach
It’s not just about shooting off emails and hoping for the best. You need a strategy, a clear message, and a bit of charm to cut through the noise. Here are some of the best practices:
#1. Discover the Right Website
The best way to identify the best website for backlinks is, first of all, by examining the backlink profiles of your competitors. You can use tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to uncover potential websites. The main thing to pay close attention to is the metrics: check if the ratio of all the referring domains to linking domains is at least 1:1. Evaluate the organic traffic and domain rating (DR) for specific link insertions. Then examine the blog post-level traffic and links.
The cache date of an article is very important since it indicates how updated and fresh the content of the article is and how often Google visits it. This is important to most people considering link inserts. To check it, put cache before the URL.
Access the general traffic of a site, make sure it has an upward trajectory and make sure it’s also a relevant site to avoid wasting time. You can know how relevant it is by checking what the website is ranking for. If it’s in your niche, then it’s your best bet.
This step is necessary to get the most beneficial websites but you ve got to know who you are going to target.
#2. Find the Correct Prospects
Focus on website owners, SEO managers, marketing managers, and link-building specialists who are most likely to engage with your request. They are the ones to contact if you want to find the right prospects for your link-building outreach. LinkedIn can be your starting point for identifying these professionals within managers and organisations.
No matter how interesting and attractive you think your email is, you won’t get responses if it’s not relevant to the person you contacted. This means that finding the correct prospects is as important as crafting a great email. Here is a table to show you who to contact at different points.
| Link Building Tactic | Types of Prospects |
|---|---|
| Broken link building | People who are linking to a dead page about your target |
| Podcast link building | People with podcasts relating to your niche |
| Skyscraper Technique | People who are linking to an inferior page about a topic |
| Unlinked mentions | People who have mentioned but not linked to you |
| Guest blogging | People who are likely to accept your guest post pitches |
#3. Find Their Contact Details
Once you have a list of people to reach out to, the next thing is to find their contact information, which is usually their email in this case. You can use an email lookup tool like Hunter.io to find their email, but you have to input their first name, last name and the domain of your target prospect.
The interesting thing about this email lookup tool is that it allows you to upload a CSV list of names and domains to prevent stressing yourself out from searching for hundreds of emails one by one.
#4. Send a Personality Pitch
Found the person?? Then half of the battle has been won. The best fight is to get the person to actually listen to or pay attention to you. Take a look at this For someone to link to you, the following must happen:
- Your email must be read by them
- They must be convinced to check out your content
- They must open the target page and complete all administrative tasks
- Linking and swapping out must occur
Most people don’t care enough to do all these things because it’s a lot. That’s why there is more to link outreach than just writing the perfect email. There are three questions you need to answer as you are crafting your nice email.
- Why should they open your email? You need to focus on your subject line to capture their attention
- Why should they read your email? You need to write the body of the email in a way to hook them in
- Why should they link to you? Your content needs to be link-worthy. What do you have in it for them?
#5. Follow up but Do Not Spam
Following up is important in backlink outreach, but you have to remember to avoid crossing into spam territory. One or two follow-ups are enough to do the work. If there’s no response after two attempts, they are probably not interested. There is no need to spam the other person with countless follow-up emails, hoping for a different outcome. If they are not interested, spamming won’t change their mind.
To streamline your process, schedule these follow-ups in advance using Google’s email schedule function. Tools Like woodpeckers can automate this process. For extra help, I have created a detailed checklist that covers these steps, just for your convenience:
Backlink Outreach.Pdf
Why Backlinks Are Important in SEO
There are a lot of reasons why Backlinks are important in SEO. High-quality backlinks are the foundation of any good strategy. few of the important ones include
#1. It Acts as a Recommendation
Think of backlinks as approval from other sites. The more quality backlinks you get, the higher your site’s credibility. Each backlink you get acts as a vote of confidence, increasing your credibility and also signalling to search engines that your content is valuable.
#2. It Drives Organic Traffic Signalling
This is one of the best thing about backlinking. When you get high-quality backlink, it will not only lead visitors to your site but search engines like Google also use backlinks as a key factor in determining the relevance of your site. Boosting your credibility with Google can result in higher rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs).
#3. It Increases Visibility and Page Indexing
The faster the search engine can index your site, the quicker you will see pages start ranking for relevant search keywords, which will create increased visibility for your brand. In a situation where organic traffic is not enough, having backlinks from a reputable website can help the search engines find and index your pages faster.
Goals of Backlink Outreach Campaign
There are a lot of achievements that come with using backlink outreach. I will list a few of them below. They include
- Improve overall brand awareness and reach a wider audience through mentions and backlinks on external platforms
- Strengthen the overall SEO strategy by acquiring high-quality, diverse backlinks from relevant sources
- Increase website visibility and organic search ranking through quality backlinks from authoritative websites
- Enhance brand credibility and establish industry expertise by securing backlinks from reputable sources
- Drive targeted referral traffic to your website, generating potential leads and increasing conversion
Tracking and Measuring the Success of Your Backlink Outreach
Tracking the success of your backlink outreach efforts is vital for optimising your strategy and achieving desired results. Here are some ways to track the success
- Monitor referral traffic from backlinks to see if they are attracting valuable visitors to your site. You can use Google analytics tool to gain insights into the actions of these visitors
- Check the social media engagement generated by the outreach efforts, such as numbers of comments, likes, follows, and shares
- Measure the number of backlinks acquired from each outreach effort. Make sure they are relevant to determine their impact on your websites ranking and visibility
- Track the conversation rate of your outreach emails and measure how much recipients engage with your content.
Tracking and measuring this outreach success is to enable you to refine your approach if necessary, focus on effective techniques and achieve better results in enhancing your online presence and organic rankings.
Effective Tips When Building Backlink Outreach
The following are additional tips you can implement while building backlink outreach:
#1. Do Not Overpersonalize
Some SEOs prefer 100% customisation for the person you are targeting; this is known as the snipper approach to link outreach. But from my experience, personalisation is not better. I have seen a lot of people link building campaigns that sent hyper-personalised emails and got no results. So don’t waste your time personalising 100% just to obtain minute gains.
#2. Avoid Templates
To be very honest, I have deleted a lot of templates in my inbox. Why? The problem here is not just the template but the bad ones. A Lot of people don’t know how to use it so they end up giving a meaningless template. You can expect to copy and paste one from a blog post and hope to achieve success. When I see templates like this, I don’t even bother reading them. Use a template with dynamic variables if you can’t, then avoid templates entirely. You can achieve this using pitchbox and buzzstream
#3. Build a Brand
This has worked for a lot of brands, including ahrefs. few years ago, they published a link-building case study. They got a lot of nice comments but the top ones were about how they got their results because of their brand and that’s true. The takeaway here isn’t that you should repeat the process with an unknown website. The takeaway is that more SEO should be focused on building a brand. If your brand is recognisable, it solves the stranger problem—people know you, like you, and are more likely to link. Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day.
#4. Build Relationships With People in Your Industry
You should build relationships with people in your industry before you start building backlink outreach. It’s easier to help people you know than strangers. Start your outreach even before you ask for a link. Don’t rely only on emails. Direct messages on LinkedIn and X, as well as phone calls, also work.
Which Tool Is Best for Backlinks?
There are a lot of fantastic tools for backlink outreach. They include
- SemRush
- Ahrefs
- Pitchbox
- Hunter
- Buzzsumo
- Buzzstream
Which Website Has the Most Backlinks?
Google, Facebook, and YouTube are the behemoths of the Internet, with the largest number of backlinks worldwide. Between the three domains, each grossed just under half a million backlinks on the Majestic Million database.
How Many Backlinks Should I Create per Day?
A general guideline is 5–10 new quality backlinks, perhaps. Going above 15+ new backlinks per day, especially low-quality ones, risks triggering spam filters or penalties.
Conclusion
Coming to the end of the article, I know you have learned a lot, because personally, I noted down a full coverage of this topic in this guide. Without wasting any time, I hope you start implementing what you learnt from me as soon as possible. Don’t expect to get feedback in all outreach. Some days you will get a response and other days you won’t but don’t give up.
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