According to Ahrefs, almost half of the top 10 pages have backlinks. This number, on the one hand, speaks of the trust that the Google bot has from the referral mass of sites, and on the other hand, it fuels interest in such a service as outreach. This material explains what outreach marketing is and why it is an eCommerce project.
What is outreach?
Outreach is a promotion method that involves personal agreements with site owners or bloggers about advertising on a specific web resource. This often means placing material with backlinks, banners, or mentions of the brand. Outreach can be called the younger brother of link building, only more human, aimed at people, and not at achieving technical goals.
The main goal of outreach as a service is to create mutually beneficial backlinks to improve organic ranking and attract a new audience. Outreach not only contributes to increasing the site’s referral mass but also greatly increases brand recognition and fosters trust on the part of the audience.
Advantages of outreach marketing
The opportunity will cover its CA. Outreach is a cold process by its very nature. It means the mass building of contacts with those who are not interested in this in advance. But there is one fundamental difference – you choose those web resources that, in your opinion, will help promote the product among the audience that suits you.
Quick result. Outreach can quickly find and attract your customer. If we talk about the growth of positions in issuance, then, on average, it will take from a week to a month.
Personalized advertising. You have already heard about the importance of personalization in email marketing. Remember that the Open Rate of personalized letters reaches 82%, and the CTR is 75%. Personalization is also important in outreach marketing and two directions at once. Personalization significantly increases the chances of achieving the desired result when contacting publishers. And posting on blogs and sites where your target audience spends time is another personalized way to make a statement about your brand.
Disadvantages of outreach marketing
The risk of wasting time. In the process of outreach, you cannot do without a preliminary analysis and preparation of a list of resources whose audience is most interesting to your business. To skip this stage is to waste your time with a high probability.
Outreach is a time-consuming process. This is a whole system of repetitive and sometimes tedious actions performed manually: analysis, determination of target resources, preparation of a list of contacts, and occasionally lengthy negotiations. They are waiting, follow-ups, waiting again. And so until the Google bot notices your link, indexed and published. For this reason, some companies hire a link builder or even an outreach worker. Such a specialist already has a developed base of quality websites for outreach and is also well-versed in the features of the tool itself.
Financial risks. According to Ahrefs, the average cost of posting one link is $361.44. A guest post can cost $77.80. Yes, outreach is an expensive service.
Outreach: a working strategy
The choice of a working outreach strategy depends on the brand’s goals, the niche, the chosen format, and , the circumstances in which the business is located. But no outreach strategy is complete without the following:
- analysis;
- template preparation and establishing contacts with bloggers/publishers;
- negotiations with site owners;
- content preparation;
- tracking results.
Now in more detail.
Analysis. We analyze competitors’ backlinks to understand which web resources are popular with your audience. We pay special attention to those who have already placed at the top of the search results. Based on the received data, we compile a list of resources that will most likely be useful for our outreach strategy.
When analyzing the control profile of competitors, we recommend using comprehensive tools for SEO analysis, for example, Ahrefs or SemRush. We use Ahrefs heavily. To find the most relevant online resources, open the Site Explorer tab and look for backlinks of the main competitors, that is, sites from the TOP-10.
What interests us:
- language;
- traffic;
- link type: Dofollow, UGC, Sponsored, Content.
Next, we proceed to the analysis of search results by frequent and relevant queries. For this, we use the Content Explorer built into the ahrefs.com website.
We evaluate the search results. For this, we use a combination of operators, for example, “request” + inurl”.
We are creating a list of donor sites for our outreach strategy. The quality of the donor can be determined according to the following criteria:
- Position in search results. The higher the better.
- Inbound traffic. Traffic is about trust, that is, this site is useful and interesting for its audience;
- Number of outgoing links. We immediately reject websites that sell links through exchanges, search engines will most likely consider
- them unreliable and send them to spam. In addition, the weight of the transferred link will be much lower.
- The number of pages in the index.
- Content quality. We evaluate the regularity of publications, the nature of comments, the presence or absence of errors.