Outreach for SEO
Because outreach can make or break a company’s SEO results, we created this Outreach White Paper to help company leadership evaluate an SEO agency’s ability to formulate a winning outreach strategy and execute it to perfection with the right processes
and techniques.
In SEO campaigns, the primary goal of outreach is to create valuable backlinks from off-site websites to the client website. These links improve organic rankings and expose the company to new audiences, driving highly qualified organic and referral traffic to the client. Often, outreach has the secondary goals of extending brand awareness and strengthening credibility.
Outreach is more important than ever to successful SEO:
The outcome of effective outreach: Greater organic search engine visibility and potentially explosive growth in high-quality website traffic, sales leads and online revenue.
While some think of outreach narrowly, as the process of pitching content to off-site publishers, true outreach is much broader, touching many aspects of SEO, as well as the client’s sales, marketing and branding strategies.
The goal of SEO outreach is link building — that is, creating backlinks to the company website that enhance its organic visibility on Google and other search engines. As the outreach campaign progresses, the company’s improved visibility attracts more qualified traffic, increasing lead and online revenue production. Also, the backlinks themselves drive referred traffic from the host websites back to the company website — creating a whole new stream of qualified traffic and opportunities for conversion.
With all of this in mind, the SEO agency’s outreach team must cover six very important bases:
All of the areas listed above describe the outreach process at a high level. In the following sections, we look at the most important technical considerations within each area that are necessary for successful outreach.
Strategically, the most important drivers for outreach are:
WORTH NOTING: These elements of relevance, value and creativity are highly prized not only by publishers, but also by Google and target audiences.
Google wants its search engine users to discover relevant, valuable and interesting content — and this is exactly the type of content likely to persuade a company’s targeted prospects to inquire or buy. This example is one of many that illustrates how SEO, marketing and sales operate in harmony when executed properly.
In the previous section we identified six elements of the outreach process. For successful outreach implementation, SEO agencies must be proficient in each. In the following sections, we provide guidance and insight to help you assess an SEO agency’s outreach campaign process from top to bottom.
1. Link Building Best Practices
Backlinks are an extremely important factor in the Google search algorithm. As such, creating good links improves a company’s organic visibility — but creating bad links worsens visibility or has no effect. Thus, clearly understanding what makes a backlink valuable is extremely important to the outreach manager. Key metrics to review include:
Agency Evaluation Tip: SEO agencies use various online tools and internally developed analytics to quantify and measure these various link-building criteria. Asking for documentation on the methodology used to evaluate links — not necessarily to understand the technical aspects of the methodology, but at least to make sure a methodology exists — is worthwhile.
2. Understanding Client Target Markets
When the time comes to create and market a client’s content for link-building purposes, the SEO agency must use creative as well as technical inputs to target publishing websites and develop appropriate content. Often, SEO agencies are technically proficient but lack the creative ability to put their technical skill to use for outreach.
Keep in mind, relevance is an extremely important factor to persuade publishers to accept content, and for potential customers to read and act on that content. Thus, if the SEO agency lacks a clear understanding of the client’s products and services, what drives new business and what drives customer retention, published content will strike readers as inauthentic, irrelevant and therefore untrustworthy. Whatever SEO gains accrue from the backlinks will be negated because of no traffic and no conversions.
Beyond client considerations, the SEO agency must also gain a clear understanding of the client’s market. Since off-site publishers usually reject overly self-promotional content, determining effective topics often involves a discussion of broad industry-related issues rather than client-specific information. For example, a packaging company may have a hard time marketing an article about its own line of tamper-resistant boxes, but have great success marketing one about tamper-resistant packaging strategies in, say, the pharmaceutical sector. To conceptualize, create and market a topic like the latter one, the SEO agency needs to know how the client fits into the big picture.
Further complicating the outreach picture: Content strategies may need to be less direct than the example noted above. For instance, an auto insurance agency may not find a receptive market for articles about auto insurance, as the niche is already crowded with content and the content cannot help but be seen as self-promotional. A better strategy may be to write about an indirectly relevant topic such as automobile safety, or even more specifically, automobile safety for teenage drivers. A strategy along these lines may serve branding objectives as well as SEO — provided the SEO agency understands them.
Agency Evaluation Tip: An SEO agency proficient in outreach insists on thorough client discovery in the initial phases of its SEO campaign. Without covering all the points detailed above, the agency will not be successful in marketing content — let alone managing or collaborating on its creative development.
3. Identifying and Vetting Relevant Publishers
In addition to the technical vetting considerations detailed in Link Building Best Practices above, a number of other techniques are used to create a hit list of potential off-site link- building opportunities. These include:
Agency Evaluation Tip: At one point, guest blogging, a common form of off-site backlink generation, received some bad press because of spamming — in particular, publishing low-quality, non-relevant content purely as a link-building ploy. Today, guest blogging remains a strong SEO strategy but must be conducted using high-quality content to create relevant links. Proficient SEO agencies understand this and emphasize it in their sales presentation.
4. Content Development
A. THE CREATIVE PROCESS.
While developing topics and content usually involves collaboration between the SEO agency and the client, the agency usually spearheads the creative process according to the following four-step process:
Agency Evaluation Tip: Because content development is collaborative and involves a lot of players and communications, SEO agencies need a documented process for content development, overseen by a trained production manager. If the agency lacks either of these, chaos is likely to ensue, leading to shortcomings in content quality.
B. THE SECRET SAUCE: TOPIC DEVELOPMENT AND PITCH TACTICS.
As mentioned earlier, the competition to get articles published is fierce. To capture the interest of publishers and get results for clients, SEO agencies must consider client and publisher needs when formulating topics and structuring outreach campaigns. Here are examples of proven techniques:
Agency Evaluation Tip: Topic development and pitching tactics make or break an outreach campaign. A skilled SEO agency cites examples of successful pitch campaigns, including both a synopsis of the pitch tactic and the performance metrics.
5. Publisher Communication
For effective outreach, mass customization must be the SEO agency’s philosophy. This is a challenging approach requiring both personalization and scalability. Both are exceedingly important.
Let’s explore both areas in detail.
A. PERSONALIZATION TECHNIQUES.
Agency Evaluation Tip: Ask for samples of the SEO agency’s pitch and follow-up emails. In this case, a picture (i.e., sample) is worth a 1,000 words.
B. ATTRIBUTES OF A SCALABLE OUTREACH PROCESS.
Agency Evaluation Tip: An SEO agency should be able to quantify the number of pitches and content placements it executes over any given time period. A prospective client should understand how many overall pitches and placements its campaign would need as a percentage of the agency’s whole. This gives prospective clients a feel for whether the agency has the bandwidth to support it.
6. Review and Analysis
Expert review and analysis of outreach performance is key to successful outreach and SEO campaigns. Certain data points related to outreach are concrete, such as the number of direct backlinks created, whereas others are quite difficult to peg, such as the number of social shares a piece of content has received. Nevertheless, tracking data to get a fuller picture of results is important. Experienced SEO agencies know how to weight data to compensate for margins of error. Important data to review includes:
Agency Evaluation Tip: Reviewing an SEO agency’s monthly outreach/SEO reports provides tremendous insight on how thoroughly it is monitoring its own campaign activity. Careful monitoring means that improvements/tweaks can be made promptly if necessary.
1. WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SEO OUTREACH AND PR?
SEO outreach incorporates many PR best practices, as both involve selling publishers
on talking about clients, and creating content that influences client target markets. The main difference between the two disciplines: PR is primarily concerned with content that improves a client’s image; SEO outreach is primarily concerned with improving a client’s organic search engine visibility to generate website traffic, leads and revenue. The SEO impact of a PR campaign is incidental or non-existent; the PR impact of an SEO outreach campaign is positive but not the focus.
2. ARE THERE GOALS BESIDES BACK LINKS AN SEO OUTREACH CAMPAIGN SHOULD PURSUE?
A well-crafted outreach campaign incorporates branding messages and leads to social sharing of content. These outcomes result in more brand awareness, greater brand affinity and strengthened credibility. While backlinks are generally the most important KPI of an outreach campaign, in the long run, clients measure outreach effectiveness in terms of traffic, and lead and revenue generation. Outreach campaigns that produce backlinks in quantity and of quality correlate most with those items.
3. CAN OUTREACH BE DONE EFFECTIVELY IN-HOUSE?
Successful outreach campaigns require expertise and time — a great deal more time
than many companies realize. If an organization has a well-staffed SEO team, content strategists, copywriters, editors, Web designers, Web developers and PR personnel, it may be in a position to execute outreach internally. Lacking any of those elements, however, the company will get better, faster results by engaging a competent agency.
Outreach for SEO
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