Although the technical aspects of code can be difficult for some SEO professionals, the hardest part is usually obtaining relevant and authoritative links on a consistent basis. SEO professionals who have a broad perspective can use both artistic and scientific methods to get good links without taking shortcuts.
This can be done by creating and promoting content that is appealing and useful to your target audience. The ideal SEO situation would be a never-ending marketing and promotion machine that creates content that resonates with viewers and achieves a goal.
If you want your content to be shared, it needs to be high quality. In a world where there is already a lot of content available and many people are trying to get attention, you need to make sure that your content is better than the rest.
I’m going to talk about some current content marketing trends that can create value for users and help with link building.
When thinking about promotion tactics, it is important to remember that focusing on the user experience will lead to more successful campaigns. This occurs because information that is more affluent will be distributing more frequently, which causes it to gain more credible inks, sources, and signals.
How much effort you should put into your content marketing depends on your goals.
Strategize Versus Seeing What Sticks
Once you have established your key performance indicators, you can then identify themes that will help you to achieve these goals. We try to accomplish too many things without a good plan because there are many factors involved. Before you start putting the content together, go through the following scenarios to help establish an outline:
- SEO Targets: Find the semantic modifiers of keyword buckets that drive context. For example, Starbucks might want to create content to target coffee pod keywords, but K-Cup keywords are just as relevant. This not only works with your own keyword strategy but also your links and citation building. Links are important, but links in content with relevant content are even more so.
- Outreach Targets: What resonates with publishers in your target verticals? What are your customers reading/visiting? Find the influencers via social media, visit the links they post then add them and ask them questions, so later when you need to communicate with them they know who you are.
- Social Sharing: What kinds of content or topics get the most interaction? Use tools like SharedCount to find out which specific pieces of content got hot and went viral. Research bulk content from competitors or industry sites and see what gets the most social sharing, then incorporate that into your current content strategies.
- Social Influencers: Who is sharing this hot kind of content in your niche?- We’re not just talking about bloggers here; you’ll want to find the YouTube and Vine stars and, as previously mentioned, popular Twitter users.
- Ad Enhancement: You have additional opportunities to grow content amplification in paid channels. Plan in advance to do Facebook, Reddit, and StumbleUpon advertising to amplify organic content success.
- Content Lifespan: Can this content live and breathe on its own? Your content should bring residual users forever (not just the short-term). Again, think about the bigger picture and how you can position this content is constantly drive value to the user.
Build Your Content Nucleus
There are different goals for content syndication and lead generation, so it is important to have a strong foundation on your site to make the most of your efforts. You’re not trying to sell something, you’re trying to get people to share your link. Consider the following when deciding the layout and design of the task at hand:
- Syndicated content should not always link directly to “money pages” (usually your sales or product pages) – it should link to an on-page resource, such as blog or informational pages. You do however want to include some call-to-actions, like email subscription and commenting options.
- Once your on-page source attracts links and value, after the initial “pop” of promotion is over, then you can take advantage of the residual search traffic by incorporating more of your “money” page elements into the content and design.
- Infographic image files are great for syndication, but be careful. For example, WordPress users will want to use a Lightbox plugin for viewing the infographic, so people are not linking to image file itself. Create supporting content to go along with the infographic as well.
- HTML 5 is a preferred and indexable way to support graphic assets and still be SEO friendly. Neil Patel’s QuickSprout is a great example of a site that uses indexable infographics in this manner.
Creating awesome content and planning accordingly is only half the battle. When your content is ready to be published, your next step is to find people to consume it. You will start to build a loyal audience that will support and promote your brand.
Remember these steps when finding new eyeballs for your content:
1. Leverage Relationships with Publishers
Can you invite them in the ideation process? Research your audience to see what content they are interested in, then create that content so that you are the first to provide it. Having content partners that you can provide consistent value for is a great way to get exposure for your own brand by piggy-backing off of their brand.
2. Leverage Your Own Audience
You and the people who started following you when you first joined should work together. Give rewards to people who help your cause, build strong relationships with them, and give them what they need to tell others about it. Don’t hesitate to ask your audience for sign of approval (as long as you’re also giving them plenty of reasons to do so).
3. Research Your Prospects
If you have more than one email address associated with a qualified domain, you may be prompted to send an email to each of those addresses. There are a few more steps we need to take before we get to that part. The first step is to research your prospects.
You’d want to know the following about each of your prospects:
- What’s their niche?
- What are some of their blogs that have caught your attention?
- What is their product/service?
- Are they a start-up or an established company?
You will be able to engage with them better and propose topics they could use if you simply know these things. A quick search will give you the answers to those questions. When you personalize your messages to your recipients instead of using a generic template, you will create a better connection with them.
4. Create outreach templates
Your emails should be different for each domain you are trying to reach. That is the #1 rule to cold emailing. Writing personalized and unique cold emails will be second nature if you’ve done your research on your potential customers.
On the other hand, you also want to maximize your time by not starting each email from scratch when you send it to a new recipient. If you create different templates for your outreach emails, you can make sure that each one is unique. This will help keep your recipients from getting bored or annoyed with your messages.
You can find guides online for how to write cold emails, as well as effective templates you can use. Email templates can be a helpful way to save time when doing SEO outreach, but it’s important not to forget to tailor each message to your recipient so it doesn’t seem like a generic form letter.
Emails which are specifically tailored to the recipient have a higher open rate and better response rates than those which are simply copied and pasted.
5. Collect the email addresses
Once you have your email templates, you can start collecting email addresses from key personnel.
Some examples of people who would be good to talk to for this project are marketing heads, editors, content managers, or company founders. If you want to find someone’s email address, knowing their name can be a helpful start.
The first step you should take is to look at the company’s LinkedIn profile. Look through the list of employees and find someone to reach out to.
Renee DeCoskey is the managing editor of Business 2 Community. We may send her a direct message on LinkedIn or keep looking for her email address.
Searching for emails is tricky. Many LinkedIn users choose not to make their email addresses visible to other users. If you want to contact someone but you don’t have their email address, you can try using email hunting software. Voila Norbert and Hunter.io are two examples of software that can help you guess someone’s email address. The only information you need to know is the person’s name and their company.
6. Draft guest post ideas
If you want to increase your chances of getting a client, let them know what topics you’ll be writing about in your guest post. Here are a few ways you may come up with guest post ideas:
- Search for queries within online niche communities
- Re-angle existing blogs
- Read reader comments on blogs you’ve guest-posted to gain more insight
- Focus on new trends around your niche
Your ideas for a guest post may depend on the person you are writing the post for. Propose different topics for each industry. If you are a company that specializes in SEO and you are writing for a web design or digital marketing niche, you should keep in mind that your readers may have varying levels of understanding when it comes to SEO.
You can make your guest posts even better by creating outlines for each topic. Showing your prospects that each topic has a concrete flow will make them more likely to be interested in your product. The outline will help your writers write about the chosen topic more easily.
7. Create quality content
Your prospects need to be willing to publish your work on their blog. The content you produce must be interesting to the people you’re trying to reach, hold their attention, and give them useful information to help your SEO campaign succeed.
Here are a few ways you can create quality content:
- Ensure your blog has a seamless and progressive flow
- Use engaging visuals for your blogs
- Don’t shoehorn in your links. Links should serve as a footnote and not mislead readers’ train of thought
- Check for grammatical errors. Edit and proofread your content
- Write according to your prospects’ chosen style guide. Many websites use either AP Style or the Chicago Manual of Style
Creating quality content will give your prospects confidence that you know what you’re doing and provide a portfolio of your work for new clients.
8. Monitor results
Look at your numbers. Are they using their time and resources effectively? Here are some of the key metrics you’d want to note for your outreach campaign:
- Email open rate
- Email response rate
- New prospects per month
- Guest posts published per month
- Daily traffic to the URL you’ve built links for
The success of your email campaign can be suggested by your open rate. Having a high open rate means that your subject line is compelling and/or your sender name is recognizable. An engaging email body will result in a good response rate. Monitoring email metrics is possible by using email tools such as Hubspot or Mailchimp.
The more new prospects you get and the more guest posts you publish regularly, the more efficient your team is in landing new projects.
The eventual goal is to improve your site’s SEO and increase traffic to your company’s website. Google Search Console is a tool that you can use to see how well your website is currently doing in terms of SEO and what keywords your site is ranking for. Using a backlink checker, you can see how authoritative your URL is and how many backlinks and referring domains your site has. This is useful for understanding the strength of your site and for identifying opportunities to build more backlinks.
Keep tabs on your competitors to see how you measure up. If you’re way behind, then you’re doing something wrong. Backlink checkers can give you an idea of your competitors’ domain authority and help you compare it to yours.
9. Expand the scope of outreach
Once you have written a couple of guest blogs, you can then approach other websites in order to expand the reach of your own website.
Eventually, you’ll get a flow for the process. You can then hire someone to write cold emails to people who might need your guest blogging services. If you automate your outreach process, you will have more time to focus on other things, such as editing.
It is advisable to get content from sources that are not related to your niche. You need to be careful to make sure you are still writing about something that your reader will be interested in. You can build backlinks to your SEO articles from business, web development, and digital marketing blogs as long as you can insert your links naturally in those articles on topics relevant to those blogs.
However, if you are a site selling shoes, for example, it might be impossible to build SEO-targeted backlinks from gaming or cryptocurrency content websites.
In Closing
If you want to improve your website’s ranking in search engine results, one way to do that is to build links through an SEO outreach program. Creating links with other websites can help increase your domain’s authority and bring more traffic to your site.
Before beginning your SEO outreach, be certain of which keywords you want to target. Identify sites to tap. To improve your website’s ranking in search results, you can either do a Google search or look at the websites that are linking to the ranking search results. Once you create a list of domains, you can narrow it down by evaluating the domain authority of each site.
You should search for key personnel from your select sites before pitching topics. If you’re trying to find someone’s email address, you can look for them on LinkedIn, or you can use email hunting software. If you already have an outline for the topics you pitched, it will help.
Make sure that the guest posts you write are interesting and relevant to your audience. That will help optimize your SEO outreach efforts. There may be other industries that would find your website’s content or product useful, so try reaching out to them.
If you want your SEO outreach and link-building to be successful, follow these steps.
Related posts:
