In the next episode of the Majestic SEO Podcast, we’re going to explore the best ways of reaching out to prospective link partners so you can maximise your likelihood of receiving your desired link.
Joining us for this episode on Link Building Outreach is Izabela Wisniewska, Aaron Anderson, Anna Bravington and Ajay Paghdal.
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Transcript
David Bain
What is the optimum link building outreach strategy? How should you reach out to your ideal target audience? How should you maximize the chance of getting a link? And has outreach changed much through the years?
I’m David Bain and those are just a few of the questions that I’m going to be asking the panelist on today’s Majestic SEO podcast and livestream.
So let’s get them to introduce themselves and bring them right on here. Welcome Ajay!
Ajay Paghdal
David, thanks for having me. I’m Ajay Paghdal and I’m the founder of Only Outreach and also the founder of Pitch Panda. Both are link building related businesses, one as a service, one as a platform, and I’ve been in outreach for about 10 years now doing it actively day-in-day-out for a long, long time.
David Bain
Super, thanks so much for joining us. Next up is Aaron.
Aaron Anderson
Hi, my name is Aaron Anderson. I am the founder of Linkpitch.io. We’re an outreach based link building agency. I also run a podcast called Let’s Talk Link Building. So yeah, Link building is a topic that I like to talk about a lot.
David Bain
That’s a good start. Our third panelist joining us today is Anna.
Anna Bravington
Hi, I’m Anna Bravington. I’m co-founder of Those That Dare. We’re not actually a link building agency, but we focus on strategy and look at the strategic side of things, from traditional PR all the way up to digital PR, which is now one of my favorite channels in the entire world.
David Bain
Thanks for joining us, Anna. Our final panelist today is Izzy.
Izabela Wisniewska
Hi my name is Izzy, and currently I’m a co-founder and Head of Search in Creatos Media. I started work in digital marketing 10 years ago, and I started as an outreach specialist and a couple of years of my career I was living and breathing outreach and link building.
David Bain
Welcome everyone. So our first question to everyone is asking how you would go about determining the ideal link opportunity nowadays?
Ajay Paghdal
I think that the standard has definitely been established as something that’s niche relevant, something that already has authority, and something that has a fair bit of traffic.
As Google’s rules evolve, and they focus on quality and relevance, that’s a nice way for link builders to say, “Okay, this is qualitative and this is relevant”. But when you go a couple levels deeper, and depending on how sophisticated you are with outreach, you start to question if someone is inflating their metrics or inflating their traffic. Below the surface you can look to see if the website exists for any other reason than to like publish posts. A good indicator of if a site is worth outreaching to will be if it has a ‘write for us page’ plastered at the top of its like menu. If it does, then maybe this site doesn’t exist to create good content, and maybe it exists to sell links.
There’s a few other things to look at too as you get deeper into the technical thing, where you’re looking to see inbound versus outbound link ratio. So is this person linking out to more sites than they get links from coming in? All of these are little high quality indicators of if a site is hard to publish on and if it’s a blog that someone cares about what kind of content is published on it, and the traffic trends are probably going in a positive direction, and didn’t peak five years ago and now there’s little remnants of traffic that people are trying to monetize.
That’s some of the ways that we try to go beyond niche traffic, and make sure that it’s also just a really good site that’s going to be in the “positive column” and not the “disavow column” five years from now.
David Bain
Would you prefer a site with that sells products, as opposed to just having a blog?
Ajay Paghdal
I find that when you’re getting into the SEO world of link building, a lot of these vendors have figured out how to show up in certain searches. So if you’re looking for pages where you can guest post or looking for pages where you can write on if you’re looking for certain keywords, these link vendors have been doing this for a long, long time. So every time someone searches that, those sites are always the ones that are popping up. So how do we discount that site versus an actual primary blog, that is a blog that’s publishing content and has an audience?
So I wouldn’t say it’s a hard and fast rules of it must be making money in some other way, because one of the ways it can be making money is through ads. But in order to have revenue through ads, you need to have a lot of traffic, and in order to have a lot of traffic, you need to have a lot of content control, and that won’t be the case if you’re publishing guest posts willy-nilly.
So I wouldn’t say you should be avoiding blogs, but I think you should be really, really picky with the type of blogs you go for.
David Bain
Opening this up to everyone on the panel, would anyone prefer having a link from just a general website, but a fairly authoritative one, over getting a link from a niche website?
Izabela Wisniewska
I totally agree with the relevancy. There’s even been studies shown from one of Women in Tech SEO ladies at Brighton SEO showing a study that they’ve done where they build links from very relevant sites, and then the more general one sites with ‘nice and flashy’ stats.
From an SEO perspective, I think we’re getting better results from the really relevant ones, over the more general and flashy stats ones. So I’ll definitely agree that relevancy to your website and to your niche, but also to your audience and the websites that your audience and your target audience will be getting something from as well, are the ones to target.
David Bain
Anna, I know you’re nodding away there, I was hoping that you would disagree with something.
Anna Bravington
No I don’t. I think the only way that I prefer a broader audience is sort of more interesting about the flashy numbers. So sometimes when you’re looking for a campaign that maybe does a dual aspect, whether it’s the backlinks and wanting a bit of publicity at the same time, that’s maybe the only time that I would go for one of those slightly broader, bigger flashier number ones where there’s a dual purpose to it as well, a bit of that traditional PR with the digital PR. We want to get some big coverage, but actually what we want to get a backlink at the same time.
So that can work sometimes, and I’ve had it in the past where it’s a bit of a catch-all, but at the same time it’s what Izzy said, you probably won’t get the same metrics, but you will get a little bit of both instead, so a ‘Jack of all trades’ type of publication.
Izabela Wisniewska
What we have to remember is it all should stay natural, and in a natural world, a website will never have just the super relevant links, right. Natural websites will have some great links, and some that are just completely irrelevant. It’s usually a bit of both. It’s similar if we look at follow and nofollows, right, usually it is a bit of both. Sometimes there will be reasons to give nofollow, and others there will be reasons to give to follow.
I used to work with a client, and they would do like massive PR campaigns, and they will get coverage in like the Metro and all the other London based newspapers. Obviously they were a bit more on the general side because they were bragging about different volumes, but for the campaigns they did, it actually made sense. So I think the key here, it has to make sense.
It depends what kind of campaign you’re running. So if you run a campaign that will attract this sort of General publications, I think that’s fine as long as it all ties together nicely. And if you run a campaign that will attract more of the relevant ones, then then that’s great as well. We have to remember not to just go away and get whatever. We have to remember to focus, because if we focus on the relevant publications, we will also focus on our audience and on the things that they want.
So going to go back to our example from Brighton SEO, I think it was a website selling bike accessories, and they were talking about links from bike related websites/forums/Facebook groups, which is obviously where your audience will be if they really love cycling. So that’s where you want to focus, because you want to get to them. Your ultimate business goal will be to get to your target audience.
But what if you run a full on campaign to promote your cycling event for charity? Well then it will make sense to get general publications involved because you want to get as many people as possible.
Ultimately I think it all depends on the on the angle you take and what your campaign is?
David Bain
Aaron, do you have any particular steps that you go through to identify the optimum opportunity?
Aaron Anderson
Sure, I think when you’re evaluating link opportunity, there’s two ways to look at it. One is ‘what page are you going to build links to?’ or ‘what type of content you’re going to promote?’. And the other is, ‘who are my targets going to be?’ and ‘do we want links that are going to be built to this page specifically to generate traffic?’ or is that more of a general approach to just building authority? So there’s some different ways to look at it.
When looking at what pages to target, I’d like to try to build links, and avoid paying for them or doing guest posts and stuff. So it’s more about the approaches I can take to actually get links for this website that are going to work without just paying for them. I think for me it’s about being opportunistic around the certain types of campaign strategies that will work for each type of page.
If you have a money page, which everyone who does will want links to their money page, but there may not be a strategy that you can identify that’s necessarily going to work for that particular page in the moment. So maybe while you’re looking and identifying campaign types that will work, you may uncover an option later. Sometimes just being flexible with the type of campaign you’re going to run allows you to just run with what’s working well, and then keeping your eyes open for opportunities that may later open up.
David Bain
Ajay, how do you actually go about finding specific link opportunities? Do you search Google for a particular keyword phrase and see what websites actually come up for that and then reach out to the relevant ones? Or is there some kind of software tool that you use to automate the process for you?
Ajay Paghdal
I’ve tried many, and there are a few out there. They all kind of poll through the same sources though. Google is indispensable for sure, it’s got the freshest data, and the search operators are super, super flexible. Just recently, I started using the ‘around’ search operator. I don’t know if you’ve heard about that one, but you take a keyword like ‘tax deductions’, and you do ‘tax around(x) deductions’, and instead of just looking for an article that has that exact keyword on there, it’ll return articles that have the words nearby so you can start to get contextually relevant sources that way.
For tools, in general we’ve been using Google search and tools like the Content Explorer from ahrefs. The way we approached prospecting is like ‘I want to find a big raw pool of data to start with, like URLs’, and then ‘how can I like filter this down to a more manageable level for manual prospecting?’ So then that second part of it becomes how do we use bulk metrics checkers to just filter out low quality things and how do we automatically categorize the page type that the results pull up? So we want sites that are actually publishing content, and not just information pages or directories, or whatever the case may be.
So I would say it’s like a secondary filtering, it’s a combination of there’s some really cool stuff that you can do with ChatGPT integrations and Google Sheets where you’re like ‘I have a list of 20,000 URLs, how do I filter this down to something that’s way more manageable’. So there’s some really cool tools now where you can just analyze each one of these URLs and say ‘give me X that meet Y criteria’. Then suddenly, after 10 minutes, you’ve gone from 20k to, maybe 500, or 1,000, and now that has become much more manageable. I think that’s where like the evolution of link prospecting is happening and using these AI tools means that the people on your team don’t really do as much mind numbing work anymore, but now they’re doing more of the fun stuff around qualifying and prospecting.
David Bain
You’re mention of ChatGTP was certainly interesting there as well, so is there any particular plugin that you use with that and would recommend?
Ajay Paghdal
GPTforWork is the website name, and then the Chrome extension itself is called GPT for Sheets™, and there are little formulas that you can create, like, =GPT_CLASSIFY, and then you can feed it like 15 common page types that show up on a web page, like a blog post, about page, contact page, and then I asked the tool to classify each page. What I’m looking for are mostly blog posts that match a certain keyword combination and instead of overwhelming someone with a manual qualification, GPT will just do it for you and actually does a really good job if you give it the right classifiers.
David Bain
Anyone else on the panel have fun using ChatGPT to assist with your outreach process?
Anna Bravington
Mine’s not quite so technical, but I do love the sort of WebPilot and the Bing connection where you can go to a new site and ask it questions about the site such as ‘who writes on this’? Or you know what topics does it talk about, which is really useful because if you identified a site, then you’re trying to understand if it’s the right audience and if it’s going to hit the mark. I absolutely love just asking questions, because now it’s got the web integrations, you can ask it so many questions about websites, and they come back with some wonderful, wonderful stats and information that can feed back to you things like journalists names that are mentioned in the text as well. So once you get to that stage, you also get who you can contact as well. So that’s one of my favorites.
Izabela Wisniewska
I was just going to add that it can definitely make your work quicker once you’re already established which websites you’d like to go after, then it can make the process of reviewing and making sure that this is what you want a lot quicker.
David Bain
So what you don’t particularly want is to be reaching out to tens or hundreds of websites and hardly receiving any responses at all. So can we talk a little bit about what to see in the outreach process and the ideal medium to use? I’m going to presume that you’re using email to personalize, but are there any specifics that you can advise around what to include in that outreach in order to get a response and get them engaged enough with what you’re offering or talking about in order to consider what you’re wanting to do with them?
Aaron Anderson
My approach to outreach has always been to be as short and straight to the point as possible. I avoid any sort of fake flattery or anything like that, and I personally don’t try to be super creative in any of my outreach, emails, or templates. I just want to let the person know as quickly as possible what I’m asking.
I find the success of the campaign is more based on the quality of the ask, or the quality of the campaign itself, rather than the actual email that I write. Some people are different and they get very creative in their writing, and I tend to find that success ranges more based on the quality of the prospect and the quality of the pitch that we’re doing, than it does from the templates. So I’m actually pretty vanilla when it comes to that.
I think a lot of prospecting is done based on content, but usually I’m looking at all my prospecting based on backlinks. I identify pages linking to a number of other external page, so I know there’ll be more willing to link out. But as far as the actual words, I just try to be as straight to the point as possible.
David Bain
So by the quality of the ask, are you essentially saying the relevance of the offer?
Aaron Anderson
Exactly. For example, a very high converting outreach campaign would be an unlinked mention campaign, where it’s very easy ask, they already know you, they’ve mentioned you in the article, but they haven’t linked back. So if you run that kind of campaign, you will have a high conversion rate because it’s a very easy ask, and it’s a very warm, and they already know about you because they learned about you.
Whereas resource campaigns will have a different conversion rate, a broken link campaign is going to depend on the quality of the broken link and the quality of your replacement, that’s going to be a bigger determinant of the success of that campaign than the words you say, because it’s going to be “no you haven’t broken link. I’m suggesting a replacement.”, so it’s more about, what was that broken link, how was it being referenced, do want some sort of supplementary information being linked to, etc, and then are you providing a good replacement.
Those factors for me tend to influence more the success of that campaign more than the actual template itself.
David Bain
Does anyone else on the panel have a more bespoke individualized process to outreach? For instance, do you consider each email and look at all your profit potential prospect sites, and try and incorporate what they do to demonstrate that you’ve taken time to really understand what they do before during the outreach?
Anna Bravington
Yeah, that’s my preferred approach. I think the one thing we sometimes forget when we’re trying to get backlinks coverage is that at the other end of an email, is a person. They want a good quality article, they want something that’s going to keep them in the good eyes of their boss. Journalism is incredibly hard at the moment, there’s reduced teams, and people are finding it incredibly difficult. So journalists want really good quality stories that are going to keep them in their jobs and that they’re going to feel proud about. So we want to just make sure that we’re remembering that there’s people there and having those relationships with them and saying that we understand what your audiences want. Sometimes in emails we say, “I think this will be perfect for your audience because of this”, so making sure that I know, their audience and who they’re targeting is important. If I’ve seen them doing articles of similar things, then I mention that, so I’ll say “I saw you wrote an article on X, Y, Z, I, so I think this would be perfect for you”.
There’s also sometimes a pre-outreach as well, which sometimes gets lost, that relationship building. In the ‘olden days’ before Social Media we had our little black books of journalists where we got to know people, and we would go and pitch multiple clients to them.
It’s not always appropriate, but actually, I’m on several groups around freelance media for women, and lots of wider groups with journalists and bloggers on where I get to know them beforehand and we get to help each other out.
So outreach sometimes starts before the outreach, where you’re building those really solid connections with people so that if you send them a piece, they’re actually just going to cover it because they know you’re good and you send good quality stuff. There’s a bit of a lean towards sort of a spray and pray approach today where it’s just sending a lot of links out. But it’s that really good quality stuff that stands out, because people don’t have the time in this digital age, they’re inundated with e-mails, so if you’ve got a prior connection and they spot your name in that inbox, they’re going to want to talk to you.
So actually, I think there’s a lot more to outreach than just the outreach itself, and I think some of that relationship building has definitely been lost.
David Bain
Ajay, you a fan of pre-outreach?
Ajay Paghdal
Yeah, it’s kind of like that focused link building approach, where instead of a scattergun approach, you’re actually zooming in looking at what it will take to get this one opportunity completed. And that’s probably more effort than just sending one email, right? Because, it’s building relationships.
So as an agency with multiple clients in different niches, most of the clients are not necessarily well-known brands. There’s some level of like process that we need to engineer into the system where it’s like, okay, we’re starting with 500 prospects and we’re gonna email a certain percentage of them, and a certain percentage of those will eventually turn into links. So the template does make a big difference in terms of whether you get those initial responses or not, but I’d say the more valuable part is just how good the prospecting is, which in terms of what Aaron said, it’s not exactly the template, but it’s more about the person you reach out to, and what the pitch is. You can say something 100 different ways, but if you contact the right person who’s going to be interested in something like that, they’ll probably respond.
I was actually testing this myself over the past two or three months, and I hired like a professional copywriter, because I was thinking that these templates that were working eight months ago, I just feel like they’re not working the same as they used to, maybe I’ve lost my mojo. So I hired a copywriter and see if they can work out what is up with it. They looked at the emails, and I was blown away, it reads really well, they’ve added a bunch of emojis in there, and there was lots of exposition and all this stuff. But at the back in my head, I’m like, I don’t know if I’d actually reply to this, or even who would read it?
So we tested it. And yeah, for some of the campaigns there were some people who responded positively and thought the email was cool and would be happy to work with us, but in general, I think it was just like super long, not to the point, had a bit of fake flattery, and it just didn’t land.
I think we’re probably going to end up with simpler templates that focus on more simple stuff. I was testing and experimenting, and I think the strategy you have kind of depends on the type of service you offer. If you’re going to offer and specialize in link building, you have to have a certain process that’s going to have lots of prospects at the top of the funnel, and a certain percentage of those will turn into links for clients, and then you have to deliver this on a monthly basis. Whereas if you’re like working internally, for one or two companies, then you’re really able to zoom in and focus, build those relationships, and build those narratives. So both strategies can work, but it just depends on what the business goals are, and what kind of team you have to utilize for it.
David Bain
I must admit, that when I get outreach type emails myself, I like emails to be short and to the point and demonstrate that they actually know what they’re talking about in terms of what they’re asking for, and hopefully, that they’ve actually engaged a little bit more with my site. But is there anything that you like to incorporate in emails to enhance your conversion rates, or the likelihood that someone is going to read your email and get back to you?
Izabela Wisniewska
So definitely 100%, what’s important is what we’re offering, because this is what marketing is, the best marketing won’t sell bad products. So if the product, content piece, resource or whatever it is that you want to try to get the links to isn’t quite good enough, then the best outreach campaign is probably not going to help you. But if the product is great, but then the outreach and marketing is not 100%, that probably won’t get you the results either.
As for the emails, I totally agree with you David, I hate spending a very long time on emails. So I’ve kind of learned that not even from doing outreach, but more from receiving them! I’ll be totally honest when I see guest posts opportunity or guest post something, I just tend to delete it straightaway, I won’t even look at it. So for me, the subject line is very important, because that’s what I’ll read first. We get so many emails that we get swamped by requests and people wanting stuff from us, so the subject line is really the thing that stands out.
David Bain
What is an example of a subject line that you would use instead of ‘guest post opportunity’?
Izabela Wisniewska
I definitely wouldn’t use ‘guest post’. I’d probably choose something that will catch the reader’s attention or interest. So if you’re offering a resource, put the resource name in and tell them what it’s going to do for them, like, “I’ve got X that will do Y for you” or something like that. It’s a hard question to come up with an answer for on the spot, because a lot of it will depend on the context, but you definitely shouldn’t say “I want to write the guest posts for you”, or at least that’s my perspective.
When I started working on outreach, I was taught that we have to build relationships with people, and that was 10 years ago. It was a completely different time, but even then it was like, don’t do “write for us as guest posts” and then move on to the next one, it was to build up the relationship and try to work with them for longer time. I don’t think that changed, even though the “write for us” and the guest posting is kind of gone.
So if we put it all together, we need to build a really good product or resource for people to link to because there has to be a value at the end of the link, and should we give them a reason to link to us, like why their audience would be interested. But if I already had a relationship with that person, say I connected with them on social, on LinkedIn, or Twitter or whatever, and they already know me, they going to be 100% more likely think it’s a good subject line from this person that I know, so I’ll check it out.
A catchy subject line with something to get the person interested is my approach.
David Bain
Now let’s just talk a little bit about what we should offer, if anything, in order to get a link. Because some companies are willing to pay cash, some companies are willing to give away things for free, some companies think that just being associated with their brand should be enough in order to get a link for that person. So is offering whatever you’re offering in exchange for a link a more effective thing to do? Are you seeing any trends where people who are going to link to you are looking for an exchange in order to give you a link?
Aaron Anderson
With the type of link building I do, I try to avoid the paid linking and the guest posting as those types of things are not really in my wheelhouse. But the fact of the matter is that there’s some industries that I just can’t work in, because in order to compete, it’s very hard to build enough backlinks without offering some sort of payment or something in exchange. So I think it really depends on the industry that you’re working in and how competitive it is in regards to if people asking for things in return.
It’s very viable to build a lot of backlinks without giving something in terms of monetary compensation or something else, but there are things that people appreciate you doing for them. That’s why with something like broken link building, there’s an inherent value in it to people, and there are types of strategies that where there is value in that, so I think when you’re giving someone value, they’re more likely to listen to your pitch and respond positively.
As you know how people are asking and what they’re doing, the fact of the matter is that apart from PR, how many people are actually building backlinks without giving some sort of exchange? It’s pretty small. Most of the typical link building is guest posts, paying for links, exchanging links, and so on. But since it’s not something I do, I’m not as well versed in the best way to do those negotiations.
Izabela Wisniewska
I wouldn’t agree that as building links without exchanging money or products is a dying art. I think we’re actually moving towards that more and more. But what we’re missing and what I think many people are missing is link building and PR, and how we still tend to distinguish them so much, but they are actually quite connected and close. They’re very, very similar arts, but they are just named differently. So what we have to remember is Google doesn’t want us to build links, they want us to earn links, and that’s where PR comes in. I’ve tried in on my own website, and yes it is slower to add links rather than getting them quicker by going out and paying people for them, but it is doable. Then if you can you do stuff to show off your expertise, you will get those mentions, and you will get those links in a PR rich way, over the old fashioned link building way, and it’s definitely something that I think we’re moving towards rather than away from.
Aaron Anderson
I totally agree with you. I just think the distinction is that most people who are doing more earned type of link building call themselves digital PRs, and most people that call themselves link builders tend to be more on the guest posting/link exchange side of things. There is a distinction there, but it’s not fully understood, and some people use digital PR and PR and link building gives it a kind of muddy definition for sure.
David Bain
Ajay, is it possible to earn all the links that you would like?
Ajay Paghdal
It depends. Earning a link to a DevOps service page maybe might not be as easy as a link to some product page on an eCommerce site. I can give the perspective of a link building agency who has multiple clients and has to deliver many high end links per month how we try to go about it.
The first thing is usually that the email has nothing to offer in return, and usually requires some kind of build-up relationship thing to get there, or some really amazing piece of content or some unique data. But sometimes you just don’t have those assets available to you. So instead you might want to take stock of what assets you do have. And for some people who have a large social media audience, they can say, ‘okay, we’ll publish this, and then we’ll blast it out to our audience’, and that might be the thing that you offer, whether it’s a newsletter or something else.
If you can include that and show proof of that and make it interesting, then that’s amazing. If you have access to other websites that are high quality, and well known and have good metrics in the space, that thing you offer could be a link exchange, or I’ve even seen people say ‘I can offer you something in return’, and then just leaving it open ended. It’s saying that you know that you’re asking for something, but I’m not after a handout, I’m willing to work with you willing to be helpful. And that little extra addition to an email can make a big difference.
I posted something on my LinkedIn a couple of days ago, a little graphic of like one of my favorite link building strategies. This is something that I tested out last month, and I was like ‘Okay, I don’t have any link swap assets, but I want to get onto really high end blogs and connect with people who are actively in this industry publishing and have really good sites’, so how do I get in there and build relationships? So then I was playing around with was a strategy which was a two pronged approach, where first I’m looking at the high end sites in the industry, so for marketing, maybe Search Engine Journal and a few others like that, and then on the other end, I’m looking to get like a contributor post on a relatively well known niche blog in the marketing space, and that would be a guest post which would be some kind of expert roundup, or something that gives how-to, and that’ll give me an opportunity to include the other people like within this article, as like a quoted expert.
So thinking about this as a two-pronged approach where I do this guest posting here, but I’m also reaching out to influencers to provide them value here, and then suddenly, you’re killing two birds with one stone, and you’ve built relationships that you can leverage in the future, and you’re also building a pretty high quality article to publish on a niche relevant blog post.
I think getting creative is the biggest takeaway depending on the industry and depending on what you have available to you, and just taking stock of that and doing something that’s more unique than a ‘guest post opportunity’ subject line.
Izabela Wisniewska
I agree, I think getting creative is the actual takeaway, because once you get a very good idea you can turn it into content or into a resource or into something that you can put on your site. I would say that makes it a lot easier to actually get people interested. If there is something like a data set, or a survey, and then we publish the results and there are some figures of interest, that too is a lot easier to get people interested, because they might use it in their own articles. So let’s say that I’m writing an article on something and pitching it like “Hey, we’ve got this amazing survey results here”, then it’s gonna be a lot easier for them to get a link from that. So I think that that getting creative and getting the first idea and then doing a trial, that’s your main bet, because then it’s really a lot easier to get those things pointing to you.
David Bain
So what you’re saying is that if you don’t have a budget, then you need to focus on building relationships, and then you’ve got a chance of getting links for free. But if you do have a significant budget, then you don’t have to focus so much on building that relationship, and you can just outreach more with whatever you’ve got to offer?
Ajay Paghdal
If a majority of my links are coming from sites that I have to pay to publish them, that’s probably not where I want the majority of my links to come from, or that’s not like what link neighborhood I want a majority of my links to be in. I have nothing against paid links, and a certain percentage of paid links is fine, because in some industries it’s really hard to build links without paying for them. But I think diversity is more what I’m about. And if you have a bigger budget, besides from just paying for links, you can do even more creative stuff with it.
David Bain
Anna, would you have any final thoughts on this particular question?
Anna Bravington
I’ve worked with big brands (like Game) and I’ve worked with micro businesses too, and I approach them both the same, because I feel that when were talking about the quality of the content, and what are we going to give people, then the gift is that we’re giving them something of quality that’s going to be useful to them, whether you’re coming from a small company, or a big company.
I’ve got the same links from a one-man-band, as I have a large company in the same publications because the quality of the content is equal. It’s not about the name, it’s about the quality of the content and when that’s equal and like Izzy was saying about having that landing page, then from small businesses and large businesses, you can have quality of content.
So for me, I think that the size of business doesn’t matter much. I’ve got a friend that’s gone viral with a very small business, who has a small PR agency, Kostas Petrou at Story and Search, and he’s gone viral with really, really small, clients, he’s got backlinks from all of these publications that he wanted, and did incredibly well. So I think it’s more the quality that’s there and because I don’t want people that have got small businesses to think that they can’t do this and that they can’t get the backlinks. Because actually you can produce just as much good quality content, you’ve got your own thought leaders, you’ve got your own data. A lot of people don’t use their data, but they should, that data is really, really valuable.
At the end of the day it’s just about giving the gift of something that’s good quality to someone who needs it, because that’s publications need articles, and they need information, they need something to keep their readers active, and it’s just about connecting those dots rather than worrying too much about paid links.
Izabela Wisniewska
If I can add a final though, what we have to remember is that we keep saying creating content and getting the content out there, but in fact, it doesn’t actually have to be the actual content. So like you said, small businesses shouldn’t think that they have to create an ebook with tons of pages of content, it can actually be different things, you just have to get creative.
A few years back I used to work with a manufacturing company, which you might consider to be a boring industry. So they would want to have pictures of little gaskets and other not very creative stuff. But what we did for them was we ran a manufacturing awards thing which was all online, and we invited other manufacturers from around where we were, and it was really good campaign. We got quite a few good backlinks to the homepage, and some other important pages as well.
Anna Bravington
I also think on top of that, being coordinated with your agencies is important. So if you have more than one agency or internal teams, if people are creating content already, then get everyone connected up, because if someone’s creating content, and then someone’s link building elsewhere, then it’s all siloed, and that can be a lot more work. Whereas if everyone’s working together and a piece of content is then reusable, it’s not just for PR, or not just for link building, then you can actually connect the dots and reuse that content across multiple different channels.
I think the problem comes when people get all these different departments doing different things, and that actually creates more work. If you’ve got the web team making a landing page, the Insight team getting the data, and then we’re all joining together to do this, makes it a lot easier work with.
David Bain
Let’s finish up with one more quick fire question, and then an opportunity just to remind the listener where they can find out more about you and contact you if you if they want. So what’s one outreach thing that people need to stop doing? or what’s one outreach activity that’s better than that thing that SEOs/link builders need to start doing?
Aaron Anderson
I’m not the most creative person, but there is another form of link building where it doesn’t require creativity, and its purely numbers driven. That’s kind of where I sit. That’s where I say broken link building is something that people should still be doing, because it’s something that is like the OG link building strategy and it still works today. I’ve even gotten links from the New York Times. The nice thing about it is that sometimes these small companies talk about being creative with content, and it can feel so challenging to create this very creative content that’s going to garner links, but with broken link building, you can find a broken piece of content and recreate it and that takes all the creativity out of it. If I can find like broken case studies and just use those stats and compile those stats into a stats page, and that can be recreated, then it can just make it much simpler and just more numbers driven. For someone that just wants to know exactly what they’re gonna get can take a lot of the uncertainty out of the creation process.
David Bain
Lovely, and where can people find you?
Aaron Anderson
So you can find me linkpitch.io, or on my podcast, Let’s Talk Link Building.
David Bain
Ajay, what’s your final tip and where can people find you?
Ajay Paghdal
This might relate to people who are similar to me in terms of tinkering with new toys, and if you have like a desire for automation. If you are sending lots of emails and using templates, then it’s the “Hi name” personalization, and maybe like personalizing by the company name or something. Now with AI tools coming out, I think it’s gonna enter the era of hyper-personalization, which could be super time consuming, or with the right mix of tools and tinkering and experimentation, it could actually be pretty time effective.
I’ve already been playing around with the idea of customizing a pitch based on scraping some data and doing the relationship thing at a larger scale where it kind of looks more like you’re doing it versus actually doing it. But so far, the results aren’t great. I do think there’s potential there though and it’s only going to get better.
So for someone who’s looking for advice, I would just say test out the new stuff that’s happening, ChatGPT and all the new tools that are coming out, and whoever starts to figure that stuff out first is going to have an advantage when it comes to link building and outreach.
You can also find me at my business, onlyoutreach.com, and @ajaypaghdal is where I hang out on Twitter.
Izabela Wisniewska
I’m gonna build on what Ajay said, but at the same time, I’m gonna go very basic, and what people should start doing, what they should have been doing for ages already, but unfortunately still don’t do, is to test your emails, especially if you go with automated emails and you send a lot of them.
I absolutely hate this, and I promise you all the brands will hate getting emails, saying ‘hello, first name’ and stuff like that, but it still happens! I understand using templates because the things we do, we do on a mass scale, but please do check your templates, send a test email to your colleague, and ensure it doesn’t go like ‘Hello, first name’ or have a blank subject line.
You can find me on Twitter at @Izzy_cm at creatosmedia.co.uk.
David Bain
Thank you so much, Izzy. And finally Anna.
Anna Bravington
So I’m gonna go back to making sure that you understand who you’re talking to and who you’re outreaching to. I saw a wonderful tweet recently from Luke Cope from Bottled Imagination, who sent out some outreach and sent it to 63 people and got 100% open rate. That’s all about tailoring your content, getting the subject line right, and getting the message to the right person. It’s also the sort of results you can get when you do it right and do it well, because then you’re not wasting energy. You’re just getting it to the right people that need it and who right for your audience as well.
You can find me on thosethatdare.com or LinkedIn, Anna Bravington.
David Bain Well, thank you so much Anna, and thank you so much to the whole panel. It’s been an absolutely wonderful discussion today. I’ve been your host David Bain on the Majestic SEO podcast. If you want to join us live next time sign up at Majestic.com/webinars, and check out our other series at SEOin2023.com
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