As a digital marketing strategy, blogger outreach allows you to forge relationships and promote your products or services or your own brand to an engaged audience while earning SEO backlinks, heightening brand awareness and driving traffic via collaboration through sponsored posts, reviews or content exchanges.
The process involves finding bloggers relevant to your sector, engaging them and pitching customised ideas for guest posts, reviews and the like. It’s all about fostering valuable partnerships in the long term, rather than one-off transactions.
You’ll need to define your goals, identify and research bloggers and engage with them by following them on social media, sharing posts and so on. Make your approach clear and direct and offer something valuable such as a product to review or an exclusive idea for a guest post or interview.
Reaching out to bloggers is a thoroughly legitimate marketing strategy, based on constructing real, mutually beneficial relationships to gain relevant, high-quality links. For its part, spammy backlinks are manipulative and of a low quality and acquired via mass, unpersonalised techniques which not only violate Google’s own guidelines, they can harm your website’s SEO.
Why does blogger outreach matter to modern SEO?
Google uses the framework Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness (EATT) in its Search Quality Rater Guidelines to assess the quality of content. This helps the search giant to identify helpful, accurate and relevant information. It will be looking for expert understanding, a strong reputation plus reliability, particularly for key topics such as health and finance.
And while EATT doesn’t qualify as a direct ranking factor, algorithms use it to reward the best-quality content, making it a genuine difference to users, so it’s absolutely vital to success with SEO.
There are a number of reasons why contextual links (i.e. hyperlinks embedded naturally within the webpage’s content’s main body) outperform directory links or PBNs (private blog networks).
These include the fact that these blogs are highly relevant, placed naturally within the main content of a page and enhance the user experience by giving the reader genuine value and encouraging them to stay on the website and engage with the content.
How blogger outreach fits into SEO packages
Blogger outreach is very transparent in the way it adds value. And you should expect bloggers involved to be relevant to the niche in which you work, while clients are entitled to expect metrics to measure success of the technique, and the right filters in place so that relationships are only forged with quality blogs.
How does a business benefit from blogger outreach?
Blogger outreach allows you to forge strong working relationships with a diverse range of professionals with a strong online presence in your sector. You’ll nurture a positive impression among your audience and build trust in your brand, particularly if you’re a relatively new business and so need credibility.
The blogger for whom you create content has an established community already. Their readers anticipate a particular kind of content, and od you have a captive audience in place and, ultimately, the possibility of more referral traffic, sales and profits.
There will also be a long-term effect on referral traffic and SEO. So it’s no wonder that blogger outreach is one of the most commonly used techniques in marketing today and organisations from PR agencies to SEOs and social marketers are all using it.
What are the characteristics of quality blogger outreach?
Blogger outreach likely to secure the best results is done manually with a personalised and tailored rather than a scattergun approach. It’s also all about vetting publishers for quality, traffic volume and authenticity, and about creating high-quality, valuable content which adds real value.
Finally, good outreach also assesses bloggers for domain authority. This score (from 1-100) predicts how likely it is that a website will rank on search engines such as Google, based heavily on the quality and quantity of its backlinks it receives, along with other SEO factors including site relevance and content quality.
Common pitfalls to avoid in blogger outreach
Do your research thoroughly first, and don’t expect something for nothing. Equally, don’t fall into the trap of buying up a job lot of cheap links, or of writing or accepting guest posts of poor quality.
Yet another common error is over-optimised anchor text. This involves repeatedly using the same keyword phrase as a clickable link text, so that your backlinks don’t look natural. Search engines such as Google and their algorithms will soon get wise to this. Indeed, ultimately it can even lead to penalties for your website, ranking dips and damage to your SEO.
Why choose Simply Search’s SEO packages?
At award-winning Simply Search, we adopt a consistently white-hat or ethical approach, with blogger outreach as part of a wider SEO package. We only build strong, personal relationships with established bloggers who write abut your niche subject. What’s more, we’ll report transparently and in detail on progress every step of the way.
Check out our packages for different budgets – they’re tailored to suit different requirements. Get in touch and book your free website review today.