As Head of SEO and Digital Content at a digital marketing agency, I work with lots of companies that, quite rightly, expect me to help move them up the rankings in Google searches for keywords that are relevant to their products and services.  Outreach is, in my opinion, one of the best ways to build a strong and long-lasting foundation for achieving this.

Firstly, why is SEO important?

To explain this in brief, below is a quote from one of the SEO industry’s most authoritative figures, Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz:

“Search engines are unique in that they provide targeted traffic—people looking for what you offer. Search engines are the roadways that make this happen. If search engines cannot find your site, or add your content to their databases, you miss out on incredible opportunities to drive traffic to your site.”

What is outreach?

Outreach is where you connect with the owners of another industry or keyword relevant website, to offer them something of value to their website’s audience, in return for a link (or ‘backlink’) back to your website.

What is the purpose of outreach?

The purpose of outreach is to help with moving your website up Google’s search rankings.  The way that this is achieved, is by relevant websites pointing to yours, it assists with positioning your website as an authoritative source of information within your marketplace, to Google and other search engines.

Why is outreach important?

There’s an excellent quote from Wendy Piersall to help explain why outreach matters:

“Google only loves you when everyone else loves you first.”

So, in those terms, websites pointing back to yours are the equivalent of a digital love letter.

By obtaining valuable links back to your website and developing a longer-term strategic partnership where you can send further insights, analysis, statistics or opinion as outreach to the same website again in the future, you’re building up a strong profile in Google’s eyes.

This will mean that Google is more likely to look at you more favourably when it decides whose website should rank highly for searches relevant to the keywords you’re targeting, where those keywords are pertinent to your website and the website that has linked back to yours.

Outreach in practice

An example of this is where a building company specialises in renovations and extensions.  Links from websites that are highly relevant to building or construction are great, but so are ones that are relevant to a wider audience, including home décor and home design related websites.

Going even further, if a builder has a certain ethos or product that’s focused on sustainability or environmental factors, links back from eco-focused websites should help to improve the website’s visibility for these types of searches in Google.

Why online advertising is not the same as outreach

Online advertising is completely separate to outreach and commonly takes the form of banner ads and advertorials on other websites.

Some website owners do pay other websites for links back to theirs, but this is recognised as poor practice and if Google thinks that your links aren’t organic (ones where the other website has added a link to yours purely for the purpose of adding value to its own users), then your website can be penalised for ‘spammy’ links.

Outreach websites aren’t always websites you would advertise on

When you’re being presented with a range of industry relevant websites that will accept an outreach article from you, you shouldn’t turn away the opportunity because it’s not a website that you would advertise on.

Whilst the website may not be entirely specific to your product or service offering, it should always be relevant to your audience.  If it’s a well-thought-out outreach campaign, the website being reached out to will also be relevant to the keywords you want to improve rankings for and in the same way, relevant to your industry.

In short, just because you wouldn’t pay to be featured on a website, don’t dismiss it.  A link back from the website can still be highly valuable (and it won’t cost you anything).

Effective outreach should always be lead generating

To refer back to my builder’s example – even if your website is being linked to from an eco-focused website, it doesn’t mean that you won’t raise awareness of your brand through this.  However, even if you don’t, the way that outreach is primarily lead generating is through search engine optimisation – in fact, that’s the whole point.

To refer back to the start of this article, the companies I work with expect me to help them to move up the rankings in Google searches.  Online advertising won’t achieve this, but outreach will.

Quite simply, outreach is not online advertising.

So, to conclude, my advice is to constantly remind yourself why outreach is being carried out in the first place.

It’s not a campaign to a targeted audience – it’s to help develop your online profile on search engines.  Take every opportunity to develop this organically and the website enquiries will follow.

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