After Panda and Penguin updates from the last couple of years and the rumors of a new algorithm planned by Google, there’s one thing that you’ve probably heard people in the industry say thousands of times already – and you’re probably going to hear it again – so I’ll just say it as well:
SEO is changing!
But it’s changing for good. Why is this? Well, the process of getting backlinks now is not a matter of doing it in a mechanical way anymore or just trying to scale everything with software or outsourcing. Now you have to be directly a part of it by being involved creatively in the research, production and outreach process.
During the time that I’ve been involved in all this “New SEO”, I’ve learned many things. There are methods such as guest blogging that works really well but is way more complex than just emailing people and asking them whether they allow guest bloggers to write articles on their website.
I’ll share a few important things that everyone should understand well:
Do not use email templates
Using email templates when contacting webmasters is definitely one of the reasons many people fail to receive a good response rate. Of course, it depends on the niche that your client is in but still everyone can smell an email that is not written directly to them.
As I said in the beginning of this article, SEO is different now and if you haven’t eliminated your spammy techniques yet, in practice or in your mind, you’re bound to fail. Just accept the change, do the transition and move on.
If you have potential website that could link to you, don’t lose the opportunity by sending them an email that is not personalized for them. Follow their blog, understand their vision, be a part of their audience, then slowly establish a connection with them and find the right time to act.
Rejection is not the end
It happens many times, for whatever reason, that your request gets rejected. But, this isn’t the end of the conversation. Remember, getting them to open the email and respond is the hardest part; not the actual conversation with them.
So, if you get a simple email by them saying that they can’t add a link to your website or they simply don’t allow guest blogs at the moment, don’t let that discourage you. This is the best opportunity to establish a connection with them. Be creative and find a way to make them listen to what you’ve got to say.
Convince them that staying in touch with you is important for them. Make them believe it by proving it in any way that you can. Be someone worth collaborating with and you’ll never fail to build connections with people who took the time to write an email back to you.
Formatting your email for Backlink
Don’t send that email, before making it look professional and serious enough. Personalize it, but be sure to check the formatting and errors. Email outreach is something that you try to scale as much as possible but not considering these points won’t make you successful in the process.
Be sure to let them know with who they are talking to by adding your full name, website, social media accounts, phone number and address. It’s always good to add some description along with your website and some interesting fact or statistic. Like the number of subscribers or the people who use your services or something similar.
I know that this is basically handled by the email provider and software, but be sure to check the font type and size before you send the email. Don’t change anything while exchanging emails back and forth from the original email. It’s distracting.
Keep a spreadsheet of your contacts
It’s very important to have a spreadsheet with these key columns:
- URL
- Email Address
- Date Contacted
- Notes
Of course, you’re free to add anything that you might think it’s reasonable but having this data is crucial if you’re willing to do the outreach properly.
There are many cases that happened to me where websites have linked to the website I requested but they didn’t send an email back to inform me about it. I got a link but I didn’t know about it up until days or weeks later. Sure there are tools that index your backlinks but many take a long time and they’re not always accurate.
I’ve found that it’s important to use some sort of a tool that checks the list of the websites that you’ve contacted to see whether there is a backlink or not. So far I haven’t been able to come up with a free solution that has been created solely for this purpose but I’ve found a little online tool called http://backlinkvalidator.net/ that many people don’t know about and that could save you plenty of time when doing outreach. I’ve written an article on how it helped me save time when doing link outreach.
So, this free SEO tool basically serves two main functions:
- The first one is to verify the backlinks that you already have and to be sure that they aren’t deleted.
- The second function is the one that I told you about. To check the list of the websites that you send requests to add your link to see if they have added your link yet. This is very helpful when it comes to broken link building and after you get the confirmation that they’re going to work on fixing the links.
Any of these functions can be handled by paid tools that many professionals use such as Ahrefs , Open Site Explorer and Screaming Frog, but this is the only free solution for people who don’t have much budget to spend on tool subscriptions.
These are basically some of the tips that I consider very important when doing Email outreach and I wanted to share them with you. If you have any similar tip when contacting people, I’d love to hear them, so please share them with us in the comments below. Here are few more articles, that will help you to get more links:
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