Have you ever tried checking the analytics of the top ranking links on Google? If you have, you must have noticed that majority of these top ranking pages have thousands of inbound links to them. Interestingly, these inbound links are actually one of the major contributing factors in getting the top ranks. But how do they do it?
Well, if you are interested in improving your rankings on the SERPs, you may need to invest time, money and efforts on your link building outreach. It is not a one-time assignment. So, you may need to pursue it for quite some time. What is more frustrating is that hiring an expert for affordable assignment help does not offer any fruitful result. With most online services being fake, placing an order leads to the wastage of time and money. Practically, you are on your own.
A link building outreach campaign, basically, requires you to find a prospect with good domain authority, approach them with a proposal for a guest post and receive a backlink in return. In reality, it is not as easy as it sounds. It will be useful for your link building outreach campaign if you incorporate these following steps in your strategy.
- Set goals for your link building campaign:
Before you start your link building campaign with the objective to boost your rankings, there are a few questions that you should answer.
Firstly, do you really need more prospects for link building?
- If you are already at a good position in the search rankings or if you have a significant number of links to your pages, you can focus your efforts on other aspects of search engine optimization. However, there is no such thing as too many links. So, if you have the option to acquire more links from prospects, it is not a bad idea to pursue the same.
Secondly, do you need to revise your email templates?
- If you have conducted link building campaigns in the past, you might have noticed that the same email template does not work for all the prospects. If you have received positive results with the existing email template, it might seem okay to continue with the same template. However, having a personalized template for each prospect may offer better results.
Lastly, do you need to follow up with prospects?
- It may often seem insignificant to follow up with a prospect after getting a backlink from them. However, it may serve you better in the future if you maintain a courteous relationship with the prospect even after closing the deal.
Interestingly, you will have to analyze your situation to get the right answer to these questions. The answers may not always be the same for every link building campaign you organize, but without having a proper analysis of these questions, you may find it difficult to set the goals for your campaigns.
- Locate prospects:
Finding a prospect who is interested in a guest blog post is often considered the toughest part of the whole link building outreach campaign. As you may realize, discovering a link prospect on the internet is as hectic as finding a needle in the haystack. You may feel like giving up after the day 1, but there are several ways in which you can find success in locating the right prospects.
Firstly, you cannot find all the prospects in your first SERP. If you are using Google with a particular keyword to look for the prospects, you may need to go through multiple pages of search results. However, if you don’t find anything fruitful on the first five pages, consider trying a different keyword the next time. You can even use tools like Prospector to locate your link prospect.
Next, you should use social networks to your advantage. Twitter is particularly effective when it comes to spotting a prospect. Since most of the prospects write their details in their bio, it is also easier to get in touch with them. Also, if you are relying on only one search engine, i.e. Google, you should consider surfing other search engines like Bing or DuckDuckGo to improve your chances.
- Create a link outreach template:
According to Moz.com, it is always better to put together a template when conducting a link building campaign. Moz.com suggests that such link outreach template can offer you a systematic way to analyze the outreach process. This allows you to drill down into the biggest opportunities for betterment. You can find a copy to the link outreach template by Moz here.
While you may find a number of key features in the template, you will need to edit the “Prospects” tab manually. Interestingly, this “Prospects” tab consists of all the potential link prospects that you have discovered in your research. You can fill the details such as the prospect’s website URL and its domain authority for outreach prioritization.
In the status column, you need to put any of these 5 options to denote the outreach stage for the particular prospect. At the initial stage when you have just found the prospect, you should use the status “Need to reach out” to mark the prospect. If you have approached the prospect with your first outreach email, you can use the “Email sent” status to mark the prospect.
Put the status of “Received response” when you get any response from the prospect’s end. Select the status of “Topic approved” once your guest post topic has been approved by the prospect. Finally, put the status of “Link acquired” once you successfully received a link from the prospect. As you put the details in the “Prospects” tab, the other tabs are updated automatically in the template.
- Record the opportunities and track the efforts:
When you have the link outreach template with you, you can track your progress thoroughly. It can help you understand which efforts are producing better results and which is not. As mentioned in the first point, the same email template may not work effectively in pursuing all the prospects. Perhaps, adopting a different email template for the new prospect may be useful in the outreach campaign.
Not just the email part, you can actually get a lot more insights on your efforts when you are tracking each of them with the outreach template. However, you will have to analyze the data properly, to learn where your efforts are lacking. For instance, if you have received a response from the prospect, but are failing to acquire a link, you may need to focus on the quality of guest posts you are sending out.
Perhaps, tracking the prospects based on the status in the outreach template may allow you to get a better understanding of the effectiveness of your efforts. Since the transition from one stage to another relies on your efforts, the details on the “Link pipeline” tab may help you adopt a better strategy for your link building outreach campaign.
- Keep the spreadsheet updated:
As mentioned earlier, you only need to manually edit the “Prospects” tab in the whole spreadsheet of the link building outreach template. However, it is necessary to keep updating the details as you continue to get updates from your link prospects. This may not be as difficult as the previous steps mentioned in this outreach process, but the outreach template may cease to benefit you if you forget to update the spreadsheet.
You can make it a habit to update the details in the spreadsheet as soon as you receive any update from the prospect, or add or connect with a prospect for the first time. Keeping the sheet updated will allow you to track your current efforts effectively. When it is needed, you can make real-time changes in your approach in the link building outreach campaign to gain better results.
Link-building is perhaps the most challenging SEO activity that you may encounter in your career. However, it can be quite rewarding as well. If you are familiar with the latest SEO requirements of Google, you may already know that backlinking is one of the major factors that influence the ranking of your pages. So, even if it seems difficult to run the link building outreach campaigns for weeks, months or even years, the results are always going to be satisfying.
Author bio: Gracie Anderson is an SEO expert who is working in the field of marketing for the past 9 years and a ghostwriter by choice. She loves music and traveling
The post How to Improve Your Link Building Outreach Pipeline appeared first on Facebook Advertising Agency | Facebook Marketing Company.
from
https://voymedia.com/how-to-improve-your-link-building-outreach-pipeline/