Outreach and search engine optimization (SEO)

Those working in communication are, of course, already familiar with outreach. For us within search engine optimization, it is also the key that makes content marketing useful. To get the full effect of your content, it also needs this component, and today we’ll clarify how it works.

When Aaron and I were talking about guest posting the other day, it struck me that outreach (especially outreach in the U.S.) might not be obvious to many. Outreach is what ties everything together for your content marketing and makes it useful for SEO. Without outreach, content marketing is more or less just blogging (if we’re being a bit harsh). So, what is outreach and how does it work?

Need help with your outreach? We now offer Outreach SEO as a service.

What is outreach?

Like a tree falling in the forest, your amazing content is just as unheard if no one can read, see, or hear it. This is how Ashley Halberstadt described outreach in 2013 on HubSpot (a must-read post for beginners). Outreach is the activity of spreading your content, and the goal could be guest blogging, newspaper articles, tweets, or anything else—outreach is what precedes that result. Sometimes news spreads on its own, sometimes it rolls on completely by itself. However, if you want some form of certainty and system in your work, you can’t rely on random distribution. You need to make sure your content ends up in front of the people who can blog, write, or share it on social media. This is where outreach is your primary tool.

Some may argue that good content or a good product will spread on its own. Sure, that can happen—what people are already interested in can gain traction, but if that were enough, why does Disney make trailers for Star Wars? With the level of internet-wide buzz around the new Star Wars movie, it seems to be the most anticipated film ever, so why bother marketing it?

How does outreach work?

If you don’t have a clip of Fredrik Federly being attacked by a pig (if you haven’t seen it yet, it sounds funnier than it looks), you need to get your content out to the right people. The truth is, you need outreach even if you want to maximize results. You want to reach and convince someone who has the ability to publish something about your material in one way or another. You do this with three main components:

• A good relationship
• A good pitch
• Hard work

You need to have a relationship with the person you want to help elevate your topic. You don’t necessarily need to be best friends or grab a beer together on the weekend, but you need to make sure there’s a connection. You should recognize each other, and that connection needs to be in place before what comes next. A pitch in outreach is not the same as a pitch to potential customers or to your boss, but it is still a sales situation. You’re trying to convince someone to do something for you. The third part, hard work, may be the most important. Not only do you need to do your homework thoroughly, but you also need to continue contacting, building relationships, pitching, and starting over again, over and over.

The Relationship

There are many ways to build relationships with webmasters, bloggers, and influencers. What I consider most important is that it’s a genuine relationship being built. If you’re going to talk to a blogger, you need to seriously take an interest in what they’ve written, you need to do your homework properly, and you need to build a real relationship. Just like a good salesperson—one who genuinely understands your problem and tries to help you find solutions instead of giving you a fake smile and pushing you to buy a vacuum cleaner you don’t need—you should read through the blogger’s work, talk to the blogger about their blog, and think about how you can help the blogger instead of the other way around. Build a real relationship.

As a small side note, I decided to publish a video collage with Tom Waits here. There are two reasons for this: firstly, it’s a piece of content that suits me perfectly; I thought it was a very funny clip and chose to publish it. Secondly, it illustrates another aspect of relationships. I already have a relationship with Tom Waits—we’ve never spoken, emailed, or even tweeted—but I’ve listened to his music. If Tom Waits were to reach out to me because he wants publicity for his new album, we already have a relationship. Think about the implications this has for large brands.

The Pitch

Once you’ve gotten to know the blogger and familiarized yourself with the work they’re doing on their blog (of course, it doesn’t have to be a blogger, but it works well as an example), you need to figure out what would make the blogger’s life better. It could be, for example, creating a piece of content that fits perfectly with their blog and fills a gap. It could be giving the blog exposure among your customers by doing an interview with the blogger on your own site. It could be almost anything, but it should meet two things: it should benefit the blogger, and it should be something shareable. In SEO, it also needs to be something that can be linked to—more on that later. The pitch, just like the relationship, should be honest; no one wants to feel like you have a hidden agenda. It should also include a call to action, telling them straight up what you want. It doesn’t need to be more complicated than: “I noticed you don’t have anything about outdoor lighting on your garden blog. How about we put together an article with our lighting expert for you to publish?” If you have a good relationship with the blogger, this won’t feel unnatural.

Of course, you can refine your pitch endlessly, and I don’t want to go into details about it. Instead, I’ll refer you to someone who is an expert on just that: read Jerry Silfwer’s How To Write A Blogger Outreach Email (Including Two Templates).

The Hard Work

Doing this once isn’t enough. The more you do it, the better the results. Also, the first thing you should do after you’ve had your first piece published about your site is to ensure you maintain the relationship. You don’t want to be the marketer who one-night-stands your contacts. Not only can you both benefit from each other in the future, but you also want to have the good taste to not slip away before the light comes up.

Now you need to repeat this: source contacts, build relationships, pitch, follow up, and start over again. This is where Excel is probably your best friend, but there are tools available on the market as well. Here’s a list of some tools that might be useful.

Use your Outreach for SEO

As you might know, I’m firmly convinced that content marketing needs search engine optimization (SEO) to reach its full potential. Outreach is the link that’s needed (besides technical solutions like correct meta tags, titles, navigation, etc. The whole on-page package). Let’s take an example to explain:

Our short workdays

The idea of a 6-hour workday has spread like wildfire around the world over the past two months. It’s not just us who’ve been mentioned, but also a regional government experiment, a car mechanic with shifts, and an app developer. In addition to being the first to actually implement a 6-hour workday 😉, there’s another major difference. The others have followed suit and received the same amount of media coverage, but we’ve received something no one else has. Take a look at this article in The Guardian—do you see the difference? We got a link, and we’re the only company with a 6-hour workday that got it. How did that happen? We made sure it did.

Not only did we make sure to have a good explanatory article about our workdays and the benefits we see from them, but we also made sure that the journalists writing about shorter workdays knew about ours. When they asked for our take on how the shorter workweek affected work, we made sure there was an article that addressed exactly that. We made their article better by providing a source that was not only in the right language but also 100% relevant.

There must be a link somewhere

Your pitch should include that little detail that earns the link. Without the link, the whole project is useless (for your SEO). If you’re publishing that lighting article, you also need to already have something on your site that deserves a link from the article. It needs to be a good source, a strong inspiration, or something else that makes it worthy of a link. When you contact the journalist you want to write about your research on which type of wood is best, you need to have the full research published on your site, not just link to your homepage. The link needs to provide real value.

Takeaways

There’s so much I want to say in this post, but if we focus on the important things, remember the three key components, and you’re well on your way:

• A genuine relationship
• A good pitch
• A lot of hard work

Also, keep in mind that I’m writing this for your sake—I’ve probably already got a relationship with you, and if I don’t, we’ll definitely have one in the future (if you like what you’re reading, of course). Feel free to share this post if you think your friends and acquaintances would find it useful; I’d be very happy about that as well.