Outreach SEO - Here's How You Do It

Outreach for SEO (search engine optimization or search engine optimization in Swedish) is one of my favorite topics right now, and I’d like us to go a bit deeper into how it works. The idea is that after reading this post, you should be able to get started with effective outreach SEO.

For those of you who want help with your Outreach SEO, it is now a service we provide at Brath.

Outreach SEO is both one of the oldest forms of SEO and one of the newer ones. In the early years of search engine optimization, when everything was somewhat less refined, outreach SEO was the method that most, or at least very many, worked with. Competition in the search results was relatively low, which meant that you could achieve success with what would later become a very expensive model for search engine optimization.

There has been a lot of innovation in SEO, especially in the areas of PageRank and authority. During the first half of the 2000s, outreach slowly started to be pushed aside in favor of more and more automated link building, as it was called back then. This was something Google disliked, but skilled SEO specialists were always one step ahead of Google and could quickly scale their solutions. Those of us who remember the larger companies of that time know how rapidly they scaled their systems and with what speed and profitability they grew. However, something began to change, slowly, during that period.

This occurred on such a large scale that it began to threaten the integrity of Google’s search results. In some cases, it could result in not displaying the “best” result for a particular search. Google then began working seriously on quality assurance for its results, and one way to do that was to combat the automatic systems. Systems that previously could deliver tons of authority at a very low cost became increasingly ineffective.

The systems became more complex and required more manual work to be as effective as before, and Google tightened the screws even further. This process has been ongoing since then, and the quality of what needs to be delivered to reach positions has steadily increased. So much so, that today, I believe automation should be completely avoided.

As automation becomes more ineffective, the solid craftsmanship becomes more and more cost-effective, which leads to outreach SEO once again being a viable path forward. Where one previously hit a wall of competition in the form of a lot of cheap authority and had to run oneself ragged to keep up, Google has, perhaps unknowingly, reduced the competition to the benefit of craftsmanship. Therefore, there are reasons to consider outreach:

This is how you do Outreach SEO

The core of Outreach SEO is earning backlinks to your site. You can earn backlinks in various ways, but at its core, there is always content. That’s why content marketing has always been closely tied to SEO as a discipline. This content must then be shown to the right person, someone who is willing and able to reference it. The content doesn’t necessarily have to be text or video, nor does it have to be the product you’re selling—it could be something entirely different. An example is our six-hour workdays. These are something that, if the right person learns about them, can generate backlinks and thereby authority to our site.

To continue with the example, we’ve had six-hour workdays since our start in 2012, but it wasn’t until 2015-2016 that we saw any return in the form of backlinks. The reason for this is that the right people didn’t know about it until now. Many people have indeed been interested in our workdays. Many of them were also willing to talk about it. However, they didn’t have the opportunity or desire to write about it and link to our site. That didn’t happen seriously until 2015. People who were interested in telling about our shorter workdays and who had a platform to do so, got to hear about us. That resulted in a significant boost in authority for us. The question now, of course, is how to reach that point—the answer is outreach.

There are a wide range of possible ways to reach the golden position I described above. One method has traditionally been social media of various kinds, which is perhaps why many have believed that likes and tweets have a positive effect on search results. What has actually happened is that the content has reached an audience, and if you’re lucky, it has landed right under the nose of the right person. A person who might consider turning their knowledge of your content into a backlink. If we disregard the more vague methods of putting your content under the noses of writers who might be interested, and instead focus on more straightforward approaches, there are actually things that you can do relatively quickly on your own.

Things you can do yourself

Much of the work with Outreach SEO is about managing, and the other half of the job is influencing. In many ways, this is similar to PR. The first thing you need to do is find all the people who might be interested in your content, whatever it may be.

You need to gather all the websites that could have an interest in what you have to offer. Whether it’s shorter working hours, stylish products, or really interesting blog posts doesn’t matter—you must find the right person. Person is key here because you can’t talk to the website you want to influence, you need to talk to the person. You need to find people who have written about a related topic, websites that have linked to similar content, or people who, for some other reason, already have an incentive to link to content like yours. One example is the Left Party’s link to Brath.se—perhaps not the party most associated with marketing companies, but they had other incentives to link, as they want to show that shorter working hours work.

Once you’ve identified a number of websites that you think might be a good fit, the next step is to create contact. How much or how little time you spend on the contact varies; it depends on the type of content and the type of site. The goal here is to build trust in your content and your person. Once you’ve done that, the rest usually goes quite smoothly. What you then need is just the right landing page—a page that is link-friendly and provides added value.

3 practical methods

If we were to come up with some simpler, hands-on models for how you can do the work, I would suggest starting with one of these three. In my experience, they yield good results and are relatively easy to implement.

1. Statistics Outreach

Statistics are very handy because they provide a strong reason for others to link to you. Here’s how you do it: Gather statistics within your field; you’re likely the best at understanding your area, and it’s usually quite easy to compile something newsworthy. A good place to start searching is in Analytics—what trends have emerged, what has changed since the launch of Pokémon Go, what do people on Facebook find most interesting about your topic, and so on. Another good place is Allabolag, where you can compare industries, look at salary costs for different companies, assess how the industry is performing, and more. Put together a comprehensive bundle of statistics.

Once you have a large amount of material, publish it in full on your site. Then, write a shorter article with the key points and the data supporting what you’re talking about, but leave out the rest of the data. This way, anyone who writes about your article will be more or less forced to link to you if they want to reference the source, unless they want to clutter their article with all your data. Then, simply send it out like a press release to anyone who might be interested.

2. Specialist magazine pick pages

If you sell products in an area where there’s enough interest for magazines to cover the field, you can use specialist magazines as a way to get links. Our garden business is a good example, as there are many garden magazines. Often, these magazines have “pick pages,” which may include fashion reports or, in our case, images of garden decorations. If you have relatively unique products (you can temporarily bring them in if needed), it’s often not impossible to get featured on these pages. Simply find the journalist who assembles these pages for the magazine and contact them to tell them about your products. This can often lead to some direct sales as well.

The important thing here is that you follow up afterward to ensure you actually get a link. They need to publish the pick page on their site, and they need to link to you for it to impact your SEO. If they haven’t done so, remind them that they should.

3. Conflict SEO

It may sound completely unreasonable, but it’s worked in PR for many years. Take a stance on something, stand firm, and make sure it’s talked about. Conflicts work as dividing lines in many contexts, and if you can get people to take your side and others to take a different side, you can get links to your articles on the topic with relatively little effort. A recent example of when this worked well is probably Oatly’s “Googla Mjölk” campaign. While SEO may not have been their primary goal, it’s something they’ve achieved to some extent as well.

Those who keep up with SEO discussions know that a number of SEO professionals, for some (to me, inexplicable) reason, got upset over Oatly’s campaign. While it’s understandable to be upset, it’s clear that Oatly wanted to divide Sweden into two camps—pro or against milk. Then, they chose two more or less well-known/unknown figures to deliver the message to everyone interested, and suddenly, they started ranking quite well for the keyword “milk.”

Now, you might not need to hire podcasters and go against the dairy industry to create a conflict where people are ready to take a stand. It’s probably more about standing up and saying, “We’re not like everyone else,” as you do in almost all marketing. Our ad about not voting for xenophobia is a good example. We lost some grumpy customers, but both those who supported our view and those who didn’t contributed significantly to spreading our material.

To wrap up this point, I want to add that it has to be genuine. Remember to stand for something you can truly support. We would never have run an ad with the opposite message, both because it would have made us physically sick and because it wouldn’t have been authentic, something that can undoubtedly bite you later.

Good luck with your Outreach SEO

You’ve been given a few tools to move forward with your Outreach SEO. If you have good tips to share or if you disagree, don’t hesitate to share in the comment section below.