To all the SEO managers who are fetching backlinks one after the other by reaching out to bloggers and influencers, keep it up, because your efforts will pay off for sure. Blogger outreach has become a widely used strategy by brands who want to reach their target audience and increase their visibility. Having a blog on your website is certainly crucial when it comes to SEO, but having backlinks to your website will affect your SERP rank tremendously. If you haven’t yet considered blogger outreach as a strategy to help your ace the SEO game, now is the time to start reaching out to bloggers. Keep reading to understand exactly how blogger outreach will help you with SEO.
What Is Blogger Outreach?
Before we understand what blogger outreach is let’s understand who categorizes as a “blogger” here. Typically a blogger is someone who writes a blog. But reaching out to any blogger won’t help you.
Ever heard of the word “influencer”? Well, there is no way you didn’t. Influencers are everywhere now. Influencers are people with a huge following and they are able to influence the buying decisions and opinions of their dedicated followers.
These two are often used interchangeably but a blogger is not always an influencer and an influencer is not always a blogger.
The best example to understand this would be our Instagram bloggers who make content on Instagram, which includes photos, videos, and stories. These are influencers without an actual blog!
As far as your SEO is concerned, both influencers and bloggers can be helpful to you. Both help you massively with your off-page SEO.
So, what is blogger outreach?
Blogger outreach refers to the act of reaching out to popular bloggers in your niche to promote your products. Since bloggers have a dedicated audience who will view everything the blogger posts, the chances of your brand and product benefits reaching the audience are higher. Moreover, bloggers have a very strong relationship with their audience. There is a lot of trust in this relationship and hence if your product is recommended by them or your website is linked somewhere on their blog people would be less hesitant to check out your products and services.
For example, there is a skincare blogger I really like. Now if he mentions ABC product in one of his blogs as a good sunscreen, I would certainly try it out because my favorite blogger recommended it.
Blogger outreach is a very cost-effective and fruitful way of marketing your product and the product benefits.
Types Of Blogger Outreach
There are many ways in which you can benefit yourself with blogger outreach. Which type you choose completely depends on your ultimate goal. Do you want to create a backlink? Or do aim for a direct promotion by the blogger popular in your niche? Once you have your objective in front of your you can plot your strategy well.
Link Building
If you know a blogger who produces amazing content and people read their blog all the time, you can try to get a backlink on one of their blogs. Since they have high traffic it means that it is a high authority website and a backlink from a high authority website is incredibly valuable.
Guest Publications
If you’re interested in creating content for the blogger then you can try guest blogging. Guest blogging requires you to have good connections with the blogger. Guest posts are great to move the traffic on the blogger’s website to your website.
Product Promotion
Influencers or bloggers directly recommending your product to their followers is what, we refer to as product promotion. This method is quite expensive if you compare it to the first two methods.
Collaboration
When two businesses come together to create content that benefits each other equally, we call it a collaboration or “collab”. The cost of this collaboration is usually shared. Often businesses who have similar target audiences come together to promote their product together.
How Does Blogger Outreach Help With SEO?
Blogger outreach deals with off-page SEO. It is one of the many things you do to promote your brand and bring more traffic to your website. The efforts you put into the off-page SEO strategy affect the way you will rank on search engines. A brand or website that is endorsed by well-known brands will eventually be recognized as valuable and relevant by search engine crawlers, which will help you rank higher. There’s more to it than that, let’s discuss it in detail.
Creating More Backlinks
The biggest advantage of blogger outreach is that you get a chance to generate high-quality backlinks.
If you are new to SEO let’s quickly understand what backlinks are.
Backlinks
I would be easier with an example, so consider that you are a business that sells and rents plants to corporates and households. Your customers will be people who are into interior decoration, event decoration, and folks who love plants and gardening.
Interior decorators are probably your biggest clients so to reach them, you approach a blogger who is famous in the interior decoration industry. You ask them to give you a backlink in exchange for some money or they could even ask you to let them write a guest post on your blog.
The blogger writes an article about indoor plants to use in an office. In the article, on a specific keyword, your website would be linked (backlink). When people read this article they will eventually click on the link and you will be able to reach your target audience.
In a nutshell, if someone links to your website on their blog or any other webpage then you have earned a backlink.
Why are backlinks important in SEO?
For search engines, backlinks are like votes or likes. The more votes one has the better they are and hence the search engine will rank them higher. Backlinks are one of the most influencing criteria when it comes to SERP rankings.
How does blogger outreach help with backlinks?
When a blogger writes about your product or promotes it, it will certainly add a link to your website. This means you are able to hit three targets-
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- Reaching the right audience
- Driving traffic to your website
- Getting yourself more backlinks (votes)
Improves Website’s Rank on SERPs
On-page, Off-page and technical SEO- using them in a balance is what all SEO managers are trying to achieve to rank higher on SERPs. While you are managing your website and the content on it splendidly, blogger outreach will lend a hand to help your website climb the ranks.
We just discussed how backlinks act as a vote to help you rank higher. In those split seconds when the search engine is deciding what rank each website should have it gives your website scores based on a lot of factors. The Search Engine wants to give its users authentic, relevant and trusted information. According to it, the website which has more backlinks and social signals (discussed further) should be ranked higher.
While you are focusing on generating high-quality backlinks, if you also focus on eliminating poor backlinks (links from low-quality websites), you can get a better rank on SERPs.
However, before you get on with generating backlinks and using relevant keywords in your content, make sure you have conducted an SEO audit. An SEO audit lets you see the current state of your website. You can clearly identify the flaws and the areas where you need to improve.
Become A Popular Guest Blogger
Guest blogging is also a widely used and clever idea for bringing traffic to your website, which will eventually lead to a higher SERP rank.
Guest posting is where you create the content for the blogger’s website. For example, you own a cake shop. You could write a blog post related to baking cakes on a famous recipe blog.
Now, is any popular blogger going to let you write on their website just because you asked for it? No!
You have to build good relationships with the blogger and then you can find this opportunity. There are also some blogs that welcome anyone to submit their guest post, then they pick the ones that fulfill the standards that they have established.
As you write more guest posts your brand would be viewed as an expert in the particular industry. The traffic on your website would steadily increase and so will the trust people have in you.
Social Signals
Social signals are indicators of how well your social presence is. It refers to the number of likes and shares your web page has. Your presence on social media can also be an influencing factor here. You can apply the logic behind backlinks to social signals as well. The more likes and shares you have, the chances of search engines perceiving you as a high-quality website will increase, thus increasing your SERP rank.
Bring More Traffic To Your Website
The backlinks, guest posts, promotions, etc will all ultimately contribute to increasing the traffic on your website. This will certainly improve your rank as well as your sales. Just make sure your website is easy to navigate and the copy is well written. Once you have people on your website, it is your copy and the website design that does the job of converting the leads into your customers.
Increase Your Subscribers
There are a few things that work here. One is that if many popular bloggers are mentioning you in their posts then you would be viewed as a good brand. Second, if you write a lot of guest posts people will start viewing you as an expert in the field. Since your “votes” are increasing you will get a better rank and you will be visible to more people. Now if your own content is good, you can gradually see an increase in the number of subscribers you have.
Why is it important to have subscribers? Well, subscribers are your loyal customers or readers. So every time there is a new blog on your website you have a fixed number of people who will surely read it. These loyal readers will share your blog on their Whatsapp groups. This gives you better traffic and also the search engine will think of you as a high-quality website.
How to Choose Blogger For Your Blogger Outreach?
You cannot simply reach out to any blogger and make them create backlinks for you or let you write guest posts on their website. There are a few things you need to consider when choosing the right blogger for your blogger outreach campaign.
1. Audience
The blogger’s audience and your target customer should be the same. Otherwise, there is no use in contacting them. Imagine your product is being discussed in front of a group that is certainly not interested in the product. Instead, you can invest all that effort into reaching out to a blogger who writes for your target audience.
2. Influence
Being aware of the blogger is one thing, but you can anticipate greater outcomes if the blogger has more influence on the readers. You may determine that the audience respects a blogger’s views and expertise if you see people inquiring about things that will help them make purchases with the blogger. Do a little research on how much influence the blogger has on its readers.
3. Reach
Reach and impressions are two different things. Reach refers to each unique view the blog has while impressions are a total number of views. The more reach a blog has the more people will be aware of your business.
4. Engagement
Another determining factor is how many comments, shares, and re-shares the blogger gets. Bloggers with good and authentic engagement from the audience can be more beneficial to you.
5. Location
If your business is limited to a particular country then you can find bloggers who have a better reach in that country. After all, you are trying to reach your target audience, so reaching an audience from other countries won’t prove to be helpful.
6. Design of the blog
Most high authority bloggers will have a well-designed blog. However, it’s your duty to check that their website is well designed and the blog posts also look visually interesting.
7. Professionalism
Don’t work with bloggers who don’t have a sense of professionalism. Acts like a delayed response or bad attitude won’t help you maintain a good relationship with the blogger. We need to maintain friendships with the bloggers to continue working with them, however, if they are being unprofessional you better choose another blogger.
8. Charges
Product promotions are the costliest blogger outreach strategies. Other methods will also cost you but it would be lesser than promotion. Discuss the charges with the blogger and if your budget permits then you are good to go.
Wrapping up
There are bloggers sprouting from every corner of the world. Bloggers earn a hefty from brands like yours. So when you approach a blogger it is most likely that they will accept your offer provided they think of you as a good business and that their audience might be interested in your product. This interdependence of brands and bloggers helps you make a deal that is beneficial for both parties equally.
Blogger outreach is one marketing strategy that you should really consider. People trust the bloggers more than they trust your ads and reviews on the website.
About the Author
Vaibhav Kakkar is the Founder and CEO of Digital Web Solutions, a globally trusted agency with a full suite of digital marketing services and development solutions. Vaibhav believes in building systems over services, and has helped scale up agencies from scratch to niche-leaders with million dollar turnovers.
