Shotgun or Sniper? Choose Your SEO Outreach Tactic

SEO outreach is the practice of contacting website owners and asking them for links back to your website. But what’s the best approach totake?

Links are a major Google ranking factor. Even if they weren’t, a link from a popular website back to yours would send visitors to your site—and make your company and brand lookgood.

But high-quality backlinks don’t build themselves—you need to be proactive to get them. That’s where SEO outreach comesin.

Waking up and discovering you’ve landed a link from the New York Times or other high authority sites just isn’t going to happen unless you:

• Create something valuable
• Find a suitable audience to reach outto
• Tell publishers about it (using a compelling pitch)

Create something valuable

If you offer something of value to the prospect when you’re pitching to them, you may save your email from being instantly slam-dunked into the trashcan.

It needs to be something their audience will love—you’ll then stand the highest chance of being credited with a backlink to yoursite.

Here are 9 ideas for creating something publishers want to publish on their website.

This is not a complete list, but with a bit of creativity, you could use this as a basis to identify something of value within your industry that you can use to pitch to publishers.

Find a suitable audience

Identifying a suitable audience for your topic is easy with the help of a tool like Ahrefs’ Content Explorer. Let’s say I...