How to Improve Your Link Building Outreach Pipeline

Have you ever tried checking the analytics of the top-ranking links on Google? If you have, you must have noticed that most of these top-ranking pages have thousands of inbound links. Interestingly, these inbound links significantly contribute to getting to the top ranks. But how do they do it?

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If you are interested in improving your rankings on the SERPs, you may need to invest time, money, and effort in 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 yield fruitful results. With most online services being fake, placing an order wastes time and money. Practically, you are on your own.

A link-building outreach campaign 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 helpful for your link-building outreach campaign if you incorporate the following steps in your strategy.

1. Set goals for your link-building campaign:

Before you start your link-building campaign to boost your rankings, there are a few questions that you should answer.

Firstly, do you need more prospects for link building?

• Suppose you are already in a good position in the search rankings or have many links to your pages. In that case, you can focus on other aspects of search engine optimization. However, there is no such thing as too many links. So, if you can 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 previously conducted link-building campaigns, you might have noticed that the same email template does not work for all 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 if you maintain a courteous relationship with the opportunity even after closing the deal.

Interestingly, you will have to analyze your situation to get the correct answer to these questions. The answers may not always be the same for every link-building campaign you organize, but without proper analysis of these questions, you may find it challenging to set the goals for your campaigns.

2. Locate prospects:

As you may realize, discovering a link prospect on the internet is as hectic as finding a needle in a haystack. Finding an option interested in a guest blog post is often considered the most challenging part of the link-building outreach campaign. You may feel like giving up after day 1, but there are several ways to find success in locating the right prospects.

Firstly, you cannot find all the prospects in your first SERP. You may need to go through multiple search results pages if you use Google with a particular keyword to look for opportunities. 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 opportunities write their details in their bio, it is also easier to get in touch with them. Also, if you rely on only one search engine, i.e., Google, you should consider surfing other search engines like Bing or DuckDuckGo to improve your chances.

3. 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 a link outreach template can offer you a systematic way to analyze the outreach process. This allows you to drill down into the most significant opportunities for betterment. You can find a copy of the link outreach template by Moz here.

While you may find several critical features in the template, you will need to edit the “Prospects” tab manually. Interestingly, this “Prospects” tab consists of all the potential link prospects you have discovered in your research. You can fill in details for outreach prioritization, such as the prospect’s website URL and domain authority.

You need to put any of these five options in the status column to denote the outreach stage for the particular prospect. If you have approached the possibility with your first outreach email, you can use the “Email sent” status to mark the chance. When you have just found the opportunity at the initial stage, you should use the “Need to reach out” class to keep the option.

Put the status of “Received response” when you get any response from the prospect. Select the “Topic approved” level once the candidate has approved your guest post topic. Finally, put the story of “Link acquired” once you successfully receive a link from the opportunity. As you put the details in the “Prospects” tab, the other charges are updated automatically in the template.

4. Record the opportunities and track the efforts:

You can track your progress when you have the link outreach template with you. It can help you understand which efforts are producing better results and which are not. As mentioned in the first point, the same email template may not work effectively in pursuing all the prospects. Adopting a different email template for the new option may be helpful in the outreach campaign.

Not just the email part; you can get a lot more insights into your efforts when you are tracking each of them with the outreach template. However, you will have to analyze the data correctly 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 send 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 actions, the details on the “Link pipeline” tab may help you adopt a better strategy for your link-building outreach campaign.

5. 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 an opportunity for the first time. Keeping the sheet updated will allow you to track your current efforts effectively. You can make real-time changes in your approach to the link-building outreach campaign to gain better results.

Link-building is perhaps the most challenging SEO activity you may encounter in your career. However, it can be pretty rewarding as well. If you are familiar with the latest SEO requirements of Google, you may already know that backlinking is one of the significant factors influencing your page’s ranking. So, even if it seems complicated to run link-building outreach campaigns for weeks, months, or even years, the results will always be satisfying.

Author bio: Gracie Anderson is an SEO expert who has worked in the marketing fielding for the past nine years and is a ghostwriter by choice. She loves music and traveling.

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