After heavy research around the controversy of Google’s search algorithm, it’s safe to say that manual outreach link building plays a significant role in website SEO. With good backlink building strategies, it may be possible to boost your website rankings. Links are mainly used to connect your website to other websites and other websites to yours. Google deliberates backlinks as an essential search ranking factor which means Google will assess the backlinks you share on other websites. As the links increase, you boost your exposure and thus enable readers better access to relevant data.
Some common manual link building strategies are content marketing, public relations, manual blogger outreach, broken link building, and many more. With quality backlinks, reaching the desired audience becomes more manageable.
Among many SEO strategies, organic link building is considered one of the challenging parts of SEO and requires a lot of work. Still, it becomes much more attainable with enough research and awareness of the white hat link building techniques. This article will describe manual outreach and introduce advanced link building strategies for SEO in 2023.
What is Manual Outreach Link Building?
Manual outreach link building is a process of acquiring backlinks to a website by reaching out to other website owners or webmasters manually and requesting them to link back to your website. The process involves identifying potential websites or blogs in your niche, contacting the owners or editors, and convincing them to link to your website.
Manual outreach link building is acquiring backlinks to a website by manually reaching out to other website owners and requesting them to link back to your website. The process involves:
- Identifying potential websites or blogs in your niche.
- Contacting the owners or editors.
- Convincing them to link to your website.
The outreach process typically involves sending personalized emails or messages to website owners, explaining why their readers would find value in linking to your website, and how it can benefit their own website’s visitors. This process can be time-consuming, so we recommend connecting with blog owners through the GetReviewed product review blogger platform and requesting them to review your product with a link to your website.
Manual outreach link building requires a strategic approach, careful research, and a solid understanding of your target audience and niche. It also requires effective communication and negotiation skills to convince other website owners to link to your site. When done correctly, outreach link building can help increase the visibility of your website, improve your search engine rankings, and drive more traffic to your site.
Manual Outreach Link Building Strategies
1. Link Reclamation
Link reclamation is one of the manual outreach link building strategies, which allows you to reclaim a previously broken or removed link on a website. Fortunately, dozens of tools are available to browse unlinked mentions across the web. For example, you can use Moz’s Fresh Web Explorer and type in your brand. Additionally, certain search operators exist to fulfill this cause and find mentions of your brand. They are also specialized to determine whether the page provides a link back to your website or not. You can even set up Google alerts that send alerts or messages to your email address once it detects a mention of your website or brand. After you find a website with a mention of your brand, you will need to reach out to the website owner and ask for a link insertion. This strategy allows you to stay consistent and find new backlink-building opportunities.
2. Reverse-engineered competitor link building
Download a CSV of 3-5 of your top competitor backlinks by leveraging SEMrush or Ahrefs. First, filter your spreadsheet and then tag by gTLD (.com, .org, .de, etc.), geography, industry, DA / PA, traffic, total unique referral domains, and other metrics your manual link-building campaign may consider valuable. The objective is to assess the data to evaluate why a competitor earned each link and focus on surpassing them by creating better content. Eliminate useless links and start planning once you’ve discovered a website for which you can produce quality material that will likely earn you a link.
While enabling filters, you can look towards the following organic link-building techniques: guest blogging, influencer relationships, broken links, link exchange for SEO, and connecting with product review bloggers at GetReviewed.
Furthermore, you can search for manual outreach link-building opportunities around value-added content. You can do this by contacting the content editor and providing a quote, offering links to research or an infographic, for instance, and even replacing dead links with better content.
3. Resource page link building
The gist of this strategy is simple and requires you to find a page that links to quality content in your chosen niche. After that, offer the best-fit content for that same resource page. To elaborate on this strategy, start by searching the following strings:
- “Keyword” + inurl:links
- “Keyword” + “helpful resources”
- “Keyword” + “useful resources”
- “Keyword” + “useful links”
These have been specially designed to find resource pages in Google. Once you’ve discovered your resource page, identify the efficacy and profit-making potential and check the website’s ratings. Finally, figure out what you can offer to fit the resource page.
4. Broken link building
Broken link building is another manual outreach link-building strategy similar to link reclamation but involves leveraging broken links of your website or your competitors from pages across the web. The recommended course to find a goldmine of broken links is researching topics using SEMrush or Ahrefs.
Consider Ahrefs and start by plugging your domain information into Ahrefs Site explorer to demonstrate how to execute this strategy. Click on ‘Broken Links’ and then filter by 404 Not Found. After clicking Dofollow Links, you are greeted with a list of pages where your link or your competitor’s link is broken, showing 404 not found. You can now browse blogs related to your niche and reach out to website owners with requests to change the broken link with the correct link version of your website.
5. Skyscraper
The main idea of this strategy is to browse the content that rates high on the ranking scale on Google for the keyword you want to rank and create an objectively better version of the same content to raise the competition. Better in these terms can mean incorporating video clips, longer writing forms, helpful images, infographics, or simply enhancing the overall quality that ranks high for your target keyword. This technique requires time and resources, and there is a minimal guarantee that you might emerge successful. Some existing cases have proved the effectiveness of this strategy; however, it is highly dependent on the core philosophy of content marketing and link building. Connecting with bloggers at GetReviewed product review blogger platform will simplify your manual outreach link-building campaign.
6. Co-authoring
Co-authoring is a manual outreach link-building tactic that involves collaborating with another author or website owner to create high-quality content and build backlinks to your website. Co-authoring dramatically increases your website’s visibility and authority while establishing relationships with other industry experts. This popular tactic allows you to double the increase of backlinks. It all comes down to doing your research, gathering practical and trendy content ideas, and pitching them to various websites while offering to co-author them by providing updated information or best practices relevant to the topic. This includes blogger outreach and sending personalized emails to relevant bloggers and journalists.
The process of co-authoring begins with identifying a website or author that has a similar target audience to yours. Once you have identified a potential partner, you can reach out to them to propose a collaboration. Your proposal should highlight the benefits of co-authoring, such as increased exposure and the opportunity to create high-quality content together.
If your proposal is accepted, you can begin the co-authoring process. This typically involves brainstorming content ideas, outlining the article or blog post, and then writing and editing the content together. You may also want to include images or other multimedia elements to enhance the content and make it more engaging.
Participating in building links gives you an edge to increase your SEO while simultaneously acquiring the assistance of the site admin to achieve a high-quality content piece. As a result, manual outreach link-building and co-authoring are effective strategies.
The advantages continue since you not only have additional backlinks to boost your SEO but also have an extended reach and the chance to grow to newer audiences. If you are looking for a great way to earn credible backlinks from bloggers, alongside excellent brand awareness through authority product reviews on blogs, GetReviewed.org is the solution.
7. Guestographics
Another strategy is to experiment with a new form of guest posting that hits the market, which uses infographics as content and is thus referred to as guestographics.
It follows a small formula for higher effectiveness’ Quality Content + Targeted Outreach + Added Value = Links.’ Try using tools like Ahrefs Content Explorer and Buzzsumo to discover trending content in your industry.
Think about how you can turn the evergreen content or trending topic into an infographic. With this strategy, you submit a high-quality infographic instead of a guest post that centers on the chosen topic that links back to your website. This skyscrapers the content that you wrote for the specified target keyword. Think creativity + placement and hire a graphic designer from Freelancer or Upwork to access quality designed visuals.
8. Conducting original research
This method reflects expertise, quality, and commitment to your brand and yourself. Suppose you possess the ability to conduct research via surveys or other means adequately, collect data that answer industry questions, or help your target audience better. In that case, you can easily elevate your brand and gain enough traction. This strategy allows you to build a positive impact on your brand, add value to your industry, and can result in high-quality links for your website.
A good example is if you work in the coffee industry and your niche surrounds coffee-making and similar beverages. You can conduct a poll on the most popular times in the day people prefer to drink their second cup of coffee. Add how many cups a person drinks on average in a month, etc., as well as popular coffee brands and caffeine alternatives like tea or energy drinks. Some authority lifestyle bloggers may find your research useful and add a link to your report in one of their articles.
9. Creating tools and widgets
Building a tool or widget is a powerful and effective method to build organic backlinks and catapult your brand into the highest rankings of Google. Earning links through widgets can be done in two well-known ways. You either build a tool and host it on your website or build a widget for others to host on their webpage.
An example of the former method is when a mortgage company hosts a mortgage calculator on their website. The calculator becomes a valid reason to visit their website and contribute to the overall rankings, which means free web traffic and links.
A couple of factors to remember are that the widget is fully functional and creatively leverages your data or API data from third parties. If your brand is willing to spend resources on getting this strategy right, it will be well worth the investment because it can deliver better ROI than any other advanced link-building strategy.
10. Ego bait
Ego bait is a proven effective method in organic SEO link building. Its primary focus is to appeal to influencers’ egos and tag them in different articles. This encourages influencers you tag to read the post, spread the word further, or link back to it later. Some specific strategies under this heading include creating a post with a reference list of thought leaders and a link to their website or emailing influencers once a post becomes live and requesting them to comment. The idea is to encourage interaction between the influencer and you and build a relationship.
The bottom line
There are a variety of advanced strategies you can employ to build backlinks in 2023. You can reclaim links or use the broken link-building technique to leverage broken backlinks across websites. Another method is to use tools to assess data, what makes a website’s backlink have a higher ranking, and how it earns traffic. This is referred to as ‘reverse-engineered competitor link building.’ Conducting your own research to determine a quality backlink or creating useful tools and widgets for your own or another website is among some advanced strategies you can use for backlink building. Skyscrapering existing content can also be a great strategy, depending on your content marketing. You should also consider co-authoring or blogger outreach alongside ego baits to earn credible backlinks.
We hope this article has been informative and enables you to build credible backlinks for your site. Thank you for reading!
About the author
Abdullah Riaz
Abdullah Riaz is a writer who, alongside content writing, also takes part in fiction writing. He has already been published in a book as one of the winners of a fiction writing contest. In addition to writing, he also has experience with all sorts of research and written content for SEO services, particularly in IT-related fields. He has always been a fan of writing and learning about new topics. Outside writing, you’ll find him spending time with his dog, Terry.