SEO
How To Unleash The Power Of Pre-Outreach Strategy
In the world of digital marketing, traffic is the name of the game. And generating a lot of traffic usually means successfully promoting your content to get links and social media shares.
But even the most popular bloggers sometimes struggle with this. Seriously. Believe it or not, sometimes, even the most established digital content creators with the most engaged audiences struggle with getting the interaction they need.
If you’re running a smaller blog, this is probably disheartening.
After all, if Seth Godin has posts that aren’t getting shared, what hope do you have of going viral with your grandma’s cheesecake recipe?
Sure, it’s the best cheesecake in the history of the world, but how do you get people excited about it and share it in their social circle?
Let me introduce you to a little tactic known as a pre-outreach strategy.
What’s that, you ask? Your work ahead of content drops pays dividends after your release. It’s establishing relationships with industry players, journalists, editors, and other bloggers.
Usually, this is a two-way street, where you’ll partner with someone to promote their content, and in return, they’ll promote yours.
And the truly remarkable thing about it is that it’s not limited to blogging. You can also use pre-outreach to link email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), influencer marketing, and social media marketing campaigns.
If your pre-outreach strategy is effective, your traffic increase will be consistent, even when you’re not releasing new content.
Sounds great, right? Then let’s dive right into how to create and implement a pre-outreach strategy that can generate links and shares for all your content.
Before we jump in, there is one thing you need to know: If your business lacks visibility, using a pre-outreach strategy may not be the best use of your time.
Instead, it would be best if you first focused on improving your profile. Once you’ve done that, you should revisit your pre-outreach plan.
Start By Checking Your Circles
I always start all my pre-outreach campaigns by pulling together a list of experts and partners I regularly collaborate with on content promotion.
This is a quick and easy task if you use CRM systems like Nimble or Pitchbox or have a spreadsheet with their names and contact info.
I recommend reviewing your current list of subscribers and social media followers. There’s a good chance that among them, there are some people that might be interested in sharing your content.
After creating this spreadsheet, I separate all my contacts into two lists.
- The first list is the people I will ask to give my piece some love and endorsement across their channels.
- The second list of people is those to whom I will reach out about the possibility of linking back.
In both cases, I never forget that I’m asking for a favor, so I need to make sure it’s going to be easy and beneficial for them to help me out. No one likes doing a favor for someone who makes it difficult or offers nothing in return. I always ask whether they want me to promote anything.
Some people think the best way to get links is to email blast people you might not know. I would not recommend this.
A recent study showed that cold outreach emails have a response rate of just 1-5%. My personal experience confirms that number. It took me about 40 cold emails to get one link.
My rule of thumb is only to ask people whether they could refer to my piece if I know them and have previously partnered with them on a link-building side.
Thanks to Pitchbox, I can easily filter out contacts I’ve never built links with from my pre-outreach list.
Even though I sometimes use automated email outreach funnels for pre-outreach, I prefer to do it manually. This allows me to double-check that I am sending it to the right person and add a bit of personalization to each email.
One more thing that is good to mention is that – thanks to the Digital Olympus conference – I have a good number of digital marketing influencers that are always willing to help me spread the word once my post goes live.
So, launching your event or even podcast is a great idea, as this can help you build relationships with industry leaders.
One more example I’ll give you is Jason Barnard’s podcast. This platform, from which he covers SEO, copywriting, and more, allows him to promote his content effectively by involving the people he invites as guests to his show.
Finally, if you’re lucky enough to have close ties with companies that send out mass emails to their subscribers, this could be a gold mine.
The logic is pretty simple: Ask to be featured in their mass emails and, in return, offer to mention their post in your email marketing campaign.
As you can probably tell, the more people you have established a good working relationship with, the better your chances of getting links and social shares are.
Now let’s see what to do next after you have reached out to all your contacts.
Going Beyond Your Circles To Secure Links
Reaching out to people beyond your contacts is essential to get enough links. This is a great time to use pre-outreach to “warm up” people and build relationships with them.
The trick here is to provide contacts you’ll pre-outreach with value and benefits first, so they feel like they owe you.
However, it’s worth mentioning that if you aren’t familiar with your industry experts, this might become a time-consuming exercise.
Those are the steps you should take:
Find Experts That Regularly Publish Guest Posts Across Various Blogs
To put together a list of contributors, you could start by checking sites that accept guest post opportunities.
Optionally, you could go to BuzzSumo and run a report with the “Top Authors” tool, where you could search via any keyword related to your pre-outreach content.
Then, you need to look at the list of authors and find contributors that write across multiple blogs.
Craft A Powerful Value Proposition
Most of us are not as popular as Rand Fishkin or Matthew Woodward, so creating a powerful value proposition is essential.
In our case, the most straightforward ways are to ask potential linkers to:
- Add their quotes (if they’re interested and have time for that).
- Share your final draft and see if they have a post they’d like to refer to.
Both options provide them with value and help you establish a beneficial relationship.
Also, I highly recommend checking this post, which can help you increase your email outreach response rates.
Hint: Quite recently, I was doing a roundup with many experts when I realized my new post would be published shortly. So, I asked the contributors to consider linking to my recent article. I immediately got ten links because they wanted to be helpful, which would continue our collaborative relationship.
The secret of working with people you don’t know is to provide them with value.
Cold mass emails might sound more accessible, but investing your time and energy into building relationships with experts will pay off. And you might even become link-building partners in the future.
Start Building Rewarding Relationships
So, now that you know exactly what a pre-outreach strategy is, all you have to do is put it into effect.
Unfortunately, as you’ll soon discover, it’s not quite as easy as it sounds. In reality, you’re going to run into a lot of dead ends, where seemingly perfect linking partners don’t respond to your emails, or you don’t get the shares you were expecting.
Don’t get discouraged. You’re playing the long game. And provided you approach each person with a proposition that will benefit them, you will build the network and generate the exposure you need.
Good luck.
More Resources:
Featured Image: Kinga/Shutterstock
SEO
Google’s Search Engine Market Share Drops As Competitors’ Grows
According to data from GS Statcounter, Google’s search engine market share has fallen to 86.99%, the lowest point since the firm began tracking search engine share in 2009.
The drop represents a more than 4% decrease from the previous month, marking the largest single-month decline on record.
U.S. Market Impact
The decline is most significant in Google’s key market, the United States, where its share of searches across all devices fell by nearly 10%, reaching 77.52%.
Screenshot from: https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/, May 2024.Concurrently, competitors Microsoft Bing and Yahoo Search have seen gains. Bing reached a 13% market share in the U.S. and 5.8% globally, its highest since launching in 2009.
Yahoo Search’s worldwide share nearly tripled to 3.06%, a level not seen since July 2015.
Screenshot from: https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/, May 2024.Search Quality Concerns
Many industry experts have recently expressed concerns about the declining quality of Google’s search results.
A portion of the SEO community believes that the search giant’s results have worsened following the latest update.
These concerns have begun to extend to average internet users, who are increasingly voicing complaints about the state of their search results.
Alternative Perspectives
Web analytics platform SimilarWeb provided additional context on X (formerly Twitter), stating that its data for the US for March 2024 suggests Google’s decline may not be as severe as initially reported.
From our data (Search Engine website category, US, March 2024) it doesn’t look like we’re there yet: pic.twitter.com/RBUJp4ZLeb
— Similarweb (@Similarweb) May 1, 2024
SimilarWeb also highlighted Yahoo’s strong performance, categorizing it as a News and Media platform rather than a direct competitor to Google in the Search Engine category.
Don’t underestimate Yahoo. They’re doing great. On our platform they’re categorized as News and Media, and hence not a direct competitor to Google in the Search Engine category. But they rank #10 worldwide, #6 in the US, and #1 in their category. Much higher than Bing and OpenAI. pic.twitter.com/O4yJu5QEK6
— Similarweb (@Similarweb) May 2, 2024
At the same time, Google is slightly declining 👀 pic.twitter.com/9i7paeU1QG
— Similarweb (@Similarweb) May 2, 2024
Why It Matters
The shifting search engine market trends can impact businesses, marketers, and regular users.
Google has been on top for a long time, shaping how we find things online and how users behave.
However, as its market share drops and other search engines gain popularity, publishers may need to rethink their online strategies and optimize for multiple search platforms besides Google.
Users are becoming vocal about Google’s declining search quality over time. As people start trying alternate search engines, the various platforms must prioritize keeping users satisfied if they want to maintain or grow their market position.
It will be interesting to see how they respond to this boost in market share.
What It Means for SEO Pros
As Google’s competitors gain ground, SEO strategies may need to adapt by accounting for how each search engine’s algorithms and ranking factors work.
This could involve diversifying SEO efforts across multiple platforms and staying up-to-date on best practices for each one.
The increased focus on high-quality search results emphasizes the need to create valuable, user-focused content that meets the needs of the target audience.
SEO pros must prioritize informative, engaging, trustworthy content that meets search engine algorithms and user expectations.
Remain flexible, adaptable, and proactive to navigate these shifts. Keeping a pulse on industry trends, user behaviors, and competing search engine strategies will be key for successful SEO campaigns.
Featured Image: Tada Images/Shutterstock
SEO
How To Drive Pipeline With A Silo-Free Strategy
When it comes to B2B strategy, a holistic approach is the only approach.
Revenue organizations usually operate with siloed teams, and often expect a one-size-fits-all solution (usually buying clicks with paid media).
However, without cohesive brand, infrastructure, and pipeline generation efforts, they’re pretty much doomed to fail.
It’s just like rowing crew, where each member of the team must synchronize their movements to propel the boat forward – successful B2B marketing requires an integrated strategy.
So if you’re ready to ditch your disjointed marketing efforts and try a holistic approach, we’ve got you covered.
Join us on May 15, for an insightful live session with Digital Reach Agency on how to craft a compelling brand and PMF.
We’ll walk through the critical infrastructure you need, and the reliances and dependences of the core digital marketing disciplines.
Key takeaways from this webinar:
- Thinking Beyond Traditional Silos: Learn why traditional marketing silos are no longer viable and how they spell doom for modern revenue organizations.
- How To Identify and Fix Silos: Discover actionable strategies for pinpointing and sealing the gaps in your marketing silos.
- The Power of Integration: Uncover the secrets to successfully integrating brand strategy, digital infrastructure, and pipeline generation efforts.
Ben Childs, President and Founder of Digital Reach Agency, and Jordan Gibson, Head of Growth at Digital Reach Agency, will show you how to seamlessly integrate various elements of your marketing strategy for optimal results.
Don’t make the common mistake of using traditional marketing silos – sign up now and learn what it takes to transform your B2B go-to-market.
You’ll also get the opportunity to ask Ben and Jordan your most pressing questions, following the presentation.
And if you can’t make it to the live event, register anyway and we’ll send you a recording shortly after the webinar.
SEO
Why Big Companies Make Bad Content
It’s like death and taxes: inevitable. The bigger a company gets, the worse its content marketing becomes.
HubSpot teaching you how to type the shrug emoji or buy bitcoin stock. Salesforce sharing inspiring business quotes. GoDaddy helping you use Bing AI, or Zendesk sharing catchy sales slogans.
Judged by content marketing best practice, these articles are bad.
They won’t resonate with decision-makers. Nobody will buy a HubSpot license after Googling “how to buy bitcoin stock.” It’s the very definition of vanity traffic: tons of visits with no obvious impact on the business.
So why does this happen?
There’s an obvious (but flawed) answer to this question: big companies are inefficient.
As companies grow, they become more complicated, and writing good, relevant content becomes harder. I’ve experienced this firsthand:
- extra rounds of legal review and stakeholder approval creeping into processes.
- content watered down to serve an ever-more generic “brand voice”.
- growing misalignment between search and content teams.
- a lack of content leadership within the company as early employees leave.
Similarly, funded companies have to grow, even when they’re already huge. Content has to feed the machine, continually increasing traffic… even if that traffic never contributes to the bottom line.
There’s an element of truth here, but I’ve come to think that both these arguments are naive, and certainly not the whole story.
It is wrong to assume that the same people that grew the company suddenly forgot everything they once knew about content, and wrong to assume that companies willfully target useless keywords just to game their OKRs.
Instead, let’s assume that this strategy is deliberate, and not oversight. I think bad content—and the vanity traffic it generates—is actually good for business.
There are benefits to driving tons of traffic, even if that traffic never directly converts. Or put in meme format:
Programmatic SEO is a good example. Why does Dialpad create landing pages for local phone numbers?
Why does Wise target exchange rate keywords?
Why do we have a list of most popular websites pages?
As this Twitter user points out, these articles will never convert…
…but they don’t need to.
Every published URL and targeted keyword is a new doorway from the backwaters of the internet into your website. It’s a chance to acquire backlinks that wouldn’t otherwise exist, and an opportunity to get your brand in front of thousands of new, otherwise unfamiliar people.
These benefits might not directly translate into revenue, but over time, in aggregate, they can have a huge indirect impact on revenue. They can:
- Strengthen domain authority and the search performance of every other page on the website.
- Boost brand awareness, and encourage serendipitous interactions that land your brand in front of the right person at the right time.
- Deny your competitors traffic and dilute their share of voice.
These small benefits become more worthwhile when multiplied across many hundreds or thousands of pages. If you can minimize the cost of the content, there is relatively little downside.
What about topical authority?
“But what about topical authority?!” I hear you cry. “If you stray too far from your area of expertise, won’t rankings suffer for it?”
I reply simply with this screenshot of Forbes’ “health” subfolder, generating almost 4 million estimated monthly organic pageviews:
And big companies can minimize cost. For large, established brands, the marginal cost of content creation is relatively low.
Many companies scale their output through networks of freelancer writers, avoiding the cost of fully loaded employees. They have established, efficient processes for research, briefing, editorial review, publication and maintenance. The cost of an additional “unit” of content—or ten, or a hundred—is not that great, especially relative to other marketing channels.
There is also relatively little opportunity cost to consider: the fact that energy spent on “vanity” traffic could be better spent elsewhere, on more business-relevant topics.
In reality, many of the companies engaging in this strategy have already plucked the low-hanging fruit and written almost every product-relevant topic. There are a finite number of high traffic, high relevance topics; blog consistently for a decade and you too will reach these limits.
On top of that, the HubSpots and Salesforces of the world have very established, very efficient sales processes. Content gating, lead capture and scoring, and retargeting allow them to put very small conversion rates to relatively good use.
Even HubSpot’s article on Bitcoin stock has its own relevant call-to-action—and for HubSpot, building a database of aspiring investors is more valuable than it sounds, because…
The bigger a company grows, the bigger its audience needs to be to continue sustaining that growth rate.
Companies generally expand their total addressable market (TAM) as they grow, like HubSpot broadening from marketing to sales and customer success, launching new product lines for new—much bigger—audiences. This means the target audience for their content marketing grows alongside.
As Peep Laja put its:
But for the biggest companies, this principle is taken to an extreme. When a company gears up to IPO, its target audience expands to… pretty much everyone.
This was something Janessa Lantz (ex-HubSpot and dbt Labs) helped me understand: the target audience for a post-IPO company is not just end users, but institutional investors, market analysts, journalists, even regular Jane investors.
These are people who can influence the company’s worth in ways beyond simply buying a subscription: they can invest or encourage others to invest and dramatically influence the share price. These people are influenced by billboards, OOH advertising and, you guessed it, seemingly “bad” content showing up whenever they Google something.
You can think of this as a second, additional marketing funnel for post-IPO companies:
These visitors might not purchase a software subscription when they see your article in the SERP, but they will notice your brand, and maybe listen more attentively the next time your stock ticker appears on the news.
They won’t become power users, but they might download your eBook and add an extra unit to the email subscribers reported in your S1.
They might not contribute revenue now, but they will in the future: in the form of stock appreciation, or becoming the target audience for a future product line.
Vanity traffic does create value, but in a form most content marketers are not used to measuring.
If any of these benefits apply, then it makes sense to acquire them for your company—but also to deny them to your competitors.
SEO is an arms race: there are a finite number of keywords and topics, and leaving a rival to claim hundreds, even thousands of SERPs uncontested could very quickly create a headache for your company.
SEO can quickly create a moat of backlinks and brand awareness that can be virtually impossible to challenge; left unchecked, the gap between your company and your rival can accelerate at an accelerating pace.
Pumping out “bad” content and chasing vanity traffic is a chance to deny your rivals unchallenged share of voice, and make sure your brand always has a seat at the table.
Final thoughts
These types of articles are miscategorized—instead of thinking of them as bad content, it’s better to think of them as cheap digital billboards with surprisingly great attribution.
Big companies chasing “vanity traffic” isn’t an accident or oversight—there are good reasons to invest energy into content that will never convert. There is benefit, just not in the format most content marketers are used to.
This is not an argument to suggest that every company should invest in hyper-broad, high-traffic keywords. But if you’ve been blogging for a decade, or you’re gearing up for an IPO, then “bad content” and the vanity traffic it creates might not be so bad.
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