If you are promoting your brand online, you must know more about the subject of external SEO. This is the lifeline that will take you to the top in 2020. An outreach strategy isn’t for everyone… but for most.
First of all, you will, of course, need to take care of the internal SEO and correct issues, so that a person understands that he needs to stay. If the moment of site usability is missed, then all efforts are in vain. Okay, let’s discuss some of the important points of outreach that are relevant today.
What is Outreach? What is it eaten with?
Why do you need external promotion at all? Imagine that you are making a choice between something you have already heard and something that no one else has ever mentioned. Who would you prefer? That’s right, you will make a choice in favor of the first. Google is in a similar situation when ranking sites.
Self-work requires an understanding of outreach, as there are many techniques for external promotion and a successful combination of methods will achieve the desired results. First of all, you need to figure out what techniques require money.
Top-5 paid promotion techniques
- Promotion on social networks via influencer collaboration. This method won’t build links to your site, but it is a great SEO external link strategy that can be an ideal traffic source, which will also give Google a reason to improve your rankings. This method has a downside since you need to do very careful work and the wrong choice in favor of the irrelevance of the audience or the influencer will allow you to lose your money.
- Donations, charity – When using this technique, almost all sites will agree to mention you with a backlink. This is a good method of building link mass from both the Google and moral perspective.
- Learning materials – Creating and distributing learning materials will also allow you to be featured on sites that tell their audience about it with a backlink. You can also monetize your work.
- Discounts, promotions – There are many sites that give a mention + backlink if your brand has valid discount coupons, etc.
- Paid guest posting – Using services or manual work with PBN and owners of paid blogs. This method isn’t recommended because at the first unreasonable action it will bring you as close as possible to the Penguin filters, etc.
However, there are many techniques for external SEO that will require only time and inspiration from you. These techniques can be divided into two types, because in one case it is an active search for places where it is possible to build a link, and in the other way it is the creation of unique content and its distribution.
The top 5 techniques of passive outreach
Passive link building is based on finding areas in which we can build link mass through communication without creating any content.
- Crowd Marketing and Reputation Management – With the increase of human opinion dependence on others on the Internet, it is becoming more important to monitor, correct, and improve the opinion of the online crowd every day. Every brand should use this technique in 2020.
Action script:
- Identify all possible brand references. Determine all relevant keys.
- Look for sites where there is a discussion of the keys relevant to us. We use the Discussions button for Google Search™.
- Participate in discussions.
- To manage your reputation, you can also set up Google Alerts so that it tracks all the mentions you need on the Internet and sends everything instantly to the inbox. To do this, write a key, define the required settings, and create a signal.
- Unlinked Mentions – It is likely that someone on the Internet has already mentioned your brand. So why not ask for a backlink? To do this, you can use an irreplaceable tool for this technique – Google Alerts. Select the desired settings and research all of the mentions. If your brand consists of two words, use Google’s tools such as “” and + to find accurate conformity. For instance, “RenoDigital + Health”.
Action script:
- Look for relevant sites on Google Alerts.
- Find points of contact through Hunter.io.
- Complete negotiations with an external link.
- Link Reclamation – This technique isn’t suitable for new domains, as it is meant to find donors who have stopped linking to your domain and renew the link. SEMRush is a good tool for implementation.
Action script:
- Look for sites in the SEMRush from which links to your domain are lost.
- Find points of contact through Hunter.io.
- Complete negotiations with a new external link.
- Resource Pages – Many sites make reviews of the useful resources. The challenge is to find the resource page we need and correctly offer ourselves in order to become a good addition.
To search we use:
“Keyword” inurl: places
“Keyword” + inurl: top
“Keyword” + inurl: links
“Keyword” + “useful resources”
“Keyword” + “useful links”
Action script:
- Define keys.
- Look for relevant sites by selecting keys.
- Find points of contact through Hunter.io.
- Complete negotiations with an external link.
- Broken Link – This is an old technique familiar to most. It is based on finding broken external links and resuming their work with your content that harmoniously fits into the overall theme. This could be a broken link on the resource page, tops page, etc. It can also be broken links to other articles. A very important point to note is the relevance of the link you are replacing. Check My Links is a good tool for finding broken links. You need to add it to chrome and use it on the page we need.
Action script:
- Look for broken links to your domain (you can use keys from Resource pages, Roundup pages – this can be a search in old articles of a relevant blog, you can also search in SEMRush through the backlinks of competitors).
- Find points of contact through Hunter.io.
- Complete negotiations with a new external link.
The top 5 techniques of the active outreach
Active link building is based on finding places where I can offer my unique content and get a backlink. Everyone is interested in high-quality updating of the site pages. When creating really good content this method has a high chance of getting a link. Otherwise, you will be forced to use only passive outreach.
- Guestographics – All modern trends should be followed by beautiful graphics these days. Infographics are what everyone needs in 2020. The method of creating an informative and visually beautiful picture should almost always be used. To be effective, infographics must structure the facts nicely and use the right color scheme to make the information as easy to digest as possible.
Action script:
- Determine the topic, information.
- Create easy-to-read, informative infographics.
- Use one of the distribution methods.
- Complete negotiations with a new external link.
This content is often used to maintain the quality of other techniques (Skyscraper Technique, Guest Posting). It also outperforms all other techniques in terms of viral distribution → means traffic and external backlinks SEO → means trust from Google. If you have no experience with graphic editors, that’s okay! There are many services available today that will make this process as easy as possible.
For distribution, you can use social networks, infographic, or photo stocks like pinterest.com, visual.ly. Also, you can use the Skyscraper Technique or like an addition to a small article for Guest Posting. A great guide is here.
- Related Blog – This technique is rather old, but still very relevant for 2020; although Google doesn’t like this technique. The challenge is to write unique, quality content and promote it through other blogs. Bloggers, in turn, will be happy to work with quality content. The difference with paid distribution is that blogs have many more requirements for the “white hat” method. You can also use infographics to improve the quality of your content.
Search keys:
“Keyword” + intitle:“guest post”
“Keyword” + intitle:”write for us”
“Keyword” + “contribute to”
intitle:”submit guest post”
intitle:”submit” + inurl:blog
“List of sites that accept guest posts”
Action script:
- Decide what your topic is going to be.
- Use keys, look for sites, and study requirements.
- Look for points of contact and reach out to the author to see if they wish to cooperate.
- Structure and create a high-quality article to ensure they’ll want to collaborate with you.
- Complete negotiations with a new external link.
- Skyscraper Technique – This is a technique based on creating something better. The task is to find the page that the site links to and get this external link by updating the content. In order to improve the article, you can add infographics, more facts, and additional information. To find potential donors, you can use SEMRush (search for referring domains to an article that you decided to update). You can also use the Link Roundup technique to find older articles or those that you can improve.
Action script:
- Look for update options, taking into account your capabilities.
- Develop a high-quality article to ensure they’ll want to collaborate with you.
- Look for points of contact and reach out, to the author to check if they are ready to cooperate.
- Complete negotiations with a new external link.
- Link Roundup – This involves getting an external link to a site from a news roundup. Some resources review the latest updates in their blogs. The challenge is to create content and get a link from the roundup page. A similar technique is Resource pages, but the difference is you need to have a new or high-quality article on your blog to implement the link roundup technique.
Donor search keys can be:
- inurl: roundup + “your topic”
- Intitle: roundup + “your topic”
- “Weekly link” + “your topic”
Action script:
- Create a high-quality article to ensure they’ll want to collaborate with you.
- Use the keys, look for sites.
- Look for points of contact and contact the author to check if they are ready to work together.
- Complete negotiations with a new external link.
- Mention Outreach – When creating an article for your blog, there are probably those articles that could make your content more well-rounded as well as help the reader better understand the topic. So why not let everyone benefit from this? We refer to other useful resources in our new article and inform them about this by letter or on social networks. They can talk about you on their pages instead and this can be the start of a good business relationship or even a backlink.
Action script:
- Create a high-quality article to ensure they’ll want to collaborate with you.
- Look for points of contact and reach out to the author to offer to share your content.
- Complete negotiations with the mention of your article on the external resource.
Conclusion
Link-building promotion demands more from us every day. And Google, as we can see, pushes to improve the quality of the information provided. Just like the “law of the jungle”, in 2020, the one with the best content survives.
Analyzing all the techniques and answering the question of “how to build external links in 2020?” there are two main success factors. It is the quality of what you create and your skill at negotiating with potential donors.
Below are also some practical tips worth mentioning:
- You should set up Google Alerts notifications for your brand, so as not to miss a mention and actively engage in reputation management. Crowd-marketing and reputation management strategies are especially relevant for healthcare brands.
- It is imperative to connect social networks in all possible cases. This will increase brand awareness, generate traffic, improve contact with potential donors, and offer many other advantages.
- If you’re wondering about where to start, the first step is to research your competitor’s link-building strategy. The possibility that a bonus in the form of external links will already be waiting for you there is guaranteed.
- In terms of the importance of the location of the link for Google, in the first place is the location of the domain (country, region relative to the promoted brand), and in the second is the relevance of the topic. Keep this in mind.
- While surfing the Internet, check for broken links and save pages to which you can apply one of the methods, so as not to forget and not lose out when there is an inspiration for link-building work.
Links to useful tools:
