How Varn Creates Effective Outreach Lists for Digital PR
To receive a successful return from your link-building efforts, it’s important to ensure effective outreach lists are created targeting the correct publications and bloggers for the client. Without an effective outreach list, you may not receive the number of high-quality backlinks you hoped for. Websites with higher quality backlinks from authoritative sites are also likely to rank better, therefore it’s important the outreach lists are created to deliver on increasing the number of offsite links.
Here at Varn, we use a range of tactics to ensure outreach lists created for our clients are successful in increasing the number of backlinks, so when outreach is performed clients see an increase in rankings for relevant landing pages.
An outreach list is defined as a list of contacts that can be journalists, publications, influencers, independent bloggers, and magazines. It’s one of the first steps when conducting outreach because the list will include prospects you wish to work with. This can include hosting content about a PR campaign, product reviews, and guest posting. It’s vital to also bear in mind the target audience for the publication as well as its domain authority, and trust/citation flow.
Here at Varn, we use a software called Buzzstream to help us search the web using appropriate keyword search phrases. Not only does the software allow us to search the web for PR-friendly publications to reach out to, but it also gives us the ability to reach out to our lists and send automatic follow ups.
Buzzstream also helps us to select sites that have a good domain authority (DA), a search engine ranking score that predicts how likely a site is likely to appear on SERPs. In most cases, we set a filter at 20 and above. If the website’s domain authority is on the lower side, the intention is that over time the domain authority of this site will grow organically.
Here are a few key considerations to take into account when creating effective outreach lists for digital PR.
It’s important to consider your client’s target audience when putting together your outreach lists. Of course, strong links from good quality websites bring the SEO benefit, however the traffic may not be relevant to your client, and the publication may not post your content at all.
For example, if your client is in the watersports industry, targeting watersport bloggers and publications will not only increase the likelihood of a reply, it will drive relevant traffic back to your client’s site which can build brand awareness as well as a higher conversion rate.
This is a really important step when building your outreach lists because if you are asking bloggers to review products, you need to ensure they are open to receiving items in exchange for a review.
The obvious way of doing this is to browse their site yourself to see if they receive gifted products, however, there are other ways you can narrow down your search in Google, as well as outreach software like Buzzstream.
You can search for an exact match by putting a keyword in quotation marks. An example could include: Lifestyle Blogger [‘PR friendly’]
The screenshot below shows two keyword search phrases on Buzzstream, and how you can narrow down your web search:
If you are creating an outreach list for guest posting, it’s important to ensure the targeted websites accept guest content. Some websites have specific guidelines to follow also.
Building warm prospects increases the likelihood of your content being posted, and you can add them to outreach lists for future clients. For example, bloggers will be open to review multiple client products over time. If a blogger decides your campaign isn’t suited to their blog audience, they may know a blogger who will be a good fit and give you their contact details. This helps increase the quality of content being posted to relevant sites.
If you would like more advice on creating effective outreach lists for Digital PR, get in touch with a member of the Varn team today.
Varn is an expert & specialist SEO search marketing agency. Technical SEO * AI & Data Analytics * Offsite SEO * Paid Search
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