Outreach is generally my favorite kind of link-building campaign because it delivers the most consistent results and is a Google update-proof strategy. 

That is if you get the right quality control process in place. 

In my experience, the problem most people face with link-building outreach is that they don’t have the time and resources to scale it themselves, or they end up buying the cheapest links available. 

What I’m going to show you in this post is how to get high-quality backlinks through my proven outreach method that focuses on quality the right way. 

Why Is Outreach A Great Link-Building Strategy? 

The main reason why link outreach is a consistently effective strategy comes down to the fact that these types of links look very natural to search engines. 

But there’s more to the bigger picture, with benefits including:

• Direct Impact On SEO Rankings
• Getting New Referral Visitors 
• Improving Your Authority And Trustworthiness
• Extending Your Network

Let’s take a closer look at these. 

Direct Impact On SEO Rankings

While there are regular reports about backlinks being dead for a website's search engine rankings, the simple reality is that for the vast majority of keywords and niches, you won’t get anywhere without links. 

Backlinko.com published extensive research into ranking factors, and they found that sites with more backlinks tended to rank higher than those with fewer backlinks. 

However, you need to throw in some context. 

It’s high-quality backlinks that will push the needle for your SEO, with poor-quality ones potentially hurting your search rankings. 

Get New Referral Visitors 

People tend to focus only on gaining organic traffic through their link-building strategies, whether that’s link outreach or PBNs. 

But with the right kind of link from a busy and popular website, you could also be looking at getting a ton of referral traffic. 

With the right kind of outreach approach and high-quality content, you could be getting referral traffic for months and even years to come. 

Here’s what I mean. 

Let’s say you score a great backlink on a site with hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors, and you planned the content to be highly relevant, evergreen, and super engaging. 

That page could get thousands of monthly visitors for years to come, and some of them will click on your backlink and end up on your site. 

Don’t underestimate this approach. 

Improve Your Authority And Trustworthiness

When your link-building outreach results in a new guest post on highly relevant authority sites, some of that authority will flow down to your site.

It’s also a signal that someone with authority trusts your site for a reference link, which provides a significant SEO benefit for what’s called E-E-A-T (Experience-Expertise-Authority-Trustworthiness). 

I recommend you read about EEAT in this MOZ article if you’re not familiar with it. It’s a critical ranking factor that you can influence by only link-building from high-quality sites. 

My experience has shown that people who fail to improve their search engine rankings with outreach tend to underestimate how important reputable sites are to their success. 

Extend Your Network

The final benefit you get from outreach link-building efforts is that you can expand your network of people in your niche. 

It’s also possible to find people who have many other sites, so one outreach email could result in multiple backlink opportunities. 

I always suggest that you connect with people on social media and try to help them out from time to time. 

You’ll be surprised how many further opportunities might come your way by building relationships with potential link partners. 

Are There Risks With An Outreach Link Building Campaign?

If you ever hear someone say that they have a risk-free backlink technique, run as far away as possible. 

However, my experience has shown that my link-building outreach process limits those risks.

Does Google Punish You For Paid Backlinks?

According to Google’s guidelines, any kind of paid backlink should be marked as “nofollow,” which would defeat the purpose of having that link for SEO purposes. 

All you’d be able to hope for is some referral traffic from the linking webpage. 

Apparently, Google’s algorithm and search review team can detect paid backlinks, but the reality is very different. 

Here’s what I mean. 

Unless you get a link from a page that clearly says that it’s a paid guest post or there’s obvious advertising on the site that it offers paid link-building services, it’s basically impossible for anyone to tell whether it was paid for. 

It should be part of your link outreach process to avoid sites that make very obvious statements like that. 

Poor Quality Sites Can Harm Your SEO Rankings

Once you start getting into a flow for link outreach and broken link-building, you’ll quickly find that there are a lot of sites that look like crap. 

While that should be a deciding factor, you also need to consider the quality of the backlink profile. 

Authoritative sites should have backlinks from other highly relevant sites and not just some random combination of crypto, poker, and porn sites. 

If you don’t focus on high-quality backlinks, you could quickly be building a footprint of dodgy backlinks that either Google’s algorithm punishes, or you could get flagged for manual action. 

Toxic Content Can Negate Your SEO Efforts

We just covered a website’s backlink profile and overall design, but you also have to dig into the type of content on the site. 

The important thing for your link-building process should be to focus not only on the content and pages you can get to from the homepage. 

You have to dig deeper and see if there are pages about completely unrelated topics and in other languages. 

This is a common method to try and manipulate traffic statistics by ranking for unrelated topics in countries that are irrelevant to you. 

Links From Irrelevant Niches Have Limited Benefits

I see this all the time; people say that outreach link-building doesn’t work, and then I look at what they got from a dedicated link-building agency. 

9 times out of 10, I see backlinks from websites that have no relevance to the target niche. Link-building services often do this to save money and they try to bridge those gaps by having a guest post written that covers both the source and target website. 

But, how realistic is it that, for example, a dental surgery supplies website will have something in common with a tire repair company? 

Maybe you can be very creative and come up with some sort of related content, but it’s not that difficult for search engine bots to identify these practices. 

That’s why I always recommend that you aim to get backlinks from relevant and authoritative websites. 

Return On Investment

While outreach backlinks are a very effective way to increase your rankings in search engine results pages, they aren’t worth it if you end up paying too much. 

In all my years of doing link-building outreach, I’ve seen people expect the craziest prices for a guest post, including some who wanted 5-figure amounts. 

For such a backlink to be worth it, you’d have to see guaranteed ranking increases to the first few spots in Google, and you’d need to be selling or promoting high-ticket things to make that money back. 

So, always factor in how much your outreach links have to benefit your income in order to get positive returns. 

What Influences The Costs Of Outreach Link Building?

One thing you have to carefully consider in a link-building outreach campaign is what characteristics of a website make it more attractive and justify a higher price. 

Here’s what I always focus on.

Professionally Designed Website

During the research phase of link outreach, I always spend some time looking at the website’s overall design both on desktop and mobile devices. 

I critically look at the design and check the following design principles:

• Does it serve the right purpose?
• Is it easy to navigate?
• Are there professionally designed and unique images?
• Do the fonts look professional and easy to read?
• Is the site mobile responsive?
• Are the design features consistently implemented on the site?

The more professionally designed the site looks, the more you should be willing to pay for a link, as long as the content matches the design quality. 

Let’s look at that next.

Content Quality Standards

I’ve already mentioned how finding niche-relevant websites is a critical success factor of a link-building campaign, but so is the content quality.

However, this can be a bit tricky. 

What I’ve seen regularly is that people add great quality content to the homepage and a few inner pages that they highlight on the homepage. 

Then, when you dig deeper into other pages on the site, you start finding low-quality crap, like spun content, really bad AI content, or even dodgy porn, gambling, and pills-related content.

If you find a site that has consistently high-quality standards across the pages, then it’s worth paying extra for a link. 

Topical Relevance To Your Niche

Let’s say you’re doing outreach for a company that sells specialty dental equipment. You don’t want to get links from a roofing contractor or power tool review blog. 

Maybe such sites will give you a bit of link juice, but it’ll be dwarfed by what a niche-relevant link will do. 

In this example, if you can find another medical supplier or oral health-related blog, then Google sees that the niches are strongly related and relevant. 

That’s the kind of link that looks natural, and it’s worth paying more for them. 

Authority Of The Website

What you quickly realize during link outreach is there are tons of websites that will accept guest posts or link insertions. 

But if the sites have very few ranking keywords, no quality links, and basically no search traffic, then you won’t get much value from a backlink. 

In order to identify authoritative websites, you’ll have to invest in tools like SEMRush Backlink Analytics.

This SEO tool provides an overall authority score, details about the backlinks, and the kind of traffic it achieves. 

The better these stats look, the more you should be willing to pay for a link.

Backlink And Anchor Text Profile

Different SEO tools have a wide range of ways to show you an authority score for a website, but you can’t be certain about it unless you take a deep dive into the backlink profile. 

Here’s why that’s important. 

It’s actually easier than you might think to manipulate the authority score with completely irrelevant backlinks from the strangest places on Earth. 

The first thing I do is look at the traffic location, like here, using Ahrefs.

It’s a natural distribution, with the majority of organic traffic coming from the U.S.

Next, you need to load a list of backlinks and check each site to see if it’s legitimate. This process is time-consuming but will help you avoid dodgy websites that are simply trying to game the system to achieve better stats. 

Another important factor is the anchor text profile, which you can also load using a tool like Ahrefs. 

Dodgy sites will be littered with foreign, poker, pills, or porn-related anchor text, which should be a big red flag. 

If you do find a site with clean and authoritative backlinks, a natural anchor text profile, and organic traffic coming from the right country, then consider increasing your budget for a link. 

Content Placement And Promotion

Many people I talk to who haven’t had success with link outreach often make one fundamental mistake. They deliver a high-quality guest article, wait for it to be posted, and then do nothing more. 

Here’s the problem. 

If you don’t request that there is an internal link structure going from the homepage through multiple inner pages to your new post, then it will become an orphan page. 

Tools like Screaming Frog can help identify orphan pages, but these essentially are posts with no link to them from anywhere.

Ultimately, that limits the amount of link juice you receive. 

The other thing you need to check is whether a website owner will promote your post through social media or paid ads. 

Not all of them will offer this; in this case, consider adding to your digital marketing budget to create some natural traffic to the post. 

Proof Of Search Ranking Improvements

The ideal way to get this information is to ask the website owner for proof of ranking improvements while discussing the technicalities of getting a back-link. 

I’ve often found that owners keep track of links and the rankings of their customers to see what kind of effect they have. 

Of course, it’s not that difficult to create fake reports, so you need to do some manual verification as well. 

Using tools like Moz and Ahrefs, you can check when a guest post was indexed and what the outgoing link is. You can then run a report on the target website and its rankings to see if there was an impact immediately after the post went live. 

This is a tricky process, but once you add it to your manual link-building outreach method, you’ll see significantly better results. 

Never Sacrifice Quality In Link Building Outreach

Outreach can be one of the most effective link-building strategies available if you avoid the temptation to reduce your quality standards. 

It can be frustrating to spend a lot of time on link outreach only to eliminate most of the sites you find. But if that starts happening, you know that you’re on the right track to scoring high-quality links. 

If you follow my recommendations above, you’ll avoid the problems most other SEOs face on a regular basis, ending up with wasted effort and no signs of ranking improvements.