SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This is the practice of optimizing websites or web pages to rank higher in search engines such as Google and Bing. The goal of SEO is to get your site ranked high enough so that potential customers see your page when they type keywords into their search bar.

Inbound marketing is a term coined by Hubspot founder Brian Halligan. It refers to the idea of attracting new leads through relevant content, rather than relying solely on paid advertising or other methods of advertising.

It’s important for SEOs to understand the concept of inbound marketing because it helps them better serve their clients. If you want to attract more traffic to your site, then you should focus on creating quality content that answers questions and solves problems. This is a big part of inbound marketing.

Also, creating engaging content that really drives readers to your blog is the goal: by identifying audience pain points and creating content that they find interesting and engaging, it’s possible to drive traffic and increase the results your blog can get.

What, Exactly, is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is the process used to help potential customers find your company online. This frequently happens before the consumer is ready to purchase. But making contact early can lead to brand preference and eventually leads and revenues.

Pull marketing techniques are often used to create brand awareness and draw attention to your product or service. They include:

• Search Engine Optimization
• Website Optimization
• Content Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Mobile App Development

The goal is to make it easy for consumers to learn about you and what you do.

The Benefits of an Inbound Marketing Strategy

Inbound marketing is often confused with outbound marketing. While both are forms of marketing, they have some key differences. Outbound marketing focuses on making sales calls, sending emails, and creating ads. Inbound marketing, on the other hand, focuses on providing useful information about your products and services to potential customers.

This includes things such as blogs, social media posts, videos, etc.

The main benefit of inbound marketing is that it makes prospects feel like they’re getting something of value from you, rather than being sold to. They’ll feel more comfortable engaging with you and sharing personal information.

How does inbound marketing work?

When a customer types in a search term into Google, Bing, Yahoo, or another search engine, their results will be populated by websites that rank highly for those terms. These websites may be owned by businesses or individuals who want to get found online.

An example would be if someone searches for “best dog food” and your website ranks high for this phrase. You could then use these rankings to send them to your site.

You can also use SEO (search engine optimization) to increase traffic to your own website. If people type in keywords related to your business, you can direct them to your website using paid advertising.

What is the Difference Between Inbound and Outbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is about creating great content that attracts people to your site. Once there, they want to know why they should care about what you’re offering, how you can benefit them, and how they can find out more. They don’t just come to your site because they wanted to; they’re looking for solutions to their problems.

Outbound marketing is about finding those people already interested in your product or service, convincing them to become your customer, and keeping them happy once they’ve bought from you. It’s about getting into their head and changing their mind.

A common mistake businesses make is thinking that one type of marketing is better than another. While some types of marketing are very effective, others are less useful. For example, email marketing works well for sending messages to existing customers and prospects. But it doesn’t work nearly as well for reaching new customers.

The same goes for social media marketing. Facebook ads are good for targeting specific audiences, but they won’t reach everyone. And while paid advertising like Google AdWords can be effective, it’s expensive and requires lots of data to target effectively.

If you focus too much on one form of marketing over another, you risk wasting money and missing opportunities. Instead, use both forms of marketing together. You’ll find that they complement each other really well, and you’ll see greater success overall.

The ROI of a Potentially Successful Inbound Marketing Campaign

The acronym ROI stands for Return On Investment. A good inbound marketing strategy will help companies increase revenue and decrease costs, while improving customer experience. However, many marketers are unsure how to implement such programs. Some common questions include: How much does it cost? What do I need to start? Where can I find qualified leads? And what metrics tell me whether my program is working?

Here are some tips on implementing an effective inbound marketing plan:

1. Start small. Don’t try to take on everything at once. Focus on one aspect of your marketing strategy at a time and make sure it works well before moving onto another area. If you’re just starting out, focus on email marketing because it can provide immediate results without requiring too much effort. You can always expand later.

2. Find qualified leads. Once you’ve identified your target audience, look for ways to connect with them. For example, you could offer a special discount to people who subscribe to your blog. Or you could promote a contest where customers enter a drawing for a free product. This way, you’ll attract potential buyers who want to buy now.

3. Use automation tools. Automation is key to creating an efficient workflow. Tools like Hubspot allow you to automate tasks, set up campaigns, track performance, and analyze data. They also give you insights into which parts of your marketing funnel work and which ones don’t.

4. Measure results. When you launch your inbound marketing campaign, use analytics tools to see how it’s performing. Track response rates, conversion rates, and sales conversions. Then adjust your next campaign accordingly.

5. Be consistent. Your goal is to build trust among your prospects, so consistency is important. Make sure every piece of content you produce follows the same style and tone. Also keep in mind that there’s no single formula for generating quality leads. Every brand is different, so tailor your approach to fit your needs.

Inbound Marketing: Content Types That Work

The most effective way to reach customers is through content. Content Marketing Institute found that 92% of marketers are creating more content than ever before. But what type of content works best for you? Here are some examples of content types you might use to attract leads, increase brand awareness, and grow revenue.

Blog posts – These help establish thought leadership and build authority around your industry. They’re great for generating traffic and building relationships with prospects.

E-books & white papers – If you want to educate people about a specific topic, e-books and white papers provide a cost-effective solution. You’ll find that many businesses offer free downloads of their whitepapers.

Infographics – An infographic is a visual representation of information. They’re often used to explain complex concepts in a simple format. Infographics are popular because they’re easy to understand and share.

Videos – Video content is growing in popularity. People love watching videos online, especially video blogs. A video blog is like a regular blog post except it includes video clips.

Webinars – Webinars allow you to host a live event where attendees watch presentations and ask questions via chat. This allows you to connect with potential clients and expand your network.

News articles – News articles are another form of content that’s gaining traction. In fact, 93% of B2C companies now publish news articles. There are a variety of ways to use news articles to generate interest in your products or services. For example, you could write an article about how your product solves a problem that’s relevant to your audience. Or you could write an article that compares your product to one of your competitors’.

Webcasts – Webcasts are similar to webinars. However, they’re usually recorded rather than live. Like webinars, webcasts allow you to communicate with your target market.

It’s Not Just About Getting The Most Sales

Inbound marketing is about helping people solve problems. It’s about creating content that helps your audience find what they want. And it’s about making sure that content is useful, interesting, and relevant enough to keep them coming back. But it’s not just about sales. Inbound marketing is about helping your customers become advocates for your product or service. It’s about providing them with information they can use to form opinions about your brand and products. And it’s about building trust and credibility over time.

The best way to think about inbound marketing is to imagine yourself working with someone else. You’re trying to help them do something, whether it’s finding a good doctor or buying a car or just getting better organized. Maybe you’re helping them figure out how to pay off their credit card debt. Or maybe you’re helping them start a small business. Whatever it is, you’re there to provide them with some guidance and support along the way.

You don’t know anything about the person you’re helping. You don’t even really care much about their specific problem. All you care about is solving their problem for them. When you achieve that goal, you’ve done your job well. You helped someone.

Who Uses Inbound Marketing the Most?

The answer is simple: everyone. Even big companies like Amazon, Dell, Walmart, and Target use inbound marketing to connect with buyers and prospects. Smaller businesses use inbound marketing too. They just don’t call it that. Instead, they’re leveraging social media, blogging, email marketing, webinars, podcasts, video, etc. to attract leads and nurture relationships with current clients.

Inbound marketing isn’t about selling more products. It’s about helping people find solutions to problems through education, inspiration, and guidance. When you provide helpful information, you empower people to make decisions that lead to buying behavior.

Why Use Inbound Marketing?

Small businesses are using inbound marketing in order to grow sales, as well as increase the time-to-value for their customers. Here are a few reasons why this could be a fantastic vehicle to increase your overall business as well.

1. It’s Empowering For Your Buyers

When you help people solve problems, they feel empowered. This gives them confidence that they can handle whatever challenges come next. If you want to build trust and loyalty with your audience, you’ve got to give them something worth trusting.

2. It’s Easy To Measure

If you have any doubts about the effectiveness of your inbound marketing efforts, all you need to do is measure results. By tracking conversions, you’ll be able to see which channels and messages are most effective at converting visitors into leads. From there, you can refine your strategy and focus on the ones that work best.

3. It Builds Trust With Your Audience.

People buy from brands they trust. The same goes for buying online. People will only purchase from sites they trust. That means if you want to increase conversion rates, you need to earn the trust of your audience.

4. It Gives You A Competitive Advantage

It’s no secret that when it comes to digital marketing, bigger businesses tend to dominate the market. But what if I told you there was a way to compete with those giants without spending millions of dollars on advertising? There is. And it’s called inbound marketing.

5. It Makes Your Brand More Human

It’s easy to forget that we’re not just talking about a company here. We’re also talking about real human beings who have hopes, dreams, fears, and aspirations. So why wouldn’t you treat your customers as such?

6. It Helps You Stand Out From The Crowd

There are so many other businesses doing similar things right now. How do you stand out from the crowd? One way is by being different. Be unique. Be authentic. Be genuine.

Creating, Implementing, and Optimizing Your Own Inbound Marketing Campaign

Inbound marketing generally includes a comprehensive content marketing campaign.

Content marketing isn’t just about throwing money at something and hoping it works. In fact, creating killer content is about brains, commitment, and strategy, not budget. But you don’t have to spend a fortune to produce quality content. There are ways to start small and build up over time.

The good news is that there are five easy steps to follow to help you plan, implement, and improve your content marketing efforts. These include:

Step 1: Define Your Goals and Audience Personas

If you want to sell your products online, you must identify your target audience and learn everything there is to know about them. If you don’t do this, you won’t be able to craft content that informs your customers.

This is why it’s important to define what you want out of your marketing efforts. What are your business goals? How does each piece of content help achieve those goals? Who is your ideal customer? Once you answer these questions, you can begin writing content for people like them.

The next step is to research your audience. Learn everything you can about them. This includes demographics, interests, behaviors, buying patterns, and anything else that might affect how they interact with your brand.

Once you understand your audience, you can start creating content that speaks directly to them. Content that doesn’t speak to your audience isn’t worth publishing.

Step 2: Create Content for Every Stage of the Buying Process

Inbound marketing is about attracting, engaging and converting leads into paying customers. But it’s also about providing value long after you’ve closed the sale. In fact, according to HubSpot research, 80% of buyers say they prefer companies that provide useful information even after they purchase. This includes offering support via email, social media, phone calls and video chats.

The key to successful inbound marketing is knowing what type of buyer you want to reach, where they spend most of their time online and how best to use the tools available to engage them.

For example, if you sell software, you might focus on creating helpful blog posts, writing case studies, recording webinars and sharing videos. If you sell health products, you could offer educational articles, publish infographics and host live events. And if you sell financial services, you could post tips about saving money, write guides on investing, and produce tutorials on budgeting.

Once you know your audience and understand their needs, you can start developing useful content that addresses those issues. You can also identify opportunities to help people along their path to purchase, whether that’s by answering common questions or helping them find the right solution.

As you build out your strategy, don’t forget to think about the different stages of the buyer’s journey. For example, if someone visits your site looking for product recommendations, you probably want to give them something else to read once they’re ready to buy. If they’re researching financing options, you might send them to a separate resource to learn more about credit cards. Or if they’re considering a career change, you might suggest some resources to check out.

As you develop your content strategy, keep in mind that preemptive answers to potential problems are one of the best ways to improve your conversion rates.

Step 3: Choose Your Content Delivery Platforms

The most important step in creating great content is choosing where to publish it. There are many different ways to create content, including social media platforms like LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat; email marketing tools like MailChimp, Constant Contact, AWeber, and GetResponse; blogging platforms like WordPress and Blogger; and others.

Each one offers unique benefits and challenges. For example, some platforms allow you to easily customize your content based on what works best for your target market. Others require you to design everything yourself. Some offer free plans while others charge per month. And some let you build relationships with people who want to hear from you, while others don’t.

There are pros and cons to each option, and it’s up to you to decide how much control you want over your content creation process. Ultimately, however, the choice boils down to three things:

1. What type of content do you want to produce? Do you want to write blog posts, articles, infographics, videos, podcasts, ebooks, or something else entirely?
2. How often do you plan to post? If you’re producing a lot of content every day, you’ll probably find that blogging platforms work well for you because you can keep track of your progress without having to manage anything else. But if you rarely update your site, you might prefer a tool that allows you to create multiple types of content in bulk.
3. How much money do you want to spend? You can use a variety of tools to help you create content, ranging from free options like Microsoft Word to paid ones like Adobe Creative Cloud. Depending on your budget, you could pay hundreds or thousands of dollars annually to access a wide range of features.

Once you’ve determined the best place to host your content, you’ll need to choose a publishing platform. Here are a few popular options:

Blogger: This is a simple platform that lets you set up a personal blog quickly and easily. You can start writing immediately, and you won’t have to worry about hosting or managing your site. However, there aren’t many customization options, and you’ll need to know HTML code to make changes.

WordPress: This is an open-source CMS (content management system) that makes it easy to create websites and blogs. It has tons of plugins available, which means you can add lots of functionality to your website. The downside is that you need to be technically savvy to install and maintain your own site.

Wix: Wix is a web development company that specializes in building sites using their drag-and-drop interface. They also offer a service called “Wix Sites,” which lets you upload your existing site and turn it into a mobile-friendly version.

Duda: Duda is a cloud-based solution that helps you create beautiful websites and blogs. It includes a built-in editor that automatically formats text, images, and other elements so they look good across all devices. You can also integrate third-party apps, such as Google Maps and Facebook, to give your site more personality.

Step 4: Create Your Content Calendar and Execute The Plan

Content marketing is about creating great content. But it’s also about scheduling that content throughout the week. You don’t want to just post something once every few days.

Instead, you want to publish content regularly — and consistently — so that people know what to expect from you.

To do that, you need a content calendar. A content calendar helps you plan ahead so you never miss a beat. And it lets you see how much work there is left to do each day. So let’s dive into step four: create and execute your content calendar.

First, think about when you’d like to release new content. For example, maybe you want to share a new blog post on Monday morning at 9am Pacific time. Or perhaps you’d rather wait until Thursday afternoon at 3pm Eastern time. Whatever works best for you.

Next, decide where you’ll distribute your posts. Will you write them yourself? Hire freelance writers? Use a social media tool to schedule your tweets? There are plenty of ways to get your content out there. Just pick one and stick with it.

Finally, figure out who will actually read your content. If you’re planning to promote your content through email blasts, then you should probably include everyone on your list. But if you’re going to post it on Twitter, you might only want to target followers who are most likely to engage with your brand.

Now that you’ve got everything planned out, it’s time to execute. Start by making sure you have enough content ready to go. Then, take some time to review your entire content calendar. Are there any dates that feel rushed? Can you remove anything that doesn’t fit into your overall strategy?

Once you’ve made any necessary adjustments, it’s time to start publishing!

Step 5: Analyze and Optimize the Results of Your Inbound Marketing Campaign

Whether you decide to analyze SEO ranks, inbound links, the number of articles published or the amount of traffic generated, these resources will provide invaluable insights into how your campaigns are doing. But it takes time to do proper research and set up a baseline. So, we recommend setting aside some time each week to review your data and make adjustments where necessary.

The most effective way to identify what works and what doesn’t is to look at your overall performance over time. You want to track metrics like SEO rankings, inbound link growth, article views, social shares, and even visitor numbers. Then, compare those results against your goals. If you’re looking to increase conversion rates, you might find that increasing the number of blog posts leads to better conversions. Or maybe you see that your best performing articles tend to rank well on search engines. Whatever metric(s) you choose to measure, it’s important to keep tabs on them throughout the entire campaign.

We suggest starting with three key metrics:

1. Keywords
2. Backlinks
3. Visitor Traffic

After you’ve identified which keywords perform best, you can use this information to refine your keyword selection process. Next, you’ll want to focus on building backlinks.

This means finding relevant sites that would benefit from linking to yours. Finally, you’ll be able to determine whether visitors are converting based on the type of content they consume.

If you’re not already using Google Analytics, now is a great time to install it. It’s free and provides detailed stats on all of your site’s visitors. Plus, it allows you to create custom reports so you can easily monitor your progress.

If you’re still struggling to understand why people visit your website, consider hiring an outside agency to conduct user testing. They’ll help you discover exactly what makes your audience tick.

Inbound Marketing is Not the Be-All, End-All Strategy, But It’s Still an Excellent Way to Reach Potential Customers

While inbound marketing is one of many types of strategies that you can use as part of your SEO mix, it’s not the be-all, end-all strategy that will guarantee results all the time.

You still need to analyze and adapt over time, along with making sure that you continue optimizing everything when you can.

If you need to switch up your content strategy, that’s fine too. The best thing about inbound marketing is that it allows you to go with the flow and adapt to new strategies for producing content as they are needed.

Nobody just “builds it and they will come.” It’s more accurate to say that they “build it, promote it, and continue promoting it, and they will come.”

When do you plan on starting your inbound marketing campaign?

In a hangout, one SEO professional asked John Mueller about server connectivity issues and how they would impact crawling by Google.

They had a problem recently where they saw more than 55 percent of robots.txt errors and server connectivity failures in Google Search Console.

They had seven days of failures in November. And it happened once in December.

So their server team blocked some IP addresses from Googlebot. Since November, their traffic from Google dropped by about 20 percent. If nothing changes during the day/date, is this reasonable to blame the server team for the decrease of their traffic?

They were just wondering. They wanted to know what effect these problems would have on Google search.

John asked if the problem was fixed now.

The SEO professional responded that they opened their IP address, but they had another problem in December and they don’t know why.

John explained that there are two things to watch out for here.

The first thing is that there are server connectivity issues. Google would not see this as a site quality problem.

It wouldn’t be that the ranking for your pages would drop as the result of server connectivity issues.

This is the first step.

What does happen, however, with these types of problems is that if they cannot reach the robots.txt file for a while, then they will assume that they can’t crawl anything on the website.

This can result in some of the pages from the site being dropped from their index.

That’s a simple way to figure this kind of issue out – is it from a technical problem or not?

Are the pages gone from the index? If so, that’s probably from a technical problem. Or are the pages just ranking lower? Then that’s not necessarily from a technical problem.

This happens at approximately the 10:20 mark in the video.

John Mueller Hangout Transcript

In a memo to his Berkshire Hathaway management team, Warren Buffet once said, “we can afford to lose money—even a lot of money. But we can’t afford to lose reputation—even a shred of reputation.”

That quote is just as relevant to SEO pros as it is to PR reps: By implementing a few best practices, SEO practitioners can have a significant positive impact on their organization’s reputation. This is known as reputation management SEO, and it might just be the key to gaining trust, boosting conversions and securing long-term success. Here’s how to start using reputation management SEO to your advantage.

• Why Does Reputation Management Matter?
• How to Leverage Reputation Management SEO
• Get Active on Social Media
• Create a Google My Business Account
• Earn More Positive Press
• Use Google Alerts to Your Advantage
• Take Control of Unfavorable Queries
• Optimize Complimentary Content
• Face Shortcomings and Rectify Mistakes

Why Does Reputation Management Matter?

Though some might say you can’t put a price on reputation, the data says otherwise. And as it turns out, reputation is very valuable: Research has shown that global executives attribute 63 percent of their company’s market value to reputation alone. Many factors contribute to their company’s reputation, but most of those executives cited the quality of products, services, employees and customer service:

Most importantly, consumers seem to agree that reputation is crucial—a study from the University of Technology Sydney found that people are willing to pay up to 22 percent more for products from businesses with a good corporate reputation.

So how do customers determine if a company has a good reputation or not? While word of mouth communication certainly plays a part, online reviews may hold even more sway: About 90 percent of consumers read reviews before buying a product, and the vast majority take those reviews seriously.

In fact, consumers’ behavior is directly affected by the reviews they read. Ninety-four percent said that positive reviews make them more likely to use a business, 92 percent said that negative reviews make them less likely to use a business and nearly 80 percent said they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations:

In other words, reputation has a large and quantifiable impact on companies’ success, and consumers gauge reputation by turning to online sources. As a result, businesses who cultivate a positive reputation are far more likely to thrive than those that don’t.

So it’s clear that reputation is crucial to companies’ success, but how does SEO come into play? In short, reputation management SEO involves strategically optimizing certain types of content. By doing so, you’ll be able to put your organization’s best foot forward in the SERPs.

How to Leverage Reputation Management SEO

If you want to start using reputation management SEO to your advantage, you need to analyze how your organization comes across to search engine users. Then, you need to strive to improve your image by implementing several reputation-enhancing techniques on an ongoing basis.

Get Active on Social Media

In the eyes of internet users, a business that doesn’t have a social media presence is one that’s not fully invested in communicating with its customers. As such, you can improve your brand’s reputation by getting and staying active on multiple social media platforms.

And once you start connecting with more followers on social media, it won’t be long until you start seeing concrete results.

In fact, consumers who follow brands on social media are exceptionally loyal: One study from Sprout Social found that nearly 90 percent of people will buy from a brand they follow, and 84 percent say they’ll choose that brand in lieu of a competitor.

To boost your brand’s social media presence, improve its reputation for communication and gain more customers as a result, you can adopt several effective tactics:

Update Frequently

When you post frequent updates to your brand’s social media profiles, you create the impression that your organization is accessible, down-to-earth and alive.

While it’s not a good idea to flood followers’ feeds with constant posts, you typically can’t go wrong with a cadence of one post per day. Exceptions do exist, though—for instance, companies that publish the most Instagram Stories tend to be the most successful.

As you increase the number of updates you post, just be sure to keep track of your engagement metrics to monitor how well your audience responds to the changes.

Be Responsive

Gone are the days when consumers had to wait days or even weeks to receive a phone call or letter back from a brand—now, 40 percent of people expect brands to respond within the first hour of contacting them on social media, and 79 percent expect brands to respond within one day.

To meet customers’ demands and build a brand reputation for being attentive and prompt, strive to respond to your social media followers as quickly as possible.

Create a Cohesive Image

If a brand’s online presence is scattered and inconsistent, consumers likely won’t feel that it’s as trustworthy as it could be.

To prevent that from happening to your organization, ensure your brand’s image is consistent across all social media platforms. This includes its profile pictures, tone and voice, usernames, visual branding and typical response times.

Engage Your Followers

No matter which social media platform we’re talking about, engagement is the name of the game. It’s not just one of the most important metrics for satisfying platforms’ algorithms; It’s also one of the most effective ways to cultivate a positive reputation and earn consumers’ respect.

To engage with your followers, you can try running polls, hosting contests and giveaways, asking for their opinions and increasing your response rate.

Create a Google My Business Account

Want to put your brand and its best features in front of customers’ eyes before they even visit your site? Then you need to optimize Google My Business (GMB), a free tool businesses can use to control how their brand appears across Google Search and Maps.

Here’s how it works: When Google users search for a specific business (in this case, we searched for a Trader Joe’s grocery store in Philadelphia), a multimedia listing will appear alongside the normal search results:

This is a GMB listing, and it includes important information about the business in question including its average star rating, website, address, hours of operation, price range and more. Information from the same listing will also appear in searches performed on Google Maps.

It’s important to create a GMB account and listing because doing so will affect how potential customers view your business—the more complete its GMB listing is, the more likely it is that users will view it as legitimate and trustworthy.

To create a GMB account, start by searching for an existing listing. (If one doesn’t exist, click Add your business to Google to build its profile from scratch.)

Earn More Positive Press

One of the best ways to truly cement your organization’s reputation in stone is to let its actions speak for themselves. In other words, consider doing things that will help your brand gain positive online press (as well as consumers’ trust).

For example, your business could:

• benefit a charitable cause, such as by making donations, running an awareness campaign, performing volunteer work or participating in a local charity event;
• take a green initiative, such as by starting a recycling program, reducing water and electricity or planting trees for every purchase; or
• host sweepstakes and giveaways which publications may want to alert their readers to.

It’s also crucial to get on relevant journalists’ radar in order to receive the press you’re looking for. Try following and engaging with them on social media and letting them know about upcoming events or initiatives.

And when your brand does receive positive press, be sure it includes a link to your organization’s website.

Use Google Alerts to Your Advantage

If you’re performing reputation management SEO for an organization that people talk about (even just a little), then negative press and inaccurate information is bound to crop up.

For instance, a business directory might list incorrect hours, or a customer dispute could lead to less-than-favorable news coverage.

Whatever the case may be, you can work to protect your brand’s reputation with the help of Google Alerts, a tool that notifies you whenever content containing your chosen search term(s) is published.

To create a brand alert, navigate to Google Alerts and enter your chosen keyword (i.e. your brand name) in the search bar at the top of the page:

Once you type in your brand name you’ll see two buttons, one titled create alert and one titled show options. Click on show options and you’ll see a list of settings for your alert, including its frequency, sources, language and more:

Once you’ve tweaked the options to your liking, click create alert and Google will begin sending notifications whenever new content about your brand is mentioned.

Going forward, whenever you see inaccurate information or negative press coverage crop up you’ll be able to immediately reach out to the source to either correct the given information or give your brand’s side of the story and show it in a more positive light.

As an added bonus, the alert you create can also bring your attention to unlinked mentions. These present fantastic link building opportunities you can use to flesh out your backlink portfolio.

Take Control of Unfavorable Queries

If your brand is relatively well-known within its vertical, then all the search queries made about it may not necessarily be flattering.

Let us show you what we mean. Here, we’ve made the query what is Wish in reference to the popular e-commerce website. While the first result is simply an article explaining how the site works, the subsequent Google-generated people also ask section is less than complimentary:

As you can see, such questions can easily lead users to believe that Wish products may in fact be cheap, unsafe or fake. It’s impossible for Wish to simply remove those unflattering questions from search results, and they can’t control what third-party publications say about their platform, so what are they to do?

The best option would be to create high-quality content that not only includes the negative search queries but also assuages users’ concerns, and that’s exactly what the clever content team at Wish has done. When performing a search for one of those unfavorable questions, a reassuring article from Wish’s official help center is one of the top results:

By taking a similar approach, you can take control of the questions users ask about your brand and build a stronger reputation in the process.

Optimize Complimentary Content

Reputation management SEO isn’t just about working to minimize negative content—it’s also about using your SEO skills to ensure that your brand’s most complimentary content ranks as highly as possible.

To do so, you can try:

• implementing high-quality content creation strategies;
• learning how to accurately decipher user intent;
• adhering to Google’s E-A-T guidelines;
• mastering the most essential elements of on-page SEO;
• adopting smart link building tactics; and
• improving your site’s crawlability.

It will take some time, but such techniques will undoubtedly draw more attention to your brand’s most favorable content and help build a solid reputation in the long run.

Face Shortcomings and Rectify Mistakes

In a way, it makes sense for brands to avoid public conflict whenever possible—not all publicity is good publicity, and no business in existence wants to lose customers. However, conflict avoidance can cause even more problems for an organization.

The reason for that comes down to consumers’ desire for transparency from brands:

• Eighty-six percent of Americans believe transparency from businesses is more important than ever before.
• Ninety-four percent of consumers are likely to be loyal to a brand that’s completely transparent.
• Fifty-six percent of consumers would be loyal to a brand for life if it provided total transparency.

Transparency involves more than providing detailed information about products and services, though. Full transparency also requires businesses to face their shortcomings head-on and do their best to openly rectify past mistakes.

So next time one of your brand’s flaws or blunders is pointed out, don’t try to sweep it under the rug. Instead, show consumers you care by honestly owning up to any failings, genuinely apologizing for faux pas and taking real steps toward improvement.

If you do so, consumers will view your brand as one that’s worth sticking with for the long haul.

Leverage Reputation Management SEO to Shine a Positive Light on Your Brand

In the world of SEO, it’s easy to get hung up on numbers. From click-through rates to cost per click, there are many metrics SEO practitioners can use to measure progress.

But the impact of reputation management SEO shows that truly effective SEO addresses the human side of success as well as the mathematical one. Without a reputation customers can trust, all those numbers won’t do you much good. So set aside the statistics and start practicing reputation management SEO to polish your brand’s image and help it live up to its full potential.

Image credits

Weber Shandwick / January 2020
BrightLocal / December 2020
Screenshots by author / May 2021

Let’s say you’re attending an industry conference, and your goal is to build more professional connections. Do you ignore everybody, throw a business card in the face of everyone who walks by (please don’t!), or strike up friendly conversations before handing over your card?

While the last option is sensible, the first two wouldn’t accomplish much at all. The same principle applies to online outreach. Instead of simply going unnoticed or bombarding users with link spam, you can use an effective outreach strategy to nurture genuine relationships, build valuable backlinks and send your rankings skyward.

Why Is Outreach Important for Link Building?

Any effort to actively increase the number of backlinks to a site is referred to as link building. These links can come from anywhere on the web, whether someone links to a site on a discussion forum, in a comments section or in website copy.

Backlinks don’t just boost site performance by encouraging more individual users to visit a site—when they’re coming from trustworthy sources, search engines like Google also view them as stamps of approval. As a result, high-quality backlinks can improve search engine rankings, too.

For link building purposes, though, it can be tough to generate a meaningful number of backlinks through organic channels alone—most people need to feel pretty strongly about a product, service or piece of content to go through the effort of linking to it. Plus, any backlinks that do occur organically may not necessarily come from an authoritative or reliable source, and so may not significantly contribute to search engine rankings.

So, what can you do to efficiently build high-quality backlinks from authoritative sources? Improve your outreach strategy by learning how to reach out to the people who can give you those links.

It’s refreshingly low-tech, but effective link building outreach isn’t always easy. It requires trial and error, constant improvement and genuine human connections to yield results. Like any other skill, though, it can be honed, delivering better results, increased traffic and higher rankings. All you need to get started is a simple “hello.”

Types of Link Building Outreach

You know you’ll be contacting people in the hope of securing high-quality backlinks. But what exactly will you be doing? The answer depends on your goals and the outreach methods you choose.

Using several types of link building outreach strategies, you can secure quality backlinks and more visitors while providing value for your contacts, too.

Fix Unlinked Mentions

Every time a site mentions a product, brand or site without linking to it, an unlinked mention is born. To gain a backlink without asking site administrators to alter their content in any way, simply request they add a link to any pre-existing unlinked mentions.

Wondering how to find unlinked mentions in the first place? A clever Google Search tip can help—just search for “intext:example -example.com” in Google:

Offer a Preview

Sometimes it’s better to offer than request. Reach out to influential bloggers, journalists and social media figures in your vertical and ask if they’d like to be contacted when a piece of your upcoming content is released.

You can even explicitly state you’re not asking for a backlink, but instead notifying them of content that might interest them.

Keep your previews brief. Describe the topic you’re addressing, and quickly highlight any noteworthy features such as original research, breaking news or particularly unique insights.

Offer Guest Posts

If a site publishes articles or blog posts about a topic relevant to the vertical you’re working in, it’s prime real estate for a guest post. You get to contribute to an authoritative site, and the site gets fresh and engaging content.

As always, prioritize quality and authenticity above all else. If all your guests posts are hastily written, fail to provide valuable information or are too promotional, they likely won’t deliver the results you want.

Your goal isn’t just to get a backlink: It’s also to convince readers the linked website is worth their click.

Tap Into Influencer Marketing

If you have the financial resources to contract influencers and respected bloggers in your industry, you also have the opportunity to put high-quality backlinks in front of a whole new audience.

A recommendation from the right influencer can generate substantial results. A hefty 63 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds trust influencers more than brands, and 58 percent purchased a product because of an influencer within the last six months.

To find influencers whose audience might click your backlinks, use social media to find bloggers and content creators involved in your niche. For instance, if you’re trying to get backlinks for a culinary website then you might try perusing the #foodblogger hashtag on Twitter.

Master the Art of Outreach Emails

They may be the granddaddy of digital outreach, but cold emails still have strong link building potential. With nearly every industry saturated with content, though, your emails need something special to avoid vanishing in a sea of lookalikes.

With a little extra thought and effort, you can take your outreach emails from predictably generic to genuinely eye-catching.

You don’t have to take our word for it. Backlinko’s analysis of 12 million outreach emails uncovered straightforward and effective tactics:

Personalize, Personalize, Personalize

You’ve likely heard it before, but it’s worth saying again: Personalization is critical, whether you’re writing a newsletter or perfecting your outreach strategy.

The benefit of personalization is monumental. Personalized subject lines alone have a ⅓ higher response rate than their cookie-cutter counterparts:

Emails with a personalized body generate even better results, garnering 32.7 percent more replies than those with a generic body.

Take an additional couple of minutes to address your recipients by name, reference their works or pay a specific compliment, and your outreach emails are much less likely to go ignored.

Regularly switch out your go-to email elements, from opening lines to jokes. No one likes receiving stale, recycled emails. Making an effort to stay fresh will help jumpstart your creativity, too.

Write a Detailed Subject Line

Life in the digital age is hectic, and it sometimes seems like attention spans are shorter than ever (they may actually be increasing, by the way). It’d be hard to blame you for thinking ultra-succinct subject lines are the best way to grab and keep readers’ interest.

The data says otherwise. Subject lines with 36–50 characters perform best, and the shortest subject lines (1–15 characters) actually performed worse than those with 70 characters or more.

When composing your subject lines, shoot for the 36- to 50-character sweet spot and be as specific as possible.

Don’t Forget to Follow Up

Sending a second email after your first one gets overlooked can be intimidating. No one wants to appear overeager, right?

The reality, though, is your recipients may have simply been too busy or distracted to respond to your first attempt. Consider the remarkable efficacy of sending a couple follow-up emails—just a single one can boost response rates by 65.8 percent:

Create a reminder (or set your email management platform) to send a second, third or even fourth message. Don’t forget to personalize your follow-up messages, too!

Stick to Weekdays

How much do you love being reminded of work on a weekend? Our guess is not very much, and your recipients probably feel the same way.

Perhaps that’s why people are so much more responsive to outreach emails on weekdays. Or maybe they’re just checking their inboxes more frequently, so your message is less likely to get lost in the shuffle.

Whatever the reason, outreach messages sent Monday through Friday drive about 23 percent more conversions than those sent on Saturday or Sunday:

Of all possible weekdays, emails sent on Wednesday generated the highest response rate— 7.64 percent, to be precise. But since every weekday drove a response rate of 7.5 percent or higher, chances are small- and medium-sized businesses won’t need to prioritize any weekday in particular to see results.

Reach Out to the Right People

The practice of searching for potential link opportunities is known as link prospecting. It traditionally calls for techniques like search engine results page (SERP) scraping and competitor backlink analysis to uncover the gold in them-thar hills … er, online content.

Such strategies can generate measurable results, especially with the help of time-saving tools. Some of the most widely-used options include:

• Ahrefs‘ Site Explorer to check backlinks, Content Explorer to identify relevant content and Alerts to get notified of new mentions, backlinks and more;
• Semrush to manage backlinks and discover new linking opportunities;
• BuzzSumo to find authoritative influencers in your niche and analyze top-performing content on any topic;
• Hunter to quickly find verified email addresses associated with domains and companies; and
• Google Alerts to be notified of fresh mentions of a specified topic, brand, product, name or phrase.

No matter which tools you choose, exposure alone won’t give you the links you want. Many people simply don’t take the time to link to the content they read or the products they use, no matter how much they love it. Plus, exposure to a small group of the right people is more effective than exposure to a wide audience with minimal interest.

So, always consider who is most likely to post links on a regular basis. The answer is the Linkerati, a term originally coined by former Moz CEO Rand Fishkin in 2006. The word is as relevant now as it was then, and refers to link-happy netizens such as:

• bloggers;
• influencers;
• digital journalists;
• independent content creators; and
• active forum users.

While tools like BuzzSumo can help you find relevant influencers who may be able to offer valuable backlinks, keep an eye out for chances to connect with the Linkerati yourself.

For instance, you could check to see if an active subreddit exists for your niche. If one does, try creating original, Reddit-friendly content to post there. If it’s well-received, you’ll gain more visitors and expose the site you’re optimizing to frequent Reddit users who may link to it in the future.

Similarly, you might try participating in your vertical’s Twitter community and identifying people—whether they’re journalists or active users—who make a habit of linking to interesting content. The next time you’re about to publish a new blog post, why not shoot them a DM to see if they’d like to read it?

In both scenarios, you’ll uncover high-quality backlinking opportunities you might’ve missed using more traditional outreach tools.

Optimize Outreach, Optimize Everything

Handing out business cards to new professional contacts does more than give people a quick way to reach you—it also opens up doors to meaningful, long-term connections. Done properly, the same holds true for online outreach.

When you learn how to do outreach in a thoughtful and strategic way, you’re not just tossing links into the digital ether and hoping something sticks. You’re opening pathways to new partnerships, more targeted exposure and the high-quality backlinks you need to meet your website goals.

Image credits
Screenshot by author / July 2020
Backlinko / April 2019