The Benefits of Outreach for SEO

How often have you advertised your product or service to a complete random stranger who willingly lets go of their hard earned money? Not very often right? Rather in most cases, people tend to buy things easily when a friend suggests it, when they see a family member using it, or when someone they trust briefly mentions it.

This is the idea behind outreach; reaching out to a target audience through someone they already know and are already familiar with, with the hope that they are able to mention one or two things about your services or products. Even if it is to simply share a link to your services or products with the hope of driving a reasonable amount of traffic that can increase leads, conversions and ultimately sales.

With outreach, many brands are able to shorten their sales funnel to get to the point of conversion easily when they break into a target audience through a face familiar; with the said target audience that both brands share.

How Does Outreach Benefit SEO (search engine optimization)?

A brand that is reaching out to another stronger brand with a greater online presence can benefit from having an effective outreach strategy in the following ways;

It is a cheap way to improve rankings in search engines

Outreach is one of the cheapest ways to get the word out about your growing brand by boosting your SEO through a brand that is already established online. Take for instance a local seafood restaurant that makes use of popular lifestyle bloggers. Whether via their website or their social media channel, they can get the word out about their restaurant through a very candid review (maybe after offering the blogger the opportunity to experience their service at a discount or for free).

When others search for the local seafood restaurant or just generally search for a nice seafood restaurant in their location, this brand will definitely show up in the search queries of search engines because of the strong ranking that the blogger already has with their website and on social media.

Increases organic traffic

Outreach helps to increase more organic traffic to a brand’s website, thereby improving brand visibility, leads and conversions. The more brands with a very strong online presence talk about the services or products of another brand, the more search engines feel the need to rank the keywords associated with the mentioned brand. However, this may only be effectively implemented with the help of a content marketing agency, unless you have good experience in the field.

Still using the example of the local seafood restaurant in the previous point; if people are searching for “the best seafood restaurant in X Location”, this is known as a long tail keyword. If the seafood restaurant has made use of a specific long tail keyword, as well as other similar long tail keywords inserted somewhere in the review which they know their target audience would be searching for, search engines would rank their content higher.

This would eventually increase the flow of organic traffic and a set of new visitors that probably have no idea about the blogger or the restaurant (but is able to read reviews written by other bloggers, check out the website of the said restaurant and make a decision about trying it out). All these improvements would strengthen the brand’s SEO campaigns in the long run. This is all thanks to an effective outreach marketing strategy.

Creates a new audience

Outreach also increases the chances of connecting to a new audience by shortening the journey customers go through their sales funnel before becoming a customer.

The point of SEO is be seen easily by the people that matter most to the brand (its target audience) through various search engines. Having created a strong online presence by ranking high on certain keywords commonly used by your target audience, and by having credible people talk about your brand, it is definitely going to be an easy, less bumpy, ride all the way to taking the top spot in your niche and opening the brand to a new target audience consistently.

This automatically creates a strong recognition for the brand because with this new target audience, if you able to live up to the standards that these bloggers you have reached out to have raved about, then they are likely to tell their friends (who are also likely to tell their other friends, if they are impressed).

Offers more backlinks

Outreach also secures the brand’s “search engines worthy” backlinks that will make it rank higher and appear trustworthy. Google search engine is particularly keen on recognising websites with a lot of backlinks. It is one of the ways it can separate spammy sites from those that actually have the kind of information that Google knows its users are looking for when they enter in specific keywords.

So when potential customers enter keywords that you and the people you reached out to have also used when searching for your products or services, this will definitely improve the ranking of the brand’s website on search engines

Improves social media ranking

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube are the top social networking platforms that rank very high on the search engines. Hardly can you type the name of a brand without its social media account also showing up.

When a brand gets mentioned by a stronger brand with a greater online presence, the followers of the stronger brand will most likely engage with the content with likes or shares. This simple action on social media signals to search engines that whatever content that was shared is valuable to those who shared it. This will then lead the search engine to also display it as a valuable content to those who search for the exact keywords or similar keywords.

This will ultimately improve how people engage with the kind of content that you share and will also act as a guide to bettering any future content you share.