If you’re looking for someone you can trust to build links for you, read this. When you’re trying to build a healthy website, a healthy following, and a healthy business that constantly makes money, you have to be extra careful when it comes to your brand.
What people think about you is who you are in the marketplace, and search engine optimization is part of that. I want you to think of Google as the new marketplace, where people find what they’re looking for.
Some websites (domains) have better brand authority over others, so they appear first in the SERPs, which are just the search engine results pages.
The #1 best strategy to build brand authority is to build links. This is (in a nutshell) getting other websites to link to your website.
So who should you give trust with your brand’s faith? Well, I’m going to be honest with you, there really are three possibilities here:
- You could hire a freelancer on Upwork, Fiverr, Freelancer, or whatever. Most of them will get the job done… Badly. You probably might as well do it yourself: these platforms are full of fake experts when it comes to SEO.
- You could hire an agency that will “build 1000 links in 24 hours”, but that is actually just automated backlinks & websites and adding links to game Google. You don’t want this, trust me, it’ll turn against you sooner or later.
- You could hire a white-hat agency (A.K.A. that doesn’t do illegal stuff), that has proven techniques in hybrid traffic and experience in link building.
We’ve Put Them To The Test
We’ve had the opportunity to test multiple agencies, and they’re not all the same. The goal of this article is to give you a clear perspective on who to hire. You’ll learn how bad SEO companies make businesses and entrepreneurs lose thousands of dollars if not more.
We’ve tested multiple SEO Blogger Outreach Services, and we’ve got the results. After our analysis, we’ll tell you what the best blogger outreach service is available right now, so keep reading.
Who Are Outreach Services For?
Other Agencies
Looking to delegate your SEO work? Choose a proper agency and you won’t have to think about it no more. The job will just be done within the deadline, as you have more time to focus on other campaigns and more business.
Affiliate Marketers And Ecommerce
If you have an online store, you’re trying to sell stuff. When people look for products like yours, you want to appear first in the SERPs. That’s how you get traffic that’ll become clients. This will also work for Amazon affiliate marketers, online store managers, and more.
Businesses
Businesses that are entering the online world or that are trying to scale quickly and increase their earnings. It doesn’t really matter what you sell (physical or digital), get the right SEO, and you’ll sell more of it. Sounds good?
Blogger Outreach Mistakes To Avoid
Not Marketing Your Business
Your business has an image: the brand. It is very important that you take care of it. You need to market in front of your target audience and a good outreach service will give you that. It will increase your reach, get you more leads, more sales, more everything.
Hiring Newbies
I’ve seen so many businesses trust random people on the internet, it’s not even funny. Don’t be fooled by strangers: look for an expert that has a proven track record. Plus, a noob does not have the connections with established bloggers that an agency has, which makes a huge difference.
Doing it all yourself
SEO isn’t something you learn overnight. It’s always best to trust an expert when it comes to your brand authority. If you don’t want search engine giants like Google to penalize you for wrong SEO practices, get in touch with a professional with experience.
Also, trying to do everything by yourself will dramatically increase the cost of the whole operation. This happens because you don’t have the connections and experience that an SEO agency has. A good service will also help you get the best prices, from the best bloggers in your niche.
How Does A Blogger Outreach Agency Work?
Step Number 1: Find Prospects
The prospects are the potential bloggers that are to make a deal with. Some of the factors that SEO agencies should consider when it comes to selecting prospects have been described above in this article. There are more things to take into consideration that are more advanced, and it really comes to who you choose to do business with.
Step Number 2: Get In Touch With Prospects
The goal of the agency here is to get the best deal out of the prospects. Here are some must-do’s included in this step:
- Negotiation: getting the best rate out of prospects for the best results.
- Provide links: prove that you’re a legit business person and you’re looking for results.
- Qualification: decide if they are actually the right blogger (extra check after the steps in the previous part of this article).
Step Number 3: Development Of Your Content Strategy
It depends on your market approach, your niche, and your marketing strategy. But, at the end of the day, the main goal here is to develop a highly successful content strategy.
There are many ways to go with this depending on your goal. For example:
If your goal is SEO: you’ll get there by creating content with links back to your website. There are other techniques, but this is the main technique that will make you rank and appear like a huge brand in the eyes of Google.
If your goal is brand awareness: a review of your product/service/brand will be written and posted on the blogger’s site. This will get people to buy from you, and generate more sales.
SEO and brand awareness really go hand by hand: if you have both, you’ll get sales (from branding) and you’ll get traffic (from SEO), so that’s the best of both worlds. Now, most of these strategies all revolve around creating good SEO, because assuming that your website’s good, you’ll get sales easily.
Step Number 4: Tracking Results
This is so important! You deserve to know what is working and what isn’t. First of all, you need to know that for future campaigns, but also to get an idea of how legit the agency you’ve worked with is.
Best agencies will not be intrusive in their results-tracking. They’ll just collect the information that they need, get it to you, and you’re done. Now that you know all this, let’s get to the results of our testing, curious to know what the best agency has been.Check it out.
Best Blogger Outreach Services Of 2020
#1 Art Of War SEO’s Blogger Outreach Service
This an agency that we tested for $1899, for 10 links ($190 per link). The results were fascinating. They differentiate themselves from other agencies because they actually don’t make bold promises that they won’t keep. Very friendly people, very professional, and actually got us the results.
What i really liked is:
- Hands free service: We told them that we need 10 links to the website, they checked ahrefs and told us what we can use to grow the rankings. Pretty cool!
- Native content with proper placement of our link.
- 3 posts ranked on google page 1 after a few weeks, that means that the links not only provide power, but also trust that most websites don’t get in 2020! (You need Trust & Power to rank on google)
- We got a manager for our future orders, which is amazing! Got some strategies to use.
We’re actually not the only ones that did this test with Art Of War SEO. For example, an user on medium.com did a similar testing for two of the companies we reviewed ourselves. Medium actually uses Art Of War SEO for their own investments, here’s what they told us.
They have invested more than $120,000 dollars with them (that’s equals to about 600-700 links), and they are still doing that. Just the fact that they’ve been working together for so long should give you a clue on how result-oriented the agency actually is.
Here is the most important info from what they told us:
- They 10Xed their client’s traffic
- They have reached 6.6 K in organic traffic, and 1.6 K organic keywords
- 268 referring domains
- Constantly growing revenue for their client
From our experience, the staff of Art Of War SEO is very interactive, and will actually go the extra mile to guarantee results. They’ve told us “the only way for our service to succeed is to get our clients where they want to be. If your clients fail, we fail too, that’s what most agencies get wrong”.
Highly recommended!
Check out their services here.
#2 T-RANKS’ T-Post
PBN link provider, recently started doubling into blogger outreach strategies: T-POST (guest posts) .
We have had good results in the past with their PBN packages so we decided to give them a go. We invested almost $1000 into 3 links of their strongest backlink tier. We pointed them at a website that was affected by the May update. We wanted to boost power and relevancy in attempt to revert the update’s negative affect
It was a great success! In 6 weeks, the website has started to recover.
Conclusion:
If you don’t mind the grey hat SEO approach using PBNs, go for T-RANKS. If you want to stay on the search engine’s good side, go for T-POST Or combine them.
#3 Hoth (not recommended)
After our testing, the team decided that it was better to not include them on the list. However, we still added it to tell you to avoid them. We actually expected a lot more from their marketing and website, they talked big game, but it was just a huge waste of money.
You might as well do the work yourself to be honest. The main issues with The Hoth:
- A lot of marketing but low-quality service
- Overpriced for the quality of their service
- Not a long-term investment
How To Judge Blogger Sites
The blogger sites will be the hosts of your links. You don’t want these websites to be just “any website” on the internet. I mean, one link from forbes.com will always be far more powerful than 10 links from a random, inactive blog around the internet.
Here are some rules that you can follow to choose the blogger sites.
Site Traffic
This is the factor that is more intuitive, but it isn’t as important as many think. You have to dig a bit deeper to really get a perspective on that, but here’s a rule of thumb that should help you.
Usually, a website that has more than 250 in traffic will help your SEO. You can use tools like Ahrefs or Similarweb to check someone’s traffic. Again, there’s more to it than just the traffic. Keep reading.
SEO Relevancy (Check Their Records)
This one is scientific, it really is useful and online tools will easily provide you with good info on this.
You need to look at their traffic, is it increasing, staying the same, or is it decreasing?
Here’s a quick example: let’s pretend that you sell mountain biking gear, and you’re trying to get Global Mountain Bike Network to link to you. Here’s what their website (www.gmbn.com) traffic looks like.
As you can see, the traffic on GMBN has been pretty stable for the last 12 months. This means that if you were to get some MTB fans to your brand, it might work great, but for SEO, not so well!
SEO-wise, Google’s always looking for people that are updating and getting better.
On the other hand, check this one out.
As you can see, their website’s organic traffic and organic keywords went down, by a lot, after May. This, basically, means that Google doesn’t really like them.
We really advise you to never get links for websites like this, otherwise Google will associate you with their website. You’ll be seen as another dying website, and I don’t think that’ your goal. The thing is, it isn’t all about how much traffic you have, it’s all about relevancy.
Content On Their Website
This one is less scientific when compared to the last one, and maybe less straight-forward. I’ll make it simple: a good website is usually a good website for SEO.
This simply means that things like how active the site is, how it appears to their audience, as well as how useful their articles actually are will make a huge difference between success and failure. SEO campaigns have to focus on building links from websites that:
- Are useful to their readers.
- The content is good quality.
- Do they post 10-20 articles a day?
Will It Actually Help You SEO-Wise?
If you want the blogger to actually help your SEO, you need to make sure that he will provide do-follow links. If you don’t know what these are, you can find the answer below. However one thing’s for sure, you need do-follow links in this case.
There are tools that you can use to check if your blogger meets this criteria or not, one of them is ahrefs (that’s what I used for the following example). Bloomberg is a website that delivers business and markets news, it’s very well-known.
You probably already know that getting even just one link from Bloomberg would be a huge deal, but why? Check this:
The arrow points to their referring domains, which are the separate domains that link to Bloomberg.com. If you’re in the business/self-development/entrepreneur niche, getting these guys to link to you would be a huge win.
But here’s the thing: getting Bloomberg to link to you ain’t an easy task. It’d take you a lot of money to even talk to their editors, so that might not work for you. So, check the next criteria, which can help you a lot more.
Useful Keywords
When a website becomes popular they start to get all kinds of requests from people like you that are trying to build their backlinks. This is especially the case with blogs and news websites (like Bloomgerg from the example above).
Examples of offers they get on a daily basis are ads, guest posts, niche edits (link inserts), you name it. So, with all this competition on your side, how do you solve the problem? You need to prioritize who will actually help you and who will just be a huge waste of money.
Blogs that will give you no-follow links will not help you SEO-wise, no matter how good the blog post is. However, blogs that provide nofollow links that have a good following will help you with brand authority.
Here are a bunch of examples:
BBC Good Food
This is BBC Good Food, you probably know them. I used Ahrefs for this example, check it out:
The green arrows point to do-follow links, while the red arrows point to no-follow links. As you see, there are far more do-follow links outgoing to various websites, like immediate.co.uk, youtube.com, and more.
Having a lot of do-follow links means:
Great for SEO. You will rank thanks to links from sites like BBC Good Food, if you’re in their niche. For example, if you are in their industry, you could create an article like “Best Diets For Losing Weight In 2 Months”. This will get you a lot of brand authority.
Great for brand awareness. It’ll get you great brand recognition, and people will know you for the article you posted on their website. Getting back to the best diets article, imagine how many would recognize your name out of many others in the SERPs, just for the article you posted on BBC Good Food.
Fashionably Male
As you see, they have a very interesting growth from may to july, both in organic keywords and organic traffic.
This kind of growth is what Google really, really loves. This huge increase in traffic means that the website is newly relevant, so it is likely to become trendy.
So, if you are in the fashion sector and you’re trying to get some links, you could definitely use their blog to host your links and build both brand awareness and decent SEO.
Conclusion: Which Blogger Outreach Service Should You Try?
After our testing, here are the three main reasons why the Art Of War SEO is a great choice.
- Great communication and customer service: they’re very responsive and they focus on giving you a great experience. We believe that it doesn’t matter whether you’re a prof or a beginner, they’ll give you a very clear perspective on what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.
- They focus on your goal: make more money. Growth revenue is the reason why you’re building links, at the end of the day. And they don’t forget that. As I said, traffic is cool, but it isn’t an indication of sales. The guys from Art Of War SEO killed it.
- We have partners working with them and spending dozens of thousands of dollars o a monthly basis, and if they keep doing it after all this time, it means they know what they’re doing.
Don’t Get Penalized
It’s actually way easier than you think to get penalized by big search engines like Google if you do SEO the wrong way. Let me explain this better.
The goal of a decent SEO agency is to get you there as organically as possible, keep it clean, and make you rank. You need to future-proof your business, and out of the 3 agencies that we’ve reviewed today, Art Of War SEO really excels when it comes to investing for the long-term.
The Google algorithm is constantly changing. I’ve heard of so many businesses failing during the lockdown literally due to bad SEO. When the pandemic started spreading all over the world, all these fake SEO professionals came out of nowhere to take advantage of inexperienced entrepreneurs.
They took their business and did some outdated, low-quality SEO that killed the potential that the business initially had. This is the case of those freelance SEO guys (both white-hat and black-hat).
This is a warning sign that you need to examine properly the agency or person that you’re hiring. Get someone with a record, a reputation, and a good service.
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