Email outreach and prospecting are becoming the most important aspects of any SEO campaign. With all the changes that Google made in their algorithms during the past 4 years, the old school link building techniques slowly turned into blogger and influencer outreach. Building real, solid online relationships is becoming an essential part of each successful SEO campaign.
However, as you try to contact numerous people within your industry, productivity becomes crucial. Make no mistake; building strong online presence and finding the right people can be quite an overwhelming task.
Here are just a few quick steps on what’s to expect on the road:
- Performing initial research in your niche by using some laser targeted Google search strings
- Finding these people’s online contacts – name, email and social media profiles
- Creating a nice email template and adding a few personalized lines to each of the recipients in order to increase your conversion rate
- Once you start getting responses, you’re done with the dirty job and now it’s time for the real communication to begin
You have to perform all these steps efficiently so that you have more time for other tasks. During this lengthy process, every SEO expert needs reliable tools to help him optimize his work. Even though the SEO market is littered with nifty products that promise to turn your daily routine into a breeze, you have to find just the right tools that will help you with your email campaigns.
Here are four great tools which I regularly use:
- BuzzStream
- BuzzSumo
- InkyBee
- Citation Labs Link Prospector
Let me tell you a few words about each one of them and what makes them so useful.
- BuzzStream
If you are working for a large company or if your campaign lasts for quite some time, this tool is a perfect solution. BuzzStream allows you to run a campaign from multiple accounts. This is especially great for teams because it gives members insight in things that other members performed. With it, you are able to make your own prospecting lists exporting collected data to program and from there you can directly send email to targeted audience. Have in mind that BuzzStream doesn’t have its own mail. In that regard, it will only connect your email to another person’s email account. This can be very beneficial because it allows you to monitor everything from the same vantage point. Also, it shows you history of communication and allows you to send postponed emails. Need some help in finding the contacts of a person? No worries, BuzzStream does this for you automatically. Also, you can check if your sent email has been opened, how many times and when was the last time it got opened.
- BuzzSumo
In a sense, SEO profession is like a popularity contest. Even though it revolves around optimization and content quality, you need to know what is trending in order to attract visitors and improve your rankings. By using BuzzSumo, you can do that and more. This phenomenal tool has incredible data base that constantly scrapes information from the Internet. It shows you the most popular content categorized according to the number of social shares it received. You can see the number of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ shares as well as total shares for a particular article. All you have to do is put your keyword in the search box and find all the trending topics served on a silver platter for you. On top of that, you can extract reports to CSV file. Wondering who the influencers and the most active bloggers in your niche are? BuzzSumo has you covered. With its “Amplification” option it shows you all the popular names in your industry with their Twitter account. Now you can simply start interacting with them. Really useful!
- InkyBee
Although not the best tool for outreach, InkyBee gives you some other valuable options. Unlike prospecting with BuzzStream (you enter keyword in Google and start prospecting results one by one according to Google positioning), InkyBee provides you with relevant data such as relevancy, audience and engagement before you add a blog to your email outreach list. This means that you are able to pinpoint the websites that are valuable for you. Also, when you add all these results, you get some cool data about the blog like location, social profiles, social following etc. Besides that, you are also able to filter blogs based on these scores. Even after you finish initial prospecting, InkyBee will continue working and give you fresh results on every six hours. If something new appears for your query, you can see it in the console and add it afterwards.
- Citation Labs Link Prospector
In most of the cases, SEO expert will contact an unknown person so that he can avert attention to his own content and potentially gain a link. This is the so-called cold emailing. However, the biggest task lies in knowing which blogs are likely to link to us. This is where Citation Labs Link Prospector comes into play. After entering keyword into search tab, you are able to further filter your search by clicking on guest posting, link pages, content promoters, reviews, giveaways, donations, commenting, expert interviews, directories, forums, blogs etc. This allows you to focus on the right group of websites. After finishing your search, you are able to export all these results in another file and save them for further use.
Voila! Now you can dive into the white hat SEO and stop worrying about the upcoming Penguin 4 update, because with this approach you’ll be playing by Google’s rules. You’ll be building real, long-lasting relationships that matter and in time this will skyrocket your SEO to a whole new level.
