5 Ways To Conduct Outreach Research
Obtaining natural, quality links from high-profile websites and authoritative blogs is key to growing your digital footprint. Our in-house outreach team are expert at achieving just this on both a national and international scale.
Outreach needs to be supported by high-quality content if you want your site to rank highly in the search engines and be viewed as a trustworthy information source. As such, there’s a lot of preparation, skill and expertise channelled into the content produced.
In this blog, we discuss five of the research methods used by our outreach experts to create such high-performing content.
What goes into our outreach research?
Building links isn’t as simple as writing content, publishing it and watching the links flood in. To maximise success, it’s important to be proactive with your research.
1) Research the business
To write excellent outreach content, we dig deep to learn all about our clients. This includes who they are, what they do, who their target audience is and what their online presence is currently like.
Reviewing their existing published content helps us develop new content ideas to further support them. We use this content along with any internal collateral to successfully replicate their brand vision, values and tone of voice.
2) Get familiar with the industry
It’s not only important to learn all about the client, but also the industry and/or niche they sit within. Being aware of what’s going on in that industry helps us to stay up to date with relevant news and updates that could affect them. Fuelled by this knowledge, we can expand upon the topics discussed in our content, making it even more engaging and ensuring it appeals to the reader’s interests.
3) Consider where they are based
Where a client is based or where their target audience is based has a significant impact on the content angles we develop.
When it comes to international outreach, in particular, it’s critical that location is considered. Every region has a unique culture as well as relevant trends that need to be taken into account. It’s not uncommon for a topic to trigger a positive response in one location and not generate the same results in another. Armed with this knowledge, it becomes easier to craft outreach content and campaigns that will achieve the desired impact with the target audience.
Working across international markets, we have significant international SEO and outreach experience. The wealth of insight from our experts has been collated in this Guide to International SEO: How To Engage A Global Audience.
4) Research the product and/or service
When creating outreach content together, it’s fundamental to understand exactly what is being offered. If you’re considering producing your outreach content in-house this should be easy.
When you engage with an agency, however, expect that they’ll need to conduct extensive research to truly get to grips with your products and services.
The majority of this can be gained from speaking to your internal team, but we also find that widening our research sheds valuable light and an external perspective on the market. Referencing relevant informative articles and leveraging supporting statistics throughout outreach content helps to form a better SEO optimised article.
5) News research
As well as being familiar with the industry, it’s important to keep up to date with external news.
Often, events in the news can have a major knock-on effect on other industries, even if they are not directly impacted. To ensure our content is always up to the minute, accurate and authoritative, we stay on top of what is happening in the outside world. Taking this approach also helps us spot emerging and ‘hot topics’ that can be applied to the outreach content we produce for clients.
Leaning on tools like Google Suggestions or Answer The Public to get additional insight into commonly searched questions relating to an industry or topic can help identify different angles to feed into existing topics and new content.
Get ahead of your competitors
Link building is an effective tactic to help businesses get ahead of the competition. But as the digital world continues to grow, content only becomes more competitive and so does acquiring top-tier links.
When it comes to creating link building campaigns, it’s important to get the research right. If you’re unsure where to start, lean on the support of an experienced agency.
We’ve implemented high-performing outreach strategies for the likes of LoyaltyLion, CitizenM and Boyes Turner to drive impressive link acquisition and boost their online visibility. Contact our specialists to find out more about our approach to outreach.