How to find the right domains for Outreach

Google says that links should happen organically when you post great content. However, why simply rely on chance to get your page to rank? Instead, take charge and get those links built to your content. 

The effort you put into link building is directly proportional to the strength that link has on your keywords. Link outreach requires a ton of effort but is one of the strongest citations you can get pointing to your page with your chosen anchors. 

Quick refresher: Outreach link building is contacting site owners to get a link pointing to your website. The variables are:

• Write new content for a new page that will anchor to your websites
• Insert your own content URL as a citation if the outreached existing content is relevant.
• Links will be your target keyword as anchor text or exact URLs

Find websites that will be worth building links to your website. Since Content Outreach uses an approach closer to sales than traditional link building, you need to build your rolodex of contacts starting with a list of domains.  Below are the domain parameters we look at.

Find high traffic websites

Find sites with high monthly organic traffic or have at least been rising steadily in the last 12 months. Use websites in the same or similar industry you are in. If you’re clever with your content, you can use niches that is not closely aligned with your business. Just make sure to coherently segue the outreach writing to your website’s content.

Your outreach sources should have a variety of keywords it’s already ranking for. The keywords must be relevant to the domains’ niche. These show that search engines have not shunned them and will value a backlink from their site to yours. 

If you are targeting a specific region, you should find websites that use country designated TLDs (top level domains). You can also use .coms for your region as long as it has that region’s language.

Avoid spammed websites

Check that the keywords or domains in the outbound links are not repeated. Sites that are linking to a domain numerous times even with different variations of similar keywords are already being used for bad SEO practices. 

Your sources should have a safe ratio of inbound backlinks and referring domains. 10 backlinks for every 1 referring domain is the ratio we work with. If a website has 50 domains referring to it, some backlinks may repeat but if it’s thousands of backlinks from only 2 domains, you should scrap that source.

Go where your competitors can’t

Avoid websites that accept guest posts. These sites are saturated with outbound links that even if it’s filled with quality content, anyone will be able to post links here. If just anyone can post on a website, it minimizes the value a backlink can have to your website when you publish your own content.

Look for websites that don’t normally link to other websites even if it’s the same niche. Don’t worry though since you can convince them to have your content posted on their website. It’s possible if you reached out to them and shown the value of listing your website as a credible source or provided them with great content they would want seen on their domain.

The parameters listed above can be filtered with Ahrefs, Majestic, Inlinks, SEOSurf, Scrapbox, Mangools and even Screamingfrog. We’ll be creating a different post on how to use each of these tools for finding worthwhile outreach websites. We will also cover how to effectively reach out to website owners so you can actually get links built.