Are links to your website still important?
Maybe you’ve heard that Google will value links less in the future.
And that may be true.
But…it certainly values links now!
If you don’t get links to your content for competitive terms, you’ll have a hard time getting that content ranked.
But getting quality backlinks is not just about ranking. It’s also about driving relevant traffic to the pages on your website that drive conversions.
In a recent study, BuzzSumo analyzed 100 million articles and found that 70% of articles don’t get any backlinks.
This means that a large majority of people are either putting little to no effort into building backlinks to their content or they’re leveraging poor link building strategies.
We recently talked with one of our customers (Distinctly) about the tactics and tools they are using to achieve great results building relevant links for their clients.
About Distinctly
Distinctly is a digital marketing agency based in the UK. They use a blend of SEO, PPC, digital PR and content strategies to extend their clients’ reach, engage their audiences and increase conversions.
Distinctly has a creative team of 16 individuals who work with a diverse client base throughout the accountancy, hospitality, travel, property management, and interior design industries. They deliver exceptional results for their clients, raising brand awareness and increasing their online visibility and rankings.
How Distinctly achieves 30% conversion rate on link building campaigns
Distinctly understands that you need to deliver value first in order to generate quality links. So they create valuable pieces of content for their clients and build a targeted list of companies to reach out to and promote that content.
A great example of the kind of content they create is a careers guide for farm machinery traders. This guide targets a niche audience and provides valuable information that cannot be found anywhere else on the web.
Instead of sending thousands of emails to build links to this piece of content, they produced small targeted lists and got some great results.
Here’s an example of a recent campaign where they sent out 31 emails and got a 55% response rate and a 29% reply rate.
What’s even more impressive is that all 9 people who responded linked to the content.
Distinctly said that OutreachPlus played a pivotal role in the success of their link building email outreach campaigns.
Here are some of the ways OutreachPlus helped:
- Trackable templates – They customize the templates provided by OutreachPlus and when they run outreach campaigns they get to see the open, response and click rates for the templates they create. This means they can choose the highest converting templates for future campaigns.
- Follow up emails – The Distinctly team understands that you don’t always get a response to the first outreach email you send. With OutreachPlus, they can automatically send a personalized follow up email to non-responsive prospects which increases the response rate substantially.
- Usability – OutreachPlus is incredibly easy to use – with an intuitive campaign wizard a new outreach campaign is set up in minutes.
[box]Link building is all about achieving those essential results and without Outreach Plus we’d struggle to keep tabs on the performance of a campaign, particularly KPIs such as clicks, response rate and open rate.[/box]
Why use a platform such as OutreachPlus for outreach campaigns
There are many types of outreach campaigns you can run with OutreachPlus and not all of them are aimed at ‘cold’ prospects. Here are some examples:
- Link building – Generate valuable links to increase traffic and authority
- PR – Build relationships with journalists and get press coverage
- Existing customers – Target a group of existing customers to improve relationships, retention and sales
- New customers – When someone signs up for a free trial you can send more personalized emails to them to get better open and response rates
- Influencer outreach – Reach out to build relationships with influencers.
Summary
Being successful at email outreach and getting high conversion rate is all about leveraging the right strategy and having the right tool to support your efforts.
Distinctly is one of the many OutreachPlus customers who are driving real, measurable value with highly personalized outreach email campaigns that they can easily track and optimize to achieve maximum impact.
