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Your Link-Building Emails Aren’t Working? How to Fix That

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In this post we uncover a few reasons why your link-building emails aren’t building your links. Also, we offer a better strategy for building high-quality links that last.

Some Background: What You’ve Been Doing Hasn’t Been Working

For the last 10 years—or longer—SEO experts have advocated the use of email outreach to get in contact with publishers and build backlinks across the web. You have probably read more than a few posts about link building that talk about ways of building a network of publishers through emails. Many also offer link-building email templates to help you make a beneficial connection with your first message.

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Yet, you might notice that email outreach for link building requires a significant amount of time. Moreover, the exercise rarely provides the results you and your business need. Here’s why that is and what you can do to fix it.

Reason #1: You’re Sending Emails to the Wrong People

In truth, you want your link-building emails to go to a very specific type of person. However, most often, you won’t succeed in getting your emails into that person’s inbox. The person you want to send link-building emails to owns and manages an authoritative website with high-quality content and happily accepts guest posts with follow links.

Unfortunately, there are a few ways this can go wrong. You might only manage to find contact information for lower-level employees who lack the power to yay or nay your request for link placement. You might only garner responses from websites that rank worse than yours and that lack relevant or reliably high-quality content.

And finally, you might send link-building emails to people who just aren’t interested in guest posts or outbound links, regardless of whether they are free or paid. If you are sending emails wantonly, you are more likely than not sending emails to the wrong people.

Professional link building services put you in direct contact with the movers and shakers who are willing to place links. However, identifying these people on your own is a major chore.

Reason #2: Your Link-Building Emails Are Generic and Boring

Next, even if your link-building emails get into the right inboxes, you could be failing to attract attention and interest.

You should know that business owners get far too many emails every day. They simply cannot invest time and energy into every single one. What’s more, the publishers you are sending link-building emails to are receiving emails from more people than just you. Only so many emails requesting links can be open and read per day. What’s more, if your emails aren’t enticing enough, you will never have the chance to build links. This will cripple your ability to improve your search ranking.

As tempted as you might be to rely on some email template you found online, you should try to make each link-building email you send as unique as possible. Your subject lines should stand out. Also, you should personalize the body of your emails to the individual publisher to whom you are writing.

Because few people put so much thought into emails about building links, even small tweaks to your emails could result in much higher levels of engagement. This is sure to lead to more high-quality links for your site.

Reason #3: You Aren’t Giving Recipients a Unique Value Proposition

You want a natural link leading back to your website. But what does the publisher get in return? You need to be able to sell your link as though it were a product that the publisher needs. This means you need to be able to offer publishers something unique, something they can’t find anywhere else.

Unfortunately, standard content isn’t unique, and it isn’t particularly valuable, either. As stated above, publishers receive hundreds of link-building emails each week asking for links and offering guest content, most of which is of a similar quality to what you can provide.

You won’t be able to get publishers enthusiastic about your links if you can’t give them something over and above what they can obtain from any other link builder. Therefore, you need to work on developing a unique value proposition for your links.

Solution: Build Relationships with Link-Building Partners

Undoubtedly, link-building emails can work—but they don’t work terribly well. A much better strategy is cultivating relationships with a variety of other website owners within your industry. This should include other businesses, content creators and publishers, social media influencers, and more. Once you have a network based on trust and respect, you can begin swapping links among yourselves to improve your ranking as an authoritative group.

No one ever said building links was easy. But relying on mass link-building emails is a good way to make the process of building links especially hard. If you want high-quality links that work wonders for your SEO, you need to make sure you aren’t making any serious email mistakes. And you might need to revolutionize your link-building strategy entirely.

For more tips about developing your SEO strategy, be sure to browse our blog often.