There is no doubt that SEO is one of the most valuable channels for your product or website to acquire new users. By its nature, organic traffic consists of people interested in the valuable content or product you offer. So, the chances of you converting them into paying customers are significant.
You must manage your SEO properly to attract organic traffic to your website. This includes proactive link-building.
Today, I want to discuss a relatively new and promising tactic in this area – automated link building outreach with LinkedIn.
What is link building about?
Link building is the process of obtaining high-quality backlinks from reputable websites. The goal is to increase your website’s authority in the eyes of popular search engines such as Google or Bing.
Digital marketers consider it one of the most important parts of Search Engine Optimization. This is because search engines use the number and quality of backlinks as a ranking factor.
The rationale here is fairly straightforward. If many reputable websites cite your content with an incoming link, you must be an authority in the subject matter. Plus, you likely have high-quality content worth showing in the search results.
You need to consider an important factor when doing link building campaigns, though. The quality of backlinks is as important (or even more important) than their quantity. So, what does the term “high-quality backlink” exactly mean?
What affects a backlink’s quality?
When we discuss the quality of an inbound link in SEO strategies, we usually refer to these three key factors:
Relevance of the backlink
The backlink needs to come from a relevant website, and the content mentioning your website or company needs to be relevant to you, too. Imagine you’re an online shoe store that sells sneakers called “CS2”.
An authoritative website about gaming mentioned you in their review of a game with the same name. Would that be relevant? No, as your website has nothing to do with video games.
You need to do some research during your link building process and identify the sites that are relevant to you.
Anchor
This is the text where a website has placed your link. Just like in the previous case, the anchor needs to be relevant to you, too. Placing a backlink to your “CS2” shoe page on an anchor saying “an amazing game” would be completely irrelevant too.
You usually negotiate with the website’s editor and ask them to place your link in the right spot.
Domain Authority and Domain Rating
The Domain Authority (DA) and Domain Rating (DR) of the website from which your backlink comes are popular SEO metrics that show a website’s overall reputation.
You can use any popular SEO tool, such as Ahrefs or SEMrush, to see the Domain Authority and DR of the website from which you are getting a backlink. Here’s what it looks like in Ahrefs.
The metric we are looking for is the first number on the top-left side.
Understanding what a great backlink looks like is great, but it’s barely half the battle since you also need to figure out how to get them.
How to find quality links
Technically, backlinks can appear naturally without you doing anything about it. Other websites and publications can find something interesting you have and reference it. However, this is a very slow process, and you risk acquiring bad-quality links from some bad apples.
So, it is a better choice to actively improve your backlink profile with the help of the following tactics:
- Guest Posts. This is among the most popular ways to obtain high-quality links. You’re reaching out to relevant websites and suggesting a blog post in exchange for adding your backlink to it. It’s a win-win situation since the partner website gets quality content, and you acquire a highly relevant link that you have placed yourself.
- Partnerships. You can also partner up with influencers in your industry. You can request a mention of you (with a backlink) in their content. In exchange, you can offer free access to your product, discounts, and more.
- Original high-quality content (linkable assets). You can analyze your industry and publish research with data that your industry finds valuable. In this case, websites in your market will organically mention statistics or facts from your research to increase the authority of their content. Popular formats include whitepapers, infographics, and industry reports.
Here’s a great example of an industry report from BigCommerce.
As you can already guess, you need to find and reach out to the right people (e.g., influencers or website editors) to get your valuable links. No matter the path you take. So, let me tell you about a highly valuable channel that you can use for this.
Why you should use LinkedIn for link building outreach
The traditional way to reach out to influencers and editors is via email. While this channel is still popular, it has many challenges.
The largest one is the response rate. SmartReach reports that the average cold email response rate is around 8.5%. So, less than one website or influencer out of 10 will likely engage with you.
The problem is that we have assumed you are sending your pitch to the right person (e.g., the editor). However, finding their email addresses is not always easy, and you must use the generic one (e.g., the “info@website.com” email). So, the response rate will be much lower in real life.
The good news is that email is not the only way to reach out to influencers and editors. There is also LinkedIn! Outreach using LinkedIn is much more effective than email for two main reasons.
Access to relevant contacts
On LinkedIn, you can easily find the person in charge of managing the content of the website you’d like a link from. Just use the search filters to show you people working as editors at the company you’re interested in:
Source: Screenshot provided by the author.
In less than a minute, I found the editor of Black and White Zebra, a Canadian publisher, on LinkedIn.
Better response rates
LinkedIn’s Sales Solutions division, which is in charge of the InMail feature, has reported an open rate of up to 25% for InMail messages. This is approximately three times higher than email outreach!
There are two reasons for this impressive performance.
First, you can find the right person who is likely to respond to your message. Sending an email using the generic contact form will result in many websites ignoring you. Unfortunately, the contact form is sometimes all you can find on your target website.
Alternatively, you can find the editors themselves on LinkedIn and directly message them.
Second, unlike email, you can see the experience and background of the person who has messaged you on LinkedIn. It leads to less distrust and a higher chance of them answering the message.
These benefits will help you with your link building efforts. However, the effectiveness of it will still depend on the quality of your campaign. So, let’s see how you can build a well-performing one.
How to build an effective LinkedIn outreach campaign
LinkedIn outreach campaigns have a well-known structure like any other marketing campaign.
Here are the steps that an effective campaign will consist of:
- Target audience identification. It’s the process of understanding who you want to reach out to. Depending on your campaign goals, it might be the editors of reputable websites or influencers in your niche.
- Prospect research: Read the profiles of your targets to understand what kind of content they produce and what they focus on. This will help you draft a personalized message for them.
- Optimizing your own LinkedIn profile. Your profile must look professional and trustworthy, so showcase your previous collaborations in your summary.
- Use prospect’s work as a conversation starter. Mention your target’s work in your prospecting message. This will help you build trust with your prospects and increase the chances of receiving an answer.
- Measure your performance. Use spreadsheets or LinkedIn outreach tools to measure the effectiveness of your campaign. Specifically, pay attention to the open and win rates for each campaign.
As you can see, making an effective LinkedIn outreach campaign is not as hard as it seems. However, if you want to reach out to hundreds of contacts, you will spend too much time on manual work.
Luckily, there are ways to automate this process.
How to automate LinkedIn outreach
At first glance, LinkedIn outreach automation might seem like something that can harm your personalization efforts. However, thanks to modern tools, you can send personalized messages to relevant contacts in bulk without decreasing the quality of your campaign.
1. Use specialized automation tools
LinkedIn actively helps third-party tools run automation campaigns on its platform. It has made some of its best tools, including advanced search and performance reporting, available via an application programming interface (API).
By using these APIs, modern automation tools can help you:
- Use LinkedIn filters for bulk targeting.
- Personalize your connection request message and follow-up messages.
- Track the performance of your campaigns based on open rates and win/lose rates.
One such tool is Linked Helper, which offers a robust suite of features for LinkedIn automation. These features allow you to scale your outreach without compromising on personalization, ensuring that you get the most out of your outreach campaign.
2. Narrow down your target audience
One of the most important factors in improving the relevancy of your outreach is sending messages to the right people. Outreach tools have full access to all the filtering options on LinkedIn, including those on the platform’s web version.
Source: Screenshot provided by the author.
These filters help you bulk target people in specific industries or professions (e.g., editors).
3. Personalize your message
These tools can also scrape and store information about your target contacts, which you can later use to personalize your message.
This information includes their name, company, position, location, topic, competitor posts, and more. You can add these data points as variables to your automated message. Here’s what it looks like.
Source: Screenshot provided by the author.
As you can see, the message you can send to the target contact looks hand-crafted even though you have automated it.
4. Measure the performance of your campaign
LinkedIn’s outreach automation tools’ last major feature, which can help you improve the performance of your campaigns, is its analytics suite.
While each tool might have its own set of metrics to track, there are two metrics that you can find nearly everywhere:
- Open Rate. The percentage of contacts that have opened and read your message.
- Response Rate. The percentage of contacts that have responded to your message.
These metrics can help you determine whether your current message or targeting filter needs adjustments to improve performance.
By taking advantage of the many features that LinkedIn outreach tools provide, you can build and run a solid campaign. To get the most out of your campaigns, consider a couple of best practices from seasoned professionals.
Best practices for LinkedIn outreach
I have compiled a list of best practices throughout my extensive work with many outreach and SEO professionals. These have helped them build high-performing campaigns. Here are some of the best tips from them:
- Quality is more important than quantity. Although you can send messages in bulk, sending smaller batches with more refined filters and personalized messages is better.
- Provide them with value. Before asking someone for a backlink, point out the value they will get from collaborating with you (e.g., a free, high-quality post in their blog).
- Have a sequence of messages. Don’t ask for a backlink in your first message; start a natural conversation with them about something they posted or commented on. This will allow you to connect with them naturally and increase the chances that they will accept collaborating with you.
- Use professional language. You’re doing business with your contacts, not chatting with a friend, so ensure your message has a professional tone and wording.
Regarding the last one, just look at these two example messages and tell me which one you would answer:
Source: Screenshot provided by the author.
The second one looks too weird and unnatural, and you would not answer it, would you?
Conclusion
Link building with LinkedIn outreach is a highly effective link building tactic. You should consider using it as part of your SEO link-building efforts.
Thanks to LinkedIn’s ability to target relevant people, you can reach them with personalized messages. As a result, you can significantly increase the number of websites that will agree to place your backlink. And it, in turn, will lead to better search engine rankings for your site or product. Want to learn more about the latest trends and insights on link building, SEO, and content? Visit our blog page for more information!
