What outreach link building actually involves
Outreach link building, often called SEO outreach, is simple to describe and slow to do well. You find websites your audience already reads, you work out why each one might link to you, and you ask the person who runs it. Everything that makes it work sits in the details: which sites make the list, how the pitch is written and what you do when an editor says “maybe”.
Most “outreach” sold online is a mail merge pointed at a list of sites that accept anything for a fee. That approach is fast, cheap and easy to spot, both for editors and for Google. The version I run is the opposite: a prospect list built for your niche, each site checked by hand and every pitch written for the site it goes to. It takes longer per link, and that is the point. The links hold up.
The work splits into five jobs: research (who links to your competitors and why), prospecting (finding similar sites that don’t link to you yet), vetting (removing the ones that only look good in a metrics tool), outreach (the pitch and the follow-ups) and negotiation (placement, anchor, content and price). You see the result of all five in one shared sheet.
What you get each month
- A competitor backlink review at the start, so the prospect list reflects what already works in your niche instead of generic “high-DR” sites.
- Manual prospect research every month, with fresh sites rather than recycled lists that other SEOs are already pitching.
- Hand vetting of each prospect for organic traffic, relevance and link-farm signals before anyone is contacted.
- Personal pitches and follow-ups written for each publication, sent from a real inbox, answered by a real person.
- Negotiation of placement type, anchor text, content angle and publisher fee.
- Content written or coordinated to the publisher’s guidelines, so the article earns its place on the site.
- Your approval before anything is published, with the site, its metrics and its fee in front of you.
- Live link checks once content goes up: correct URL, anchor and attribute, logged in the sheet.
On Core, that adds up to at least 20 qualified publication opportunities a month, and on Scale at least 30. Publisher fees are never bundled into the monthly price. You pay each publisher directly, only for sites you approve.
How I vet a site before pitching it
Domain Rating on its own tells you almost nothing about whether a link is worth having. Plenty of DR 60 sites are link farms with inflated metrics, and plenty of DR 25 blogs have loyal readers and rank for real queries. So every prospect goes through the same checks before it reaches your sheet:
- Organic traffic trend. Is traffic real, stable or growing, and does it come from queries related to the site’s topic? A graph that fell off a cliff after a core update is a no.
- Topical relevance. Is your product something this site’s readers would actually care about? Relevance beats authority for both rankings and referral traffic.
- Outbound link patterns. Sites that link out to casinos, pills and essay mills in the same week are selling to everyone. Your link would sit in bad company.
- Footprints. “Write for us” pages with a price list, “sponsored post” tags on every article and author bios that don’t exist are all warning signs.
- Content quality. I read the site. If the recent articles are thin, spun or clearly AI-generated filler, the site is skipped.
- Audience and geography. A link from a site whose readers are in your target market is worth more than a bigger number from the wrong country.
If you want to see this in more detail, I wrote up the full link prospecting checklist I use.
Placement types outreach can earn
Outreach is a method, not a single link type. Depending on your niche and the sites involved, a campaign usually mixes several of these:
- Guest articles written for a specific publication, with a contextual link inside the body. See guest posting.
- Niche edits: a link added to an existing article that already ranks and gets traffic. See niche edits and link insertions.
- Listicle and roundup inclusions: your brand added to “best of” and comparison articles, which also feed AI answers. See GEO outreach.
- Resource page links from pages that collect useful tools, guides and suppliers in your space.
- Brand mentions, including unlinked mentions of your brand that can be turned into links with a polite email.
Anchor text and target pages
A strong link profile looks natural because it is built naturally. I plan anchors and target pages with you at kickoff and keep them varied through the campaign: mostly branded and URL anchors, a healthy share of descriptive partial-match anchors, and exact-match anchors used sparingly where the context truly calls for them.
Target pages are spread across the pages that need authority, not just the homepage. For many sites that means a mix of the homepage, key category or service pages and the informational content that supports them. If your competitors’ strongest pages earn links to specific guides or tools, that shows up in the research and shapes the plan.
Who outreach link building is for, and who it isn’t
Outreach works best for sites with something worth linking to: a real product or service, useful content and a niche with active publishers. It suits businesses that want steady authority growth month after month and care about where their links come from.
It’s not the right tool if you need a hundred links next week, if you want private blog network links or if your site has nothing a real editor would feel comfortable pointing readers to. If that’s the situation, I’ll say so in the proposal, usually with a note on what to fix first. If you’re still comparing providers, my guide on how to outsource link building without getting burned lists the questions worth asking anyone, me included.
For agencies that want to resell this work under their own brand, see white label link building. For regulated niches, I run dedicated campaigns for casino and iGaming and crypto brands.