Do everything right and you’ll be awarded with really high quality backlinks. There are plenty of journalists and reporters out there who are looking for people just like you, and businesses just like yours. After speaking with Dialed Labs about this issue, we chose to build white hat links via their Help a Reporter service. One of the key things that held our site back from page 1 rankings was our backlink profile. We simply didn’t have enough high authority backlinks.
I always loved writing and being able to provide expertise for other outlets in return for a backlink. Another ambiguous answer, where the real answer is “we don’t know”. Some industries have a high volume of search requests and tend to get published faster. We have an in-house team of editors that consistently proofreads every response that goes out to journalists. This is because journalists receive at least 50 responses in the first 3 to 4 hours of sending out their mails. We cannot stress this enough — it’s vital to keep the responses short, crisp, and valuable.
In HARO preferences, you select your industry or any close. This will send you journalist queries related to your niche and your expertise. So, getting your subject matter experts answering HARO inquiries can be the best way to get you backlinks. And the best thing, it only takes 10 minutes of their time.
Lots of bloggers use HARO for a day or 2, get no replies and decide to add it to their list of useless link building strategies. Thank the journalist and share the content if it’s relevant to your audience. You should, however, make sure you don’t miss any questions the journalists may ask if they choose to include your pitch. Getting the right pitch format can take a while so I recommend trying different approaches and seeing what journalists respond to.
Link building with HARO demands time, resources, punctuality, and actual expertise. The competition is intense, and there’s a method that needs to be followed to leverage this platform to your advantage. I recommend signing up now if you haven’t already done it and trying to reply every day for at least a month. For example, SEO blog Databox invited me to contribute to other articles after I replied to one of their requests.
Dofollow links are links that Google uses to rank a website’s trust, quality, and authority. If a link is dofollow, it lets Google know it’s pointing somewhere important—the linking site owner wants Google to make the connection between their site and the site at the other end. If you don’t have the time, energy, or desire to answer HARO queries yourself, Jolly SEO might be the answer. If you like, they can totally take on the whole responsibility of building links through HARO. This tool can become a hub for your HARO link-building attempts. While Jolly SEO is a service to build HARO links for you, Link Sourcery is a platform for you to build your own links.
I’m Benjamin Houy, the founder of French Together, a language-learning blog that attracts 308,000 monthly visitors. After 6 years in the language-learning niche, I created Grow With Less to share my passion for blogging and show online business owners how to grow without the overwhelm. It starts with a demonstration of expertise (“I travel about 20 times a year”) followed by a HARO link building list of actionable tips.
