How to Find Journalists for HARO Link Building Campaign
So you’ve launched a website, and you’re producing a steady stream of quality onsite content. But your link-building efforts are falling short. Maybe it’s a result of a lack of budget or time. Fortunately, there’s a way you can land high-quality links at a fraction of the time and often without spending a dollar—by seeking out journalists.
One that we recommend is to do a link building campaign. Or if you’ve been using one already, it’s time to assess how you’ve been doing it and what are the results so far. You might need to change your strategies and find journalists who can help drive your link-building efforts to success. Remember, the SEO landscape keeps on changing, so you need to adapt. Below, we’ll show you how to find journalists you can turn to for quality earned coverage.
Why should you take link building seriously?
Link building pertains to the process of acquiring links (backlinks) from other websites back to your page. Search engines have always given weights to quality links when ranking a page on search results.
Backlinks are a strong signal that a website is high-quality because others use it as a source. So, you can imagine how high domain rating websites linking to your page can boost your SEO strategy.
Creating content that people want and would love to link to is the easiest part. Building links is another story. It would be best if you did it the right way to generate the results you want, and that requires lots of planning, time, money, and building relationships.
What’s an effective way to do link building?
Finding journalists and establishing a strong relationship with them can help you tremendously with your link building campaigns. Now, the question is how to find journalists? Here are a few ways that work:
1. Find the best influencers in your niche
While any journalist can cover your content, finding the most influential ones who write stories in your niche is so much better. Determine who are the journalists with the most engagement and number of followers on social media.
One tool you can use is BuzzSumo, which allows you to filter active and verified influencers and major reporters. You can narrow down the list based on the niches that they cover and you think are relevant to yours. From there, you can build your new journalist email list and send your quality pitches to them.
2. Find the most influential websites on a topic
You can also scout journalists for your link building campaign by targeting the most influential websites that cover your topic.
Many journalists write for a couple of publications around a niche. What’s more, major websites trigger natural syndication, which means that when you get earned coverage from one of them, you’ll likely see your content covered in other publications.
3. Use online link building outreach tools
You can find several link building outreach tools online, including HARO (Help a Reporter Out). Some of these platforms connect you with journalists who need experts they can cite on their content. About 800,000 users are connecting with journalists via HARO. Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook are the top platforms that marketers use, and professionals worldwide use social media to increase exposure.
You may be asked to provide an expert opinion that they can include in their content and credit to you. Others may request full articles that they can publish. These are good places to look for online writers and publications where you can send our pitches.
4. Work with an SEO agency
Link building can be a tedious process, and you may have to spend a couple of hours scouting for influencers and sending your outreach emails. If you’re a busy person or you have little knowledge about link building, you can leave things to the professionals.
An SEO agency, being good at what they do, can take the hard work off your shoulders and find journalists for your link building campaigns. As link building is part of their services, they may already have a journalist email list for various niches. That saves time, allowing you to kick off your link building campaign immediately.
The Takeaway
Your SEO strategy can benefit massively from a successful link building campaign. When done right, link building can boost the authority of your website, so search engines will rank you higher.
When you’re at the top of the search results page, your target audience can see you easily and that will drive traffic to your site.
Find journalists who have the greatest number of followers and engagement or from major publications. Take advantage of online tools and outreach platforms or work with an SEO agency to find them.
