029 – Is Link Outreach Still A Relevant SEO Strategy in 2024?

00:00.82
peteeveritt
Hello and welcome to this episode of the WP SEO show. I nearly forgot the title of the show there. That would have been an interesting start. my I’m your host Pete. I’m here with my co-host Jeff, all the way from California. How are you doing mate?

00:15.01
Jeff
I’m good. pete it’s It’s been a couple of weeks, hasn’t it?

00:18.58
peteeveritt
It’s been more than a couple of weeks. Uh, yeah. And, and we were just riffing before the show about how we feel bad that we haven’t recorded one of these in a while, but then we realized that actually next week, the show is going to be the whole year old.

00:31.81
peteeveritt
We haven’t released anywhere near 52 episodes. Um, but it will be a year old and we’ve done more than we’ve done more than 26. So we’ve done 29, 30 shows. So that’s, you know, it’s more than one, ah one every other week, which is, uh, which is pretty good going.

00:41.02
Jeff
Yeah.

00:45.31
Jeff
we yeah We were planning on every every two every other week, so I guess it’s it’s averaged out for the most part. But honestly, you know it’s just no one of those things.

00:50.74
peteeveritt
Yeah.

00:53.68
Jeff
i’ve I’ve had so much fun doing this this year. I’m not sure if it’s been as… um I don’t know you know. If we’ve done it as frequently as we both wanted to and things like that. But at the same time,

01:05.06
Jeff
It just cements this fact that I love the world we’re living in, where we can work remotely, we can you know and and the lives that we’ve set up. it has been <unk> It’s been a nice addition, even though it’s been extra work you know this year. It’s been a nice like just i don’t know mental thing dude to do, to talk with you. That’s always fun, but then also to just kind of get out there and meet new people. and you know every Every time we release them, we end up talking to several new you know new folks, whether they’re going to work with us or we’re going to just you know chat with them or do some advising. and it’s It’s been really cool. This has been a fun thing to do.

01:36.97
peteeveritt
and ma You’re making me tear up.

01:38.78
Jeff
Oh, well, for, I mean, we’ve both listened to podcasts forever.

01:38.42
peteeveritt
This is…

01:41.45
peteeveritt
I wish I could say the same.

01:43.21
Jeff
You’ve had, you’ve had a podcast. I’ve not done that, but I, so many people have podcasts. You start to go, is everyone going to have a podcast? You know, and when we started with like, we were reading another podcast and it’s like, yeah, I guess so.

01:54.54
Jeff
Cause you know, people are listening and we’re having fun.

01:54.55
peteeveritt
Yeah.

01:56.68
Jeff
So why not?

01:58.19
peteeveritt
Absolutely. you know what And and as as with a whole load of things in marketing, at the end of the day, if youre ah you have the idea of what your customer of who your customer is and you’re actually creating stuff for them, it so doesn’t really matter. about you know you you can You can then carve out your niche and the Your crowd, your tribe, that’s the word I was looking for. Your tribe will find you. That makes it sound like we have a tribe, which, you know, I’m sure both of our listeners will will agree to. So. um

02:30.58
peteeveritt
Yeah, but anyway, we are here. It’s it’s all good. um And today we’re gonna take the lid off a bit of a sticky subject. I’m a bit apprehensive about this one, I’ll be honest.

02:43.39
peteeveritt
And just as I’ve said that, the dog’s jumped on the desk. So I guess he’s he he wants to have a say in it too.

02:46.23
Jeff
Perfect.

02:49.29
peteeveritt
We’re gonna talk about link outreach. Now we should sort of caveat this. Maybe you wanna premise this. You should caveat this that this has come because o We’ve genuinely noticed, we’re not just saying these things, we we genuinely come up with ideas for the podcast because these are the things we talk about with clients.

03:05.80
peteeveritt
And we seem to be having a number of discussions about link outreach, which was something that we used to offer at SEO Hive and we we still now do, but we’ve put sort of parameters around it. So, ah ah where this was your idea, mate, where did you come from?

03:19.95
Jeff
Yeah, so I’ll kind of touch on that last part there. you know as As of recording, which is September 2024, you can’t go to our website and purchase any sort of link outreach services. You can talk to us and maybe we’ll figure that out. you know i mean we we we can like it Like Pete said, we can still do it. this isn’t you know We’re not here to advertise our link outreach services, not what we even want to do.

03:39.92
Jeff
but But yeah, a lot of the topics that we talk about on this podcast end up from the conversations we’ve had. I had the conversation yesterday with with a client and about seven times last week. And it’s weird because it felt like up until recently, we’ve probably gone a year, maybe even longer with like never discussing link outreach, just just not doing it. And we had it as one of our core services when we started this, ah four and a half years ago.

04:07.68
Jeff
um My gosh, no wonder I don’t have any hair.

04:08.45
peteeveritt
Yep.

04:11.54
Jeff
I’m getting old. um

04:14.65
peteeveritt
Yeah.

04:15.12
Jeff
Just dated.

04:14.89
peteeveritt
Like you had hair then.

04:16.76
Jeff
That’s true. I didn’t have much more than but little bit. um um and And it was great. It sold well and you know, which is important. We got good results, but we didn’t always have great reception, I suppose would maybe be the best way about it because there was a disconnect and understanding

04:35.56
peteeveritt
Yeah.

04:36.47
Jeff
the para what you get, what you do, and really the landscape and the landscape is shifted, which we’ll talk more about. But um but yeah, so eventually we pulled it right out.

04:44.69
peteeveritt
Well, and and I don’t know, obviously I was on your calls this week, start last week, but the times I’ve discussed, i’ve I’ve had these discussions with clients more recently, it’s more being like we’ve done the entire call and they’ve done that Colombo thing where they come back and say, oh, just one more thing.

05:02.97
peteeveritt
You do link outreach, right? And then we’re like, oh, we really going there right now. And we have to get into it all.

05:09.82
Jeff
Well, the call was about to wrap up, but now we’re going to get another 20 minutes.

05:12.25
peteeveritt
Yeah. So so that’s um and and we we go through we go through why why we don’t offer it quite as publicly anymore. We do have a few sites that we still run our outreach process on.

05:26.66
peteeveritt
But I think I think we’re we’re skirting around the topic at the minute, which is is why. Well, we call it link outreach. We don’t call it link building.

05:36.83
Jeff
huh

05:36.62
peteeveritt
And that that really sums up the crux of the problem here, which is that there’s now then now There’s now a market in links, not in the bad paid links that you used to have when you used to use link farms and and PBNs and all that kind of stuff. yeah you You still shouldn’t do any of that. That’s just wasting your money.

05:59.12
peteeveritt
Website owners know that links are valuable. And all website owners, essentially, are trying to monetize their website in one way, shape, or form. And because of that, we can find link opportunities, but they they now, the vast majority of them, like way over 95%, actually come with some kind of monetary fee involved. So we can now only work with clients on link outreach if they have the budget to actually pay the website fees on top of what you know the the the outreach.

06:27.69
peteeveritt
And those links nine times out of ten come with the requirement for a guest post as well so if the clients got the ability to do that great but if not then we’re looking at an additional copywriting fee in order to write the guest post that then needs to be paid for to be put on the website and all of a sudden you now getting into the realms of you know if you’re working with a.

06:46.51
peteeveritt
Let’s use our plumber example from the plumber down the road. He’s not going to want to spend four, five, 600 bucks on a link. And frankly, it’s not going to do him that much good anyway. So there’s a massive contextual piece now that needs to go in into the conversation with any client before you just go out on the the market for saying, yeah, we’ll do some link building for you.

07:10.02
Jeff
Yeah. No, obviously if you could get that link without spending all that money and doing all that, effort that’s fantastic. It does help, but is it worth like you five, 600, who knows how much? is Is it worth it on top of what they’re already paying monthly just for those leads essentially is what they come down to. So yeah, for most most of the clients that we get, most of the clients that I assume 90% of the agency partners and you know and freelancers and everybody listening to this get, it’s it’s it’s not it’s not the best option anymore.

07:39.70
Jeff
If you got the money, great, you know what I mean? But you’re not gonna get as much return on your investment most of the time.

07:43.91
peteeveritt
Well, yeah, and we we come we come down to the fact that, like the clickbaity title of this show could be. We haven’t, we’ve got two versions of the title and we don’t know which one it’s going to be as we record it. But as the clickbaity version of this title could be, link building is dead. Well, no, it isn’t. It’s still a very valid part of a good thorough ah SEO strategy.

08:08.41
peteeveritt
But like we talk about loads of times on this show, ah SEO is a game of displacement. So if if you’re in a competitive market and you have a business that has the budgets and you you need to engage with that level of the competition, then yeah, absolutely. Link link outreach, making sure you’ve got a good volume of high quality links coming into the site, making sure that there’s there’s not a whole lot of toxic stuff linking back to you. That’s also important as well. It’s ah it’s a key part of an ongoing strategy.

08:37.27
peteeveritt
If, on the other hand, you’re not in one of those competitive markets, if the competition is your competition isn’t in those competitive markets, then actually you don’t need to engage with that side of the game a lot a lot of the time. That’s exactly what we’re talking about with the plumber example. it’s It’s just not something that, you know, there’s so much else we can do which will provide better value and higher quality leads back to your client, show a return on investment far quicker than going through this expensive process of buying leads.

09:10.09
Jeff
Yep. You love that word displacement and I, I, I get it, but I love saying it’s a tiebreaker. I don’t know why I just always kind of, I always think it’s a race, right? So if you’re neck and neck and you guys are doing, you know, the one week or one month, you’re number one.

09:23.36
Jeff
And then the next month your competitors, number one, and you just keep flip-flopping back and forth, figure out what it is that they’re doing, figure it is what you’re doing. You know what I mean? And then beat them. So, and that’s the example that maybe then you need a couple of links, right?

09:36.29
Jeff
Maybe it is worth the money because if they’re not getting them and you guys are that close, well, that might be the thing that puts you over the edge to kind of cement that number one standing.

09:36.87
peteeveritt
Yeah.

09:44.11
Jeff
You know, if that’s what you’re, if that’s the situation you’re in or what you keep going back and forth on. But that’s just, yeah, it’s an example. With tiebreaker, you’re displacing them. Displacement feels like you’re youre kicking them out.

09:54.42
Jeff
You know what I mean? You’re like, get out of my way. you know I don’t know. It feels a little violent to me, but I don’t

09:58.73
peteeveritt
Well, let’s let’s angle whoa who let’s just clarify that a little bit. I normally put it in the sense of, look, if you want to rank on page one, then that means that wherever you rank, somebody has to drop from page one to page two.

10:11.33
peteeveritt
You you have to displace them off that off that page to to get them to drop down.

10:15.64
Jeff
know.

10:16.41
peteeveritt
and it can It’s really about talking about this contextual side of SEO, which is you don’t need to do all the SEOs on every site, on every page of every site. What you need to do is understand what the competition is doing and and basically do what you said, which is do it better, right? Just just do it better than the competition. um And that’s where You can have a mix of affordable SEO that is going to deliver leads for the clients. so They see a return on investment. You as that the agency partner can keep on making ah a healthy profit off it. And actually you’ve got you’ve got a client over a far longer period of time at that point. They become far more valuable to you than let’s say you had a ah client, you know, a client at six or 800 bucks a month that stays with you for four or five years is far more valuable than a client that

11:07.34
peteeveritt
you onboard for three and a half thousand a month and only stays with you for three months and then they they say you haven’t delivered and and off they trot. So yeah it’s a longer game ah but it’s about playing the right game and it’s not always the same game for every client.

11:20.84
Jeff
Yeah, yeah, it’s yeah. um I had something to add, but I’m like, yeah I’m not going to keep beating that point in there. One thing that this is kind of adjacent to, and that’s citation building.

11:34.40
Jeff
and This is in regards to local SEO mostly. And that I think citation building is still something obviously we do as part of our local service. And and I think most most SEOs that do local stuff are doing that as well.

11:42.85
peteeveritt
Yep.

11:48.52
Jeff
And citation building, you know, technically it’s link building, you’re building links on these things, whatever. But those don’t always have the same like benefits from them.

11:59.94
Jeff
because it’s just a directory. You’re literally just making sure that you’re in more places. It’s not the same as getting a really powerful DR site link from another site that really is mentioning your business or whatever. They’re just listings. They’re profiles. They’re great. They’re fine. You want to have them. You need them to, like we were talking about, displace the other people in your niche.

12:20.24
Jeff
but it’s more of kind of like a ah black and white, you know what I mean? Like it’s binary. You just, you just do it. It is not getting the same type of benefits from it. And that’s why they don’t cost tons of money. And every now and then some of those ones, they do start putting fees on there.

12:32.71
Jeff
Oh, you want to be on our, uh, I don’t know, our website professional directory. Well, $25 a month. No, thanks.

12:38.50
peteeveritt
Yeah.

12:39.35
Jeff
ah There’s 27,000 other ones that we could, you know, do similar like that that don’t cost anything. So.

12:45.71
peteeveritt
There is another, another side to citations, which is kind of important to to touch on as well. So a citation, you normally submit not only the link to your site, but also your NAP details, your name, address, and phone number. Um, which again is why it ultimately, why it sits so well within a local SEO kind of plan, but the,

13:08.97
peteeveritt
When you claim those citation, those citations around the internet, it means that you are then in control of the details that are there because believe it or not, there are bots and there are companies out there that will go and try and claim, claim, uh, local citations and kind of for their own purposes, either to try and sell back to you to say, Hey, we have your listing over here and we want you to pay us $500 for it, which is completely not right.

13:35.59
Jeff
I was going to say unethical.

13:35.47
peteeveritt
Uh, or. Oh, yeah. Or they will try and claim your business listing and point then the the domain name back to their website so that they’re essentially trying to steal the citation. And it also it also means that, of course, you know, sometimes things change, you know, your phone number might change, your email address might change, all of those kind of things that your your domain name might change, the things that you do submit off. So by claiming the citations and actively managing them, you are in control of all of that stuff.

14:03.56
peteeveritt
um And Google will use that as part of your ah youll business profile. it What some people don’t necessarily realize is anybody can suggest and edits to any Google business profile. you know if you’re you go Google your local takeaway down the street and you’ll be able to go and suggest an edit.

14:22.46
peteeveritt
now If Google can, Google needs to verify that edit in some way. So if you’ve claimed all the, so as many citations as you can, and all those details are up to date, not only does it mean if your phone number changes, you’re then in control of rolling out that phone number update. But it also means that if somebody then goes and suggests an edit and gets something a bit wrong, you know, they miss key your phone number or they, they miss key one of the the dates that you’re, you know, you’re opening times or something like that.

14:50.81
peteeveritt
Google will take that edit and it will try and verify it against the other information it can see on the internet. It doesn’t just go and say, all right, yeah, that’s changed and post the new thing. So you’re actually sort of protecting yourself, if you like, from erroneous ah business profile updates by keeping all of these citations up to date yourself. And I don’t, I don’t think that’s a benefit that many people see. And it’s probably quite a long winded, you know, it’s, it’s not something anybody’s ever going to buy. It’s entirely consequential, but it is a benefit to, to doing this as well from a citation’s point of view.

15:25.45
Jeff
Yeah. And we’ve, you know, we’ll get like a ah customer too. And we’ll, we scan those, you know, when we build those, if we get a citation, we monitor that citation as well. So we might get that in January. We’re still checking it in December. If that, of course, that client’s still active and we’re working for him. But, um, if the, if those details change, you got to go change them. It’s not, nothing happens automatically. You’re not in control of that. So that’s what we’ll have. We’ll have a local business, you know, move down the road.

15:52.58
Jeff
guess what, those 47 citations that have been built over there all need to be updated now.

15:53.94
peteeveritt
yeah

15:57.26
Jeff
And it’s not the hardest thing in the world to do. If you’re tracking it, then it’s easy to, you know, keep it on top of, but, but yeah, that stuff has to stay updated. And we’ve seen mismatch citations all the time. People sign up and you know, maybe they, I don’t know, actually now now yeah we’re talking about it.

16:11.63
Jeff
I don’t know if that situation has happened to me because we’ve had ones where their address or their phone number or things were just flat out wrong. Sometimes it was like, yeah, that was our old info. But other times they’re like, that is, that is not our, those are not our details.

16:20.11
peteeveritt
Yeah.

16:22.95
Jeff
We don’t know how that got there.

16:23.11
peteeveritt
Oh yeah.

16:24.19
Jeff
yeah like

16:25.50
peteeveritt
And the number of times we onboard a new and new client to the local plan and they say, ah well, how how did that get there? Because nobody’s looked at this since like Marie left the company four years ago.

16:36.10
Jeff
yeah

16:35.95
peteeveritt
And it’s like, well, I’m guessing Marie might have had something to do with it, you know, just just a hunch. i But we, yeah, yeah we we can fix it for you.

16:44.02
Jeff
yeah

16:43.73
peteeveritt
That’s not a problem. but yeah These things are easy forgotten, I get that. But, um you know, we were segueing a little bit away from link outreach or link building, but it’s, yeah, it is what it is.

18:21.38
Jeff
All right, cool. So now, you know like I said, we keep saying, yeah, you’re probably not going to do it that much, but we’re we are still doing it and we still will do it. It’s just that we don’t necessarily run out the gate and suggest it to every single one of our clients. But you know let’s move forward. Let’s say that we’re we’re doing this. What type of things are we looking out for? Do we do they need a higher domain rank? Do we did they need a certain number of pages? or you know They’d even need to be in the same niche. like What type of things would you know people, if they’re still going to be going through, actually want to pay attention to, to do this right and actually get results?

18:56.11
peteeveritt
So the first thing, the first thing is in order to build decent quality links, you have to have decent quality stuff to link to. I mean, that’s the, that’s kind of a given.

19:08.41
peteeveritt
am ah We’ve mentioned this on the show before. Can you remember that one page website that signed up and wanted content from us and they didn’t have a blog?

19:17.38
Jeff
And like it wasn’t WordPress, so they’re like we don’t know how to add a blog.

19:17.18
peteeveritt
Yeah.

19:19.54
Jeff
We’re like, I’ll see you there.

19:19.65
peteeveritt
Yeah.

19:20.64
Jeff
Rest night there.

19:20.78
peteeveritt
Yeah. Yeah. That’s, that’s, you know, ah if the reality is. very few websites, even if they, the when you approach a website, they are going to vet you just as much as you’re vetting them ah for under a few things we’ll talk about in a minute. But if you’ve not got anything that’s worthwhile for them to link to, they are essentially what you’re asking them to do is put an endorsement from their brand to your brand.

19:45.85
peteeveritt
And if if you’ve if you’ve got a one page website or a website that looks like a dog’s dinner or something that’s inactive or you know look it looks dated, the content’s dated, the’s you’ve not posted on the blog for six years, it’s just not giving the right impression. So actually a lot of the first thing of link building is making sure the website looks good, that you’ve got content that’s link worthy, that it’s active, that you’ve got those right things in place. So whilst they’re not officially link outreach or link building services,

20:16.51
peteeveritt
you you You really are trying to nail jelly to a wall if you haven’t done that. So that’s the first thing. But then when you actually get into the process of the link outreach, there’s a few things you want to bear in mind.

20:28.46
peteeveritt
The first is when when we’re running link outreach, every month before we run the outreach for each client, we check the current domain authority and page authority of the site. So we will only ever go and approach sites that are of a higher domain authority than the site on that month that we’re that we’re working on it. And that’s that’s simply a way of, you know, the the whole point of doing link outreach is to pass authority around the internet. You’re trying to build authority for your for your site. So going and getting a whole load of like one or two percent links, if you’re at a 25, it’s just wasting everybody’s time. It’s a whole lot of time, effort and money for literally nothing.

21:08.57
peteeveritt
So you need to make sure that you are progressively going for ah domains that are slightly higher than yours. You know, if you’re that 25, absolutely go for like 28 to 35 DA links. That’s absolutely fine. At least you’re making progress. If you go for like a 75, 100 domain, firstly, they’re really hard to get hold of and would be either budgets we’ve been talking about, they’d be even more expensive. But um you’ve just, you know, that they are the They’re the rocking horse manure type links.

21:41.33
peteeveritt
They come around once every so often and that that’s, yeah yeah.

21:45.90
Jeff
Well, one thing, yeah, one one thing we do is and I want to say it’s like, it’s not a hard set number, but because it depends.

21:45.80
peteeveritt
Just be realistic of what you’re reaching out for.

21:52.77
Jeff
All right. But like five, maybe 10% of the outreaches we do every month are to ones that are actually a little bit outside of what we would think are reaches.

21:59.32
peteeveritt
Yeah.

22:00.77
Jeff
But those open, chances are you’re not going to get anything from them. But what it does is it opens up that conversation and start finding out what’s required. So, you know, we’ve had sites where they’re at like, I don’t know, DR 10 or whatever, and and we’re going after a 2530 or something, but then we get the info back of what we need to achieve in order to get that. So in that case, it’s like,

22:19.55
Jeff
and you know this little networking some discussing or discussion or whatever but one thing I wanted to is kind kind of a little bit so good before we wrap things up I wanted to mention another thing we’ve done that again this isn’t like a huge mover for the SEO needle quote unquote you know it’s not going to help your rankings big time all the time but

22:20.61
peteeveritt
Yeah. Yeah.

22:36.08
Jeff
And this is mostly, again, for our local sites, but it it doesn’t necessarily have to. But one of the things we’ve done, and just in our research, when we find, you know, we’ve got, I don’t know, a ah new customer that’s, ah you know, in a small town or something, and we start finding out, well, what’s what’s in that small town? um As far as internet presence, right? So we’ve seen community sites like local job boards or posting message board, things like things that probably are on Facebook these days, but sometimes there’s still community blogs and things like that.

23:02.35
peteeveritt
Mm hmm.

23:03.53
Jeff
and their domain might be terrible. It may do nothing for you to get that link as far as rankings go. but But if there’s people in that community using those websites and now you can get a ah link to the plumber, it’s I mean, it’s basically like a sponsorship, right?

23:15.63
peteeveritt
Yeah.

23:18.23
Jeff
it’s ah Those can be huge. And it’s not going to show on your search console or any of those reports, but it will show by customers first picking up the phone and calling your customers. So that’s that’s another way that we’d like that kind of every now and go, hey, we did some link building, even though that’s not what the service is right now or that’s not what you’re getting.

23:35.19
Jeff
But but those little things are huge. And if you can find those or if you’re provider can find those for you and you deliver those clients. It’s like, it’s gift wrapping, right? Here you go. Happy birthday.

23:44.84
peteeveritt
Yeah.

23:45.31
Jeff
We found you some bonuses and stuff like that. So and those are the funny ones again, because they just, they don’t do anything for the search report really, but they, they help move the needle.

23:48.04
peteeveritt
Absolutely.

23:53.64
Jeff
They help get calls and things like that.

23:53.89
peteeveritt
At the end of the day, ah your client will be able to tell you if their phone is ringing more than it was.

23:55.16
Jeff
So.

24:00.48
peteeveritt
but That’s really the telltale sign. just to Just to wrap up the things to look out for, so make sure your site’s active. Make sure that if you’re proactively doing this, that the the domain authority is above the site but within a reasonable kind of range.

24:13.61
peteeveritt
Third thing, do check the toxicity of a domain. You don’t want to be building domains that are blacklisted or on toxic toxic registers or spam lists or anything like that. So you do need you do need to check that out. um And then then lastly, there will almost certainly be some fees to pay. So make sure that they are reasonable.

24:33.45
peteeveritt
Likewise, you know, a number of sites have various ways that you can build links. Some of them want you to actually go and crawl their site and say, right, well, i’d I’d like a link on this keyword to this link over here. Can we make this happen? Others will suggest things to you. Others will say, no, we just want a piece of content. And then you want to you have to pay us $80 for the editorial because we want to proofread it to make sure it sounds like it comes from us.

24:56.12
peteeveritt
So you’ve you’ve got to start piecing all that jigsaw together, which is why it becomes a little bit a little bit difficult. And as I say, we now only really work or offer this to clients where we can validate ahead of time that there is a budget there for actually sourcing the links, you know, actually completing the link transaction as well as doing the outreach. And it’s exactly why we our service is a link outreach um plan rather than a link building plan, because we can’t guarantee the building too many moving parts.

25:25.71
Jeff
Yeah, the only way to guarantee the link building quote unquote would be to be building terrible links, right, just going and doing whatever it is you can just to do it.

25:31.16
peteeveritt
Yeah.

25:34.23
Jeff
And that’s there’s no point in that, you know, no point.

25:35.68
peteeveritt
There’s no point in that. There’s no point in that. So that’s, that’s basically, uh, that’s basically where we are. Um, and and that, that, I guess that kind of brings us around full circle. You know, we, we used to offer link, link outreach. We had an issue with it. We stopped offering it. We now offer it a little bit and we, we can do it. ah the The only thing I was going to mention when you were talking about our outreach is, you know,

25:59.51
peteeveritt
At the end of the day, you’re outreaching to websites individually. So there is an open rate and there is a close rate to these deals. Typically speaking, we we normally average around about a 30% opportunity rate, let’s call it, an offer rate of a link ah from all of the all of the outreach we do. It takes us a little while to build up to that momentum for certain clients, particularly if in a niche that we haven’t necessarily worked that heavily in before, but that’s kind of our sort of benchmark as to where we can get the the the opportunities to. And then after that, you know, just because we found an opportunity doesn’t mean that a client has to take it. Absolutely not. So, you know, we we can then we then in a position to not only vet the opportunities, but the client can vet the opportunities as well to say, you know what, I just don’t want to be associated with that. Oh, that’s a really good one. Yeah, I’d i’d actually prefer to write an article for that one. That’d be great.

26:54.49
Jeff
Yeah. Yeah. Some of them are, vant and some of them are kind of like, I don’t want to be say vain, but you know, they’re like vanity sites too, right?

26:55.29
peteeveritt
And that’s kind of where we are.

27:01.41
Jeff
It’s like, oh, it’s just awesome to be able to get on that.

27:01.63
peteeveritt
Yeah.

27:03.57
Jeff
Great.

27:03.59
peteeveritt
Yeah. Yeah. It’s not, it’s not for me to tell the client what’s important for their business in that, in that sense, that side of things. All I can tell you is that, yeah, the data stacks up on this and I think it’s worth it.

27:14.76
peteeveritt
Or no, the data doesn’t stack up on this. And I think you’re wasting your money. Um, but that, that squidgy you organic human element, that’s all them.

27:27.42
Jeff
ah Well, it’s like I said, when we, you know, we kind of, you know, shoot high on some of those ones, they’re, you know, they’re, I can think of some examples. I don’t want to go into it right now. But like, you know, some big publications, right? magazines, you know, things that we all know, like household names, you’re like, let’s give it a try. you know

27:42.26
peteeveritt
yeah Absolutely, absolutely. And there are other techniques to to building yeah to finding links as well that that we don’t use. we found We found a method that works for us that we could productise into a service and that we offered and and it was successful. There are other techniques yeah um that we we don’t use. you know We’re not a digital PR house, so we’re that’s not in our wheelhouse. If that’s the kind of thing you’re after, then then you know you need to go and find a digital PR place. That’s fine.

28:10.32
peteeveritt
um but yeah the There’s multiple ways of skinning this animal and ah yeah we we found the one that gives us a good return but. It comes with let’s put this last thing we say let’s put this kind of into context when we started the service like four and a half years ago. The link outreach pathway about.

28:32.45
peteeveritt
50 to 60% of the opportunities we got carried some kind of fee. So it was over half, but you know, there was a reasonable number we’d get where we could build links without an additional charge.

28:44.90
peteeveritt
Now I can’t remember a link outreach that I’ve seen this year that hasn’t had a fee associated to it.

28:50.58
Jeff
No, yeah it’s it’s a new industry or business.

28:50.49
peteeveritt
That’s, that’s the difference.

28:54.26
Jeff
I mean, it’s not new. It’s been happening forever, but it’s now basically completely turned into that business model.

28:58.73
peteeveritt
Yeah.

28:59.78
Jeff
and you know I don’t know. I used to i got my my start with the whole internet world and business and stuff by having a blog. I used to travel when I was in college and you know I had a travel blog and I would get those, you know hey, you want to build these links?

29:12.98
Jeff
And I would ignore them all the time and so they’d go until they would say, we’ll give you 20 bucks. I’m like, cool. All right. After a few years, I paid through college. I paid a lot of my college for that. But let me tell you, after I was done, that website was trash.

29:26.47
Jeff
It got no respect anymore.

29:27.13
peteeveritt
ye Yeah. Yeah.

29:30.51
Jeff
The links changed to different things too. I was like, wait a second, I paid for something about travel insurance and now it’s linking to blankets or something made in Bangladesh. I don’t understand what’s happening here.

29:40.83
Jeff
So it’s just like, what are you opening yourself up to with that?

29:44.19
peteeveritt
Actually, I’ll tell you an angle of the show we haven’t thought about is do you advise your clients to sell links on their websites?

29:50.10
Jeff
No.

29:52.97
Jeff
And I have had people ask, Hey, can I sell a link? Why would you do that? here You really want $20 from this person?

29:56.14
peteeveritt
Why would you do that? Yeah, yeah just no.

30:00.58
Jeff
You charge way more for that for to your customer. Let’s point to that. That’s why ah I know we’re getting off topic, but I hate when I go on like a Best Buy as an example, ah you know, local electronics company here in the United States.

30:13.46
Jeff
They have Google AdSense on their own website. They’re an e-commerce website, but they have Google AdSense and they link you out to other websites all throughout their life. I’m like, why? I just want to check out without going somewhere else.

30:23.51
Jeff
Why would you drive traffic away from your website?

30:23.99
peteeveritt
Yeah.

30:26.23
Jeff
Which says they must make money doing ads more than they get e-commerce sales.

30:26.10
peteeveritt
yeah

30:29.42
peteeveritt
Yeah, it must be a significant income stream to their bottom line for it to be there. Absolutely. Absolutely.

30:36.03
Jeff
they’ll They’ll be the next blockbuster video.

30:36.02
peteeveritt
So.

30:40.14
peteeveritt
Yeah, almost Netflix, but just not quite.

30:45.05
peteeveritt
Well, look, i I hope you found this valuable. It feels like this has been a bit of a rambling kind of show, which is fine. It is what it is. um But yeah, i hope I hope you found some nuggets useful in the in the ramblings of two aging men in the internet world.

31:02.42
peteeveritt
At least I’m not losing my hair yet.

31:03.67
Jeff
Yeah. but Let’s please take a sec to wish happy 40th or happy belated 40th birthday to Pete last weekend. So he just turned 40. He is old.

31:13.34
peteeveritt
All right, I’m now in the same decade as you that you’ve been in for like three years.

31:15.85
Jeff
Oh, wait. Yeah, I’m already at my I’m already in my 40s.

31:17.16
peteeveritt
so

31:18.25
Jeff
Nobody who heard that be offended. i’m I’m making fun of myself more than anybody else. Yeah. We are oldish.

31:24.19
peteeveritt
Yeah, i’m I’m getting ready to grow out of my hair just like you have.

31:27.44
Jeff
Oh, gosh.

31:30.88
peteeveritt
So cool. Well, thank you very much. And, uh, well, if you’ve got any queries about any of this, feel free to reach out hello at SEO hive dot.co and we’ll happily talk to you more about, ah you know, how we could help, but be prepared to get the answer that we don’t think this is going to be right for this client as well.

31:49.08
peteeveritt
Uh, so yeah, absolutely.

31:49.77
Jeff
In regards to link outreach, I was just clarifying there.

31:52.59
peteeveritt
Absolutely. And ah we don’t know when it’s coming, but we will see you in the next show. Have a good one.

31:58.29
Jeff
yeah