Contents
- What is HARO?
- How to succeed with HARO
- The secret sauce
- Common HARO Mistakes
- Why we’re awesome at HARO
HARO (help a reporter out) is an excellent way to attract links from high authority publications, which is very advantageous for SEO performance.
Platforms like HARO are very predictable for link building, simply because the reporters actually want your story.
The concept is simple – Journalists, reporters & bloggers are looking for expert sources on all manner of topics, and by providing them with a great quote, they’ll link to your website.
📹 Check out this video on exactly how it works
But getting coverage is far more complicated than sending out the odd reply when you see a suitable opportunity. This type of scattergun approach sees companies fail to build links despite investments in time and effort.
Using a HARO link building service (like ours) is a good option to build branded white hat links quickly.
You’ll get more links, from big publications like these;
Why HARO Users Regularly Earn Links From Big Media
Every day, journalists at sites like Insider, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and more use HARO to request expert insight for their stories. These requests are sent out in one of HARO’s many daily emails.
Looking for HARO Links?
If you’re looking for high-authority backlinks using platforms like HARO, Qwoted and other journalist outreach platforms, then you’ve come to the right place!
Drop us an email via our contact page, and we’ll give you the lowdown on exactly how we can help 😎
If a writer chooses to use your response, you’ll get a backlink from the website that published the article. It’s a win-win situation: journalists write better stories backed up by experts, and you get high-quality links from an authoritative publication.
How to Succeed with HARO Link Building
I’ve listed the 5 most key elements of any success on the platform below. If you follow these you can’t go too wrong!
- Fast responses – This is by far the most important. If you respond quickly to a HARO query, your pitch will land right at the top of the journalist’s feed, meaning he/she is far more likely to go with your insight. If you leave it 24 hours, it’s likely that 50+ people will have already replied and the opportunity is lost.
- Look for relevant requests and topics – You can easily scan these in the HARO daily emails. For example, if you’re a digital marketing agency, you can answer pretty much any question about marketing, business, entrepreneurship, advertising, management etc.
- Be concise – Don’t write any more than 200 words in your response. And don’t start dropping links to all of your social profiles and contributions. The writer just wants to grab some insight.
- Use actionable and insightful tips – This is where most people go badly wrote. Don’t write generic fluff, it never ever works. Journalists want some lovely quotable points of expertise. So tell them about tools, and actionable strategies you use. Open with the actionable piece of advice, then go onto explain what you mean.
- Never use filler content – You’re not writing a beefed up blog post, you only have 200 words to convince someone you’re an expert with an interesting insight that their readers may enjoy.
How We Built Our SEO Results With HARO
The Linkbuilder website is proof that HARO works. We currently rank number one for many profitable and highly relevant link building related keywords – and are on the first page for many more.
🔑 Keywords we currently rank well for include:
- Link Building Agency (Number 1)
- Link Building Company (Number 1)
- Link Building Expert (Number 1)
- Link Building Service (Number 3)
We have many backlinks — as you’d expect from a link building agency. But HARO has attracted some of our best ones.
LegalZoom HARO Link
a site with a DR of 81, and millions of organic search visitors per month. The journalist sent out a request on HARO asking how small businesses can define and increase customer lifetime value.
To stand a chance of being chosen for a competitive request like this, you need a deep understanding of the publication and what the writer wants. This helps you write an easily quotable response that ticks all the boxes the journalist is looking for.
As a HARO link building service, we have a refined process that ensures all responses meet these criteria. We used this system when responding to the Legal Zoom request and the writer used our answer. You can see it in the screenshot below.
RavenTools HARO Link
We also used HARO to get the link below on Raventools, a DR 79 website. The request was for agency owners to talk about their best tips for predictable lead generation.
As an agency, we were well suited to reply. Our explanation on how to use YouTube to generate leads was used.
💡Top tip for inspiration
Look at Quora and Reddit threads related to the topic being pitched. Those are often gold mines for finding interesting viewpoints that you can ‘re-word’ into your own HARO journalist pitch.
🚀 Want High Authority Backlinks on Autopilot?
🤫 The Secret SEO Sauce – One of Our Responses
I’m going to share with you the exact response that landed us a link on LegalZoom…
LegalZoom (DR 91) Success
Here’s a response we wrote to a writer from LegalZoom looking for insights on customer lifetime value:
“Hi Sandra, Great idea for a post!
People are often very concerned with sales, but they don’t realize the impact that improving customer lifetime value can have on revenue. Understanding your customer lifetime value is a vital piece of the business puzzle.
It not only allows you to make key revenue predictions, but helps you to make incredibly informed decisions on your marketing and advertising spend, because you can easily calculate your ROI (return on investment) from various different marketing activities, and make informed decisions on which are the most effective and generate the best returns. Companies can increase their customer LTV through a number of intelligent strategies – One of the best methods is by greatly improving your customer service offering, which has been proven to greatly reduce churn rate in a great number of businesses.
All things being equal, if people like you and feel like they’re being treated well, they’re going to stick around as a customer longer.”
Pretty simple right?
You don’t need to be a copywriting genius to land links from journalists, you just need to give them a tasty and unique piece of information that they can extract and use within their article.
