Struggling to build backlinks? Try this HARO strategy

Be warned, ignore this piece at your peril. As someone who’s seen the effectiveness of PBNs, link exchanges, pay-to-play and a variety of link-building techniques fall by the wayside, HARO remains steadfast as a place to garner quality links.

That, combined with the fact that most tier one publications who use no-follow for all links are no longer being treated differently by Google compared to do-follow links, means there’s never been a better time to up your HARO game.

How to Identify

For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to assume that you religiously follow your HARO emails at 5:35 am, 12:35 pm and 5:35 pm EST.

Is that just me?

Well in any case, chances are you’ve seen a typical HARO email (Figure A) and understand the key to a successful pitch starts with identification.

 

Figure A: Standard HARO Email

Let’s get the first misnomer out of the way, don’t pitch anything with the publication listed as ‘Anonymous.’ I tried for many months, hoping that perhaps I could catch a gem — maybe a tier one publication that wanted to avoid the volume of pitches that came when their name inevitably appears in a HARO email.

Suffice to say, never gained a successful pitch from an ‘Anonymous’ source — my guess is the person behind them uses the answers for swift content creation.

The next step is to filter based on a matrix of publication and pitch relevancy — here’s one I prepared earlier:

Low Domain Ranking	High Domain Ranking
Low Relevancy	X	X
High Relevancy	X	✅✅✅

This matrix might seem intuitive, but one of the cardinal sins I see folks committing is trying to pitch everything and anything on HARO. It’s better to take the sniper than the shotgun approach so make sure that the publication you select is of sufficient quality.

A good rule of thumb is to find publications that have a higher domain ranking than your own domain.

This can be discovered via a quick search in Ahrefs, Semrush or your SEO tool of choice. Yes, this seems obvious, but make sure you have expertise that is relevant to the content of the pitch. It doesn’t benefit you to manufacture a response outside your expertise just for the sake of a top tier publication.

A final note — when in doubt, speed is everything with HARO, so think twice about pitching if it’s been longer than 24 hours.

Example Identification

Let’s use Figure B below as an example of how to identify a good HARO query to pitch.

Figure B: Sample Identification of ideal HARO pitch

At first glance, it’s easy to discount the ‘Anonymous’ publications. Beyond that, there are no recognizable tier one media publications, so it’s time to look at the queries themselves.

In this example, I’m imagining I’m trying to gain backlinks for my business and that’s what draws my attention to CEO Blog Nation — What’s your motivation for you to grow your business.

Here I run the publication domain through Ahrefs (or equivalent SEO tool) and discover a domain ranking of 71 out of 100, a very good score and, more importantly, greater than my business’ domain ranking of 44. In the next section, we’ll use this same example to produce a sample pitch.

How to Pitch

Once you’ve identified an appropriate HARO query & publication, now it’s time to craft your pitch. Rule #1 — stop bragging about you or your client’s credentials without a response to the query. How did I find this out? I did a little reconnaissance.

Cast your mind back to 2020 — anything online was booming and I just happened to be involved in the EdTech space at the time.

I decided to put together a report on how the pandemic had accelerated growth in the EdTech space and turned to HARO to generate some additional statistics and quotes for my report.

The avalanche of responses was encouraging, but the considerable number of responses from PR professionals saying words to the effect of “My CEO is amazing, our company is great, please interview him now” was downright horrifying.

By contrast, those who gave me a short paragraph, answering my query succinctly went straight to the top of the list in terms of coverage.

Through being on both sides, I reinforced an important lesson for myself when pitching journalists.

They are extremely time poor and trying to hit exceedingly tight deadlines — if you want coverage, make it easy for them — indeed write in a way that your quotes could be directly lifted and placed into the journalistic piece verbatim. When you make a journalist’s life easier, you’ll be rewarded in spades.

Two secondary tips I’ll leave here.

1. For your subject line, don’t overcomplicate it. A simple three to four word description of why you’d make a good expert often does the best e.g. I describe myself as a “10 year tech marketing executive.”
2. Below your paragraph that you hope the journalist will use, be sure to give some basic information that will be used such as Name, Title, Company, and most importantly, URL. After all, with no URL, there’s nothing for the journalist to link to in the article.

Example Pitch

Now we know the structure, let’s look at an example in real life, using the same CEO Blog Nation pitch from before. See the pitch below in Figure C and we’ll evaluate.

Figure C: A sample HARO pitch to a query for CEO Blog Nation

The subject line is fairly explanatory — straight to the point and focused on expertise that matches the type of expert source the journalist is seeking.

The blue section is a short intro that provides some social proof — remember the journalist receives many pitches, why should they choose yours over any others.

I also include a URL here — it seems redundant especially because I have included the URL later in the email but remember journalists are rushing so make it easy for them to give you that precious backlink.

The yellow section is the meat — this is a custom paragraph, designed to be able to be quoted verbatim by the journalist — use of italics helps distinguish it visually from the rest of the email.

The green section provides an offer for further information — nine times out of 10 the journalist won’t take you up on this — but if they do, chances are you’ll be a bigger focal point of the story and get even more substantial coverage.

Finally the orange section are the particulars — always include a name, title, company and URL at minimum. Remember, journalists are time poor so they don’t want to be scrambling around for information — give it to them upfront in a neat, easy to digest manner.

How to Measure

Once you’ve gotten into the swing of regular pitches (as much as these tactics work over time, there is always a volume factor to HARO), now it’s time to measure your effectiveness. As mentioned above, journalists are lacking in time.

They are dealing with the unenviable task of growing content production demands in writing rooms that have been slashed. Making things easy for them is a huge factor as to whether you will even hear back after your pitch.

Let’s split into two categories — the responsive and the non-responsive.

The responsive journalist is the rarer of the two, but definitely makes your life easier. Adopt a simple nurture mindset and follow-up periodically, asking if the piece has been published.

Even if the piece is shelved (which happens more frequently than you might think), at least you have the added benefit of building a relationship with a journalist that covers your space — if you’re really lucky they’ll come to you first rather than put out a HARO query, guaranteeing you coverage.

The non-responsive journalist is the far more common one, but don’t take their lack of response as a negative. Here’s where you need to be diligent in your sleuthing.

Use a combination of Google Alerts (see Figure D), Native Publication Search, and SEO monitoring tools such as Ahrefs and Semrush to keep an eye out for the piece dropping.

From there, a simple Ctrl + F should help you find your name and hopefully that glorious backlink. My rule of thumb is to keep an eye on a piece for at least four weeks after you pitch. After that point in time, chances are the piece was shelved.

Figure D: A simple Google Search of your name via the ‘news’ tab can help you locate your successful pitches — like I did here for a New York Times feature.

This is just a small sample of how you can start leveraging HARO to earn links for your domains but trust me when I say it’s worth it.

Building authority and backlinks to drive results for your domains might be harder than the days of simple exchanges or link buys, but if you put in the effort, the rewards of HARO far outweigh any somewhat suspect grey-hat tactic us old SEO hacks have up our sleeves. Happy link-building!