The ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing has grown dependent on search engine optimization (SEO). Link building is an inextricable part of it. Despite all the controversies, it still works as a critical strategy to elevate a website’s authority and visibility. Making use of the power of HARO (Help a Reporter Out) can be an effective way for digital marketers to achieve their organic link-building goals.

The Basics of HARO

The HARO link-building strategy is an effective way to get quality links. Journalists, bloggers, and content creators are always in need of expert insights and opinions for their content and stories. Through HARO, both individuals and businesses can connect with such journalists to situate themselves as expert authorities and provide journalists with needed insights. When used effectively, HARO can help you build links and raise brand awareness by providing valuable opinions to those seeing it. 

Regardless of what industry you belong to, how big of a scale you operate on, or your geographical limitations, using the right techniques, HARO can substantially boost your PR efforts. It is a great tool as it provides mutual benefit. Reporters get a source, and responders get great backlinks.

How Does HARO Work?

Becoming an SEO-friendly website by building great content and generating quality backlinks is a strenuous process. HARO expedites it to some extent by fast-tracking the relationship-building phase. There are various software and platforms that provide access to HARO utilities. Most of them have similar steps of initiation and functioning, which can be classified along the following lines:

1. Registering and Creating a Profile: To start using HARO, you need to sign up and then register yourself as a source. Since your profile will serve as your digital resume and will be a testament to your professionalism and expertise, create one that stands out. The accuracy and authenticity of your profile information can increase your chances of being chosen as a source.

2. Subscribing to Relevant Categories: All HARO platforms will send out emails at regular intervals, containing questions and queries from journalists who are seeking expert advice on a plethora of topics. The questions are often subdivided into categories like lifestyle, technology, healthcare, automotive industry, cosmetics, fashion, etc. You can individually subscribe to the categories to streamline the process and receive relevant, targeted queries.

3. Drafting Unique and Insightful Responses: Journalists and reporters are often looking for responses that stand out. Try creating compelling answers and giving new perspectives instead of being generic. Showcase your expertise by providing relevant statistics, data, and case studies. Don’t forget the importance of brevity. Keep it short, crisp, and factual. 

4. Establishing Reliability: To increase your chances of being chosen as a source, you need to establish your credibility on the platform. Keep updating your profile with any notable publications that you may have contributed to. Provide links to your personal or business blogs. Your credibility will play a major role in differentiating you from other sources.

5. Monitor Links and Mentions: You should always keep an eye out for the mentions you receive since some might not link you back. Surveys have found that almost 32% of articles do not link back to the source. While brand name visibility still boosts your traffic, it is better to explore if you can cordially negotiate for a backlink.

6. Bring Diversity to Your Link-Building Approach: HARO, while being a magnificent tool for link building, is not the only available strategy. There are many other tools and techniques, such as influencer marketing, guest posting, etc. Combine these to create a balanced and well-rounded ecosystem of link building and backlink generation.

How To Achieve More With HARO

Within HARO, certain techniques can be implemented to unlock its full potential. Here are a few:

1. Work with multiple categories: While working with all categories is a hassle and will lead to lower meaningful productivity, do not constrain yourself within a singular niche. Try spreading out and connecting with professionals from multiple fields to expand your brand’s horizons. 

2. Brevity is king: Journalists receive multiple responses from many different sources. Try to be short and crisp to garner more attention. Construct your pitch with great care, so that every line is necessary and contributes to meaningfully addressing the posted queries. 

3. Creating an Eye-Catching Pitch: To create a pitch that easily catches a journalist’s eye, you need to take care of the following:

1. Include the Subject: The subject line is a must since journalists often scroll through their inboxes. Having a short and poignant subject will net you better results.

2. Foster Connections Through Personalization: Structure the answer as if you are having a conversation with the individual. Establish a connection with them by using their name. This small difference helps you stand out from the rest.

3. Introduction and Conclusions: In introductions that are talking about you, only provide relevant details such as who you are and why you should be considered an expert on the topic. Do not forget to conclude by promising to address any follow-up questions they might have and that you will share their published article on your social media pages.

Category-Wise Pitch Templates

There is a universally successful format that you can follow for any pitch, regardless of the category:

Hi [JOURNALIST’S NAME],

[INTRODUCTION] 

[MAIN BODY OF PITCH]

[CONCLUSION] 

While this format can be used for any query, you should customize your answers depending on what category of query you are addressing. Depending on the category, you either have to elaborate on topics or remain short and crisp with your answers. Some queries require more engagements and follow-ups. Others require a more professional approach. Understand when to leave your answers open-ended and when to go for definitive ones.

Choosing the Right Platform

HARO has become overly saturated in recent times. Thus, choosing the right HARO platform will shorten the time it takes for you to yield results. That being the case, there has been a rise in platforms that automate a lot of the grueling manual tasks involved with HARO. 

SEOBOX.AI

SEOBox is an AI-powered tool that helps link-building by compiling pitches from HARO and several other platforms:

• SEOBox conducts thorough monitoring of the internet to find backlinks and digital PR opportunities for you. It sifts through them based on the keywords you provide to send you personalized and relevant queries. 

• This saves time, as you don’t have to check your emails daily for online PR and marketing. 

• The platform leverages AI technology to streamline the process of pitch submissions, giving you ample time to draft compelling responses. 

• It currently supports HARO, Help a B2B Writer, PASE, and monitoring of Qwoted, with Twitter and Terkel.io currently in the works.

• They have 3 subscription models, with a 5-day free trial. 

Linkly’s PASE

PASE (Partner with an SEO Marketer) is a Linkly initiative that helps all categories of content marketers, including writers, businesses, and sources, by bringing them together on a singular platform.

• Linkly’s PASE is another HARO alternative that connects over 1700 content marketers and writers.

• PASE focuses on A-B-C link exchange within their trust-based community of writers and sources who generate content with high authority and credibility.

• They have a simple work model where the publisher submits the request, PASE subscribers get notified and can reply to the requests, and both parties are now in a win-win situation. 

• PASE is a good alternative to HARO because HARO focuses only on journalists who work in media companies. PASE is more of a platform for writers, non-journalists, and experts to collaborate and come up with quality content. 

Does HARO Yield results?

Several studies and analyses have been conducted regarding the conversion percentages that HARO offers across a wide range of platforms. An overarching survey by Zestard Technologies in the year 2021 has analyzed results from 2,500 queries within the framework of HARO. This survey yielded some interesting results. Let us glance at some of their key findings:

1. The Ratio of Published to Unpublished Queries: The study has shown that only 35% of the queries that are posted by journalists get published. This implies that only 3 in 10 requests get mentions and backlinks. On the bright side, it has also been discovered that the websites that published the queries mostly had a high domain rating. Thus, every backlink that they generated had high credibility-boosting potential, thus yielding better SEO results. 

2. Category-wise Query Quantification: As discussed above, you need to find the niche that you wish to work with and get targeted queries for yourself. Thus, it helps to know which domain generates the highest number of queries. Here are the top 5 results:

1. General Queries: The general category, understandably, comes with the highest number of queries and by a huge margin. It includes subcategories like home decor, gift selection, DIY hacks, etc. 

2. Financial Queries: Second on the ranking charts are business  and finance-related queries. With the increasing inclination towards investment and the stock market amongst the general populace, this has become a popular topic in recent times. Questions regarding making better investments, accounting decisions, entrepreneurship, etc. require a high level of business acumen and expertise. If you can fill this position, the number of quality backlinks you can generate will go up drastically since trust is the most important factor when it comes to financial decisions. 

3. Lifestyle and Fitness Related Queries: These queries come in third and include things like life hacks, fashion hacks, relationship advice, parenting advice, nutritional care, personal health, hygiene, etc. While the market for such information is widespread, it is a bit difficult to gain a solid footing within this niche since it is completely based on pre-established trust and feedback from the results your answers yield. Thus, it takes a relatively longer period to generate credibility in this field.

4. Medicine, Health, and Biotech: Medicine, dosage, ratings of medical professionals, etc. are sought-after data. Providing credible information can help a lot of people while also expanding your influence horizons.

5. Tech Solutions: With perhaps the most potential for future growth, tech solutions clocks in at the fifth rank when it comes to the number of queries. Networking, cybersecurity, VPNs, etc. are topics that are searched for frequently. Couple that with queries regarding the latest strides in tech, and you have a niche that can easily help your link-building process. 

3. Domain Rating Statistics: The domain rating (DR) of a website is a metric given by Ahref that indicates how likely it is for a website to have a high SERP (Search Engine Result Page) ranking. It has a range from 1 to 100, with 1 being the lowest possible chance. Ahref uses this metric to calculate the credibility and authority of a website. A DR of 70 or above belongs to a high-authority website that can generate high-impact backlinks. The survey has shown that overall, 53% of queries had a 70+ DR, and when it comes to published queries, 74% of them had a DR of 70+. This data illustrates that HARO is a great tool for generating backlinks with good authority. 

4. Organic Traffic Generation Rate: The main goal of link building is to generate organic, targeted traffic to your site. According to the data, 78% of published queries receive 10k+ organic visitors every month. Thus, it can be concluded that, when it comes to brand visibility and traffic, HARO is an excellent resource.

5. Expert Advice: Link-building expert Julian Goldie gives some great advice regarding link-building. He says, “If you want to maximize your results in link building, you should also be producing content, targeting low-competition keywords, nailing your on-page SEO, etc. Even if you don’t see results within the first 30 days, be consistent.” He took Signature, a SaaS website, from 0 to 145,000+ SEO traffic visitors within 6 months. 

Concerns with HARO

HARO provides opportunities to widen your reach. However, utilizing HARO requires lots of work. The platforms have become oversaturated, and results are not guaranteed given the dependence on publisher attention. A certain degree of luck is attached to it as well until you create a good brand name. However, it is still a platform that is extensively used to generate high-authority links that have the potential to drive traffic, sales, and leads.

Some HARO platforms can be a bit bothersome since they will spam you with excessive emails. Some platforms require you to be vigilant about whether you are being linked back. Some new platforms require time before they can pull in reputable sources and journalists.

Conclusion

HARO can be an excellent platform to provide some real help to emerging businesses and other entities to farm credibility and boost link-building opportunities. Although getting quality backlinks through HARO can involve immense effort, it’s worth the effort.

The key to finding success with HARO is to write high-quality pitches, work on your website’s content, and provide real value to journalists. Yes, all of this requires time and patience. But quality always finds a way through.