What Is Outreach and How It Works: A Strategy for eCommerce
May 22, 2025
10 mins
For eCommerce companies, outreach marketing is an opportunity to make a name for themselves through reputable sources, get quality backlinks, expand brand awareness, and attract new customers.
In this article, Promodo experts will explain how outreach works, why it is important for online commerce, and how to build an effective strategy in 2025.
Outreach is a method of promotion that involves personal agreements with website owners or bloggers to place advertising materials on their web resources. This usually involves publishing content with backlinks, banners, or brand mentions. In other words, outreach is a more personalized approach to link building*, focused on establishing mutually beneficial relationships with people, not just achieving technical goals.
Link building is a broader process of obtaining external links to a website in order to improve its position in search engines. It covers both technical and content strategies: from automated processes to creating newsworthy events and publications in the media.
The main goal of outreach is to create high-quality backlinks to improve organic rankings and attract a new audience. This method not only helps to increase the link mass of the website, but also increases brand awareness and builds trust among the audience.
Outreach marketing works not only for links, but also for your brand awareness. Brand mentions on reputable websites increase your reputation and brand credibility.
Choosing the right outreach strategy depends on your goals, niche, product format, and even the stage of business development. However, regardless of the details, an effective strategy always includes five key steps:
Competitor and market analysis;
To avoid shooting at random, it is important to find out which platforms your audience already lives on. The best approach is to analyze the backlinks of competitors, especially those who are already in the top 10 of Google. This method helps to identify sites that are trusted in the niche and can become potential partners.
There are special tools for this, such as Ahrefs, Semrush, SE Ranking, or SurferSEO. Promodo specialists use Ahrefs.
1. Open the Site Explorer tab.
2. Enter the competitor's domain and go to the Backlinks section. You can see who is linking to it, which pages are driving traffic, and what authority the source has.
What we are interested in:
Tip: pay attention not only to the volume of links, but also to the quality of the donors: traffic, topics, domain authority (DR), and relevance of the materials.
Next, let's analyze the search results for frequent and relevant queries. To do this, we use the Content Explorer built into the ahrefs.com website.
Evaluate the search results. To do this, we use operator bindings, for example, “query” + "inurl".
After analyzing competitors, the next important stage is the selection of donor sites that will potentially host your backlinks. Google is increasingly evaluating not only the links but also the context in which they are placed.
The quality of the donor site is important. A single link from a bad resource can not only fail to produce results but also harm SEO. To avoid this, evaluate donors by the following criteria:
Be sure to check traffic dynamics over the past 12-24 months. If the graph has sharp jumps (especially drops or unnaturally sharp increases), this may indicate sanctions, cheating, or an unstable SEO strategy.
site:URL "porn" OR "casino" OR "gambling" OR "lotteries" OR "poker" OR "cryptocurrency" OR "forex" OR "bitcoins" OR "cbd"
If the search shows pages with such mentions, this is a red flag, and cooperation with such a donor should be avoided.
When choosing a platform for link placement, I recommend paying attention to such indicators as site DR, traffic, geo-referencing. In addition, check the resource for unnatural links and track how often paid links are published on it. Make sure that the selected publisher does not refer to materials from so-called gray niches. Also, make sure that traffic on the selected site does not drop for no apparent reason.
It is also worth asking the website owner for additional analytics: scrolling depth, average session duration, bounce rate - this will help you assess the real level of audience engagement.
The most important thing in link building is to choose the right goal. After all, SEO goals differ significantly from PR goals. Accordingly, the selection methods, placement format, and analysis methodology will be different.
Anastasiia Hryhorenko
Link Builder at Promodo
There are many methods of outreach SEO. The choice of tactics depends on your goals, resources, and type of content. Here are the most common practices:
Creating a full-fledged informational article on an external website that includes an active link to your resource. This is the most popular and effective method because it allows you to control the quality of the content, the context of the link, and the topic of the publication.
Adding an active link to the existing content of a third-party website - for example, to an article that is already ranked on Google. The method allows you to quickly get a link from an indexed page that already has authority, but requires a cautious approach and the consent of the editorial team.
Mutual prelinking between your site and an external resource. This method can be effective if the cooperation is natural, thematically based, and does not look like an artificial exchange to search engines. At the same time, it is difficult to scale and requires a high level of trust in partners.
Posting information about your brand or website on third-party platforms such as company directories, aggregators, mapping services, video/audio platforms, etc. Suitable for strengthening your background profile, improving local SEO, or expanding your presence, but should not be the basis of your strategy.
It is most effective to combine several methods, for example, guest posts for key pages, link instruments to support already active content, and summits as part of local or brand promotion.
At this stage, you should determine the format of cooperation - an anchor link, a full-fledged guest post, a banner, or another option. Some resources may agree to barter or free placement, but the effectiveness of such links is usually lower.
Recommendations for correspondence:
Hello!
My name is Anastasiia, I am a ____________ (position) at ____________ (company).
I am reaching out with a request to publish an article on the website ____________. We need to publish an article with a dofollow anchor link.
Could you please let me know if this is possible? If so, please share your terms of cooperation. We can prepare the article topic according to your request.
Looking forward to collaborating.
Best regards,
Anastasiia Hryhorenko
To establish effective communication with website owners, you should reach out to real people. This approach significantly increases the chances of a response and further cooperation. In particular, search on Instagram, Facebook, and other social networks.
After you find the contact person, personalize your email. Mentioning a real person, their work, or their latest publication significantly increases the chances of a positive response. This is a time-consuming step, but it often determines whether your proposal will be taken seriously.
Tip: create a Google spreadsheet or CRM where you enter the contacts you find, job titles, response status, when you wrote, to which email, etc. This will save time and avoid repetition.
If you received a response, great. Please clarify the following points:
If the content will be prepared by contractors, formulate a clear statement of work based on the requirements received.
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After approving the materials, send the final version and ask for confirmation of the publication date. After publication, check:
Website owners have the right to change or delete posts, so it is important to periodically check the status of links. To do this, use services like Link Checker PRO or SE Ranking Backlink Monitor.
Let's consider two simple scenarios.
Successful: you agreed to write a guest post on a popular blog in your niche with high traffic. The article turned out to be informative and useful, and received a response from readers. As a result, this resource has been receiving stable referral traffic (for example, 200 visitors per month with a bounce rate of <30%), and several of them have even become leads. You also noticed that in a couple of weeks after the link appeared, your site rose from the 5th to the 3rd position for one of the targeted queries. This can be considered a successful outreach partnership that has yielded both SEO and direct marketing effects.
Unfortunate case: you bought an article on a little-known website on a similar topic without checking its quality. The material was published, it even received views, but the rejection rate was 80%+. Of course, this did not bring any applications or rankings. Moreover, later it turned out that the donor resource was partially under a filter - your page was not even indexed there at first. Therefore, if a donor provides neither traffic nor SEO results, cooperation with it is considered unsuccessful, and in the future, you should choose sites more carefully.
In 2025, the success of an outreach campaign largely depends on the quality of the guest post. Reputable websites will agree to publish only relevant, well-written, and interesting material for their audience.
1. Adaptation to the site. A successful guest post should organically fit into the website where it is published. Before writing it, be sure to familiarize yourself with the content of the site: its topic, style and tone, audience, format requirements. Choose a topic that will be both interesting for the target readers of the blog and relevant to the site's niche.
2. SEO optimization of the guest post. To make your content work not only for PR but also for SEO, you need to optimize it.
Choose keywords and subheadings.
Take care of the logical structure: use lists and tables where appropriate - this will improve readability and allow search engines to better “understand” the content. Add internal links to relevant pages of your website and external links to authoritative sources on the topic (if agreed with the platform).
Formatting also plays a role: highlight key points, use quotes and images. A well-structured text is easier to read, and the presence of images is another advantage when crawled by a search engine.
3. Effective content formats.
The choice of format depends on the topic and the platform. It can be step-by-step instructions, reviews and comparisons of products or solutions, analytical articles with data, professional market research, case studies with real examples, and columns by top experts.
If you see that the resource already has several guides, then you should prepare a study with unique data or an interview with an expert. The variety and usefulness of content increase its chances of standing out.
To understand the effectiveness of an outreach campaign, you need to track the main KPIs:
1. Number of placements. How many guest articles were successfully published on external platforms (and, accordingly, how many backlinks were received). This is a basic indicator of the amount of work done. It is important not only to count the publications themselves, but also to check their availability: whether the platform has deleted the material after a while, whether the dofollow links remain. Tools like Ahrefs help you track new and lost links. But quantity is not an end in itself: one article on a top site can have more effect than ten on medium-sized ones. Therefore, evaluate this KPI in conjunction with the quality of donors.
2. Increase in organic traffic. Outreach is usually aimed at improving SEO, so it's worth tracking how organic traffic to your website changes after the campaign. Compare the number of conversions from search before and after guest posting (for example, in a month or two). In Google Analytics 4, you can create a report to segment traffic by Organic Search channel and evaluate the dynamics. If you have posted materials to promote specific pages or queries, check the performance of these pages in Google Search Console to see if their Search Impressions or positions for target keywords have increased. Of course, organic growth depends on other factors, but a steady increase in search traffic after an outreach campaign is a sign of its success.
Eager to understand link building? Here is a curated article list for you:
Link Building Effectiveness: Top 15 Questions to Consider for Successful SEO Strategy
Powerful Link Building Strategy for eCommerce
Link Building & Off-site SEO: New Trends
Link Building with HARO: A Strategic Guide
Backlink Analysis for SEO: Tools, Strategies, and Techniques
Backlinks for Shopify: How to Build a Strong Link Profile for Your Stores
3. Positions of key queries. Another indicator of the SEO effect is a change in the ranking of a website in search results for the queries that are important to you. If the purpose of the outreach was to strengthen certain keywords, then track their positions in a few weeks/months (manually or using ranking services). For example, you published guest articles to increase visibility for the query “CRM for small business” - check if your site has risen in Google for this query. An increase in positions by even a few points may indicate that the backlinks you received worked positively.
Ahrefs, Semrush, and other SEO platforms allow you to set up position tracking and see the progress. It is important to analyze in aggregate: if traffic has increased, but positions have not, you may have received more low-frequency traffic or increased visibility due to the long tail.
4. Referral traffic. These are visitors who came to your site directly from published guest posts (via links in them). Referral traffic shows whether backlinks lead to real people, and not just hang somewhere on the page. In GA4, look through the Traffic Acquisition report and find the sources of referrals from third-party sites. It is important to evaluate not only the number of such conversions but also their quality: analyze the engagement of these users (bounce rate, time on site, conversions). If 100 people came from a certain guest site with a high bounce rate and zero conversions, the audience may not have been targeted. Instead, a few dozen clicks, but with long browsing and applications, is a great result.
The growth of referral traffic after the campaign confirms that your content on external resources is interesting to users and encourages them to click on your brand.
After collecting KPI data, it is important to interpret it correctly.
To achieve maximum results, you need to look at link building more globally. Systematically analyze your competitors, not only in terms of the number of links and standard quality metrics. Pay attention to the methods used, the types of donor sites, and the types of content. Approach planning not only technically and strategically, but also creatively.
Vira Sechkina
Manager of Promodo's link building team
The effectiveness of outreach depends directly on the quality of donors and content, personalized communication, and competent analytics. It is important not just to get placement, but to achieve real impact — on search rankings, traffic, and brand trust.
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