It can be challenging to make your voice heard in a society where there are so many people, stories, and viewpoints. Marketers are aware that any success in reaching people requires two ingredients: strong online exposure and good PR.
These two factors can mean the difference between gaining credibility and organic traffic and being recognized as an unreliable source who is having a hard time finding leads. There are many practical and efficient methods to increase the visibility of your website, brand, and blog, but link building with HARO stands out from the crowd.
If you’re looking to add a largely underutilized link-building strategy to your SEO plan, HARO could be an ideal choice. Explore now.
Understanding HARO
What exactly is HARO? Help A Reporter Out is the ingenious acronym behind the cute title, which was first conceived as a straightforward concept in 2008.
HARO is an online service that links journalists and media members to help gather feedback, engage trusted expert sources, and gather quotes to generate new content for articles, blogs, and press releases. So, it was developed by PR enthusiast and entrepreneur Peter Shankman. After noticing a steady stream of requests from publications, editors, and reporters seeking information and sources for articles on a variety of topics, Shankman was motivated to start HARO. While connecting to some of these requests is feasible, connecting to all of them is incredibly difficult. HARO was developed to solve this problem.
HARO began as a platform that could handle the volume of requests and information among journalists. It has since evolved into a database useful for journalists and writers searching for their names (and a link to their website) and quotes.
Today, HARO is used by thousands of media outlets to find qualified sources to support their content, including The New York Times, TIME Magazine, and ABC.
If you consider yourself an authority on a certain topic and you’re trying to increase organic traffic and leads, take a look at HARO for untapped success. So, at Front Page, we actively seek HARO requests and opportunities where we can contribute our knowledge of all things inbound marketing, and we place a strong emphasis on adding as much value as possible to each answer.
How Can HARO Help SEO?
Understanding what your target market is saying and figuring out their search intent is a key part of SEO. Users can interact with celebrities from the reputed website at HARO. It provides users with a wealth of knowledge and an opportunity to gain high-quality connections and organic referral traffic. This is one of the more secure, reliable, and affordable (free) methods of building natural hyperlinks.
Consider spending 30 to 60 minutes per day going through HARO’s daily requests emails to help your Search efforts. Look for questions that you can reply to that relate to your area of expertise (for example, at First Page, we would address questions about SEO, inbound marketing, and related subjects).
There is no assurance that any of your comments will be referenced in a piece that is published, but if it does, you will receive a link from a website with a good to excellent domain authority. For your business, this link can lead to the following:
- Increased awareness and exposure
- More references (brand mentions)
- More readers on that page visit your site through the link
- So, the top two ranking factors are content and links, which make a useful backlink.
- Opportunity to maintain a working relationship with the website that refers you
Digital Marketing Insights
What does HARO mean for digital marketing as we discover more about how it can support your SEO strategy?
There is a lot to sort through because HARO is a platform for companies of all stripes. Of course, some subjects receive more attention than others. Additionally, some niches have a bigger following than others and vice versa.
How can you tell if HARO is the best link-building and PR tool for you? First, some intriguing results from a new HARO study:
- Only about 33% of queries are released, or three out of every ten queries, on average.
- The area with the most queries is business & finance.
- The fourth and sixth most inquiries, respectively, are in the high-tech and biotech categories.
- Since search engines view queries with a domain rating (DR) of 50 or higher (on a scale of 100 points) as having more authority, backlinks from these websites are the most useful for SEO.
- The domain rating for 68% of the 1,500 study inquiries was 50 or higher.
- A DR of 50 or higher was present in 89% of all published inquiries.
- Of the 1,500 queries examined, 69% resulted in 1,000 monthly organic site visits. So, websites with 1,000+ organic monthly visitors are regarded to have more reliable and authoritative queries.
- Of the queries that were released, 87% of the websites received 1,000+ organic visitors each month.
- Do-follow links were used in more than half of all published pieces (follow links are better for SEO than nofollow links).
Steps for Using HARO for SEO
All things considered, HARO is among the finest tools for link building. Although the practice can be challenging at first and you must react quickly to the questions, it’s a helpful trick that can be very profitable with the right links.
Take these actions to get things started:
- So, sign up as a source on HARO.
- Select the areas to which you feel most comfortable contributing. Several groups are:
- High Tech
- Business and Finance
- Energy and Tech
- Travel
- Healthcare
- Lifestyle and Fitness
- Education
- Entertainment and Media
- Always keep an eye out for email inquiries (sent three times a day) from writers and journalists in your inbox.
- Respond to inquiries that you believe your company is authorized. There are probably many other HARO users who are lifestyle experts, for example, the first page doesn’t waste their time answering questions about lifestyle.
- Expect a few weeks. You get your company’s identity and a link to a popular website.
Best HARO Alternatives That You Can Use
You might frequently use HARO as a journalist to find experts for the topics you are working on. However, there are times when you might not have the time to read through every HARO email that arrives, and there are times when you might not find anyone who would be a good match.
When that occurs, choose one of these four HARO alternatives:
- ProfNet is a free tool that links reporters and experts. You can filter your search results by location, media type, and language as well as by keyword or subject.
- Expertfile is yet another free resource that links journalists and subject-matter specialists. You have the choice to filter your results by expertise, media type, language, and location in addition to conducting a keyword or subject search.
- QueryTracker is a free database of writing agents and editors. So, you can perform a search using a keyword, editor name, agency, or genre.
- Muck Rack is a free journalist directory. By journalist name, media source, or beat, you can search.
