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- [00:00]
Ben Shab
The Voices of Search Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com welcome to the Voices of Search Podcast.
- [00:25]
Alex Goffstein
A member of the I Hear Everything Podcast network, ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts.
- [00:32]
Ben Shab
Sit back, relax and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom.
- [00:38]
Alex Goffstein
Here's today's host of the Voices of Search Podcast, Jordan Cooney.
- [00:43]
Jordan Cooney
Hello SEOs and marketers. My name is Jordan Cooney from Pre Visible. Joining me today is Alex Goffstein, who is the co founder at pitchbox. Pitchbox offers a comprehensive influencer outreach platform which is designed to streamline the process of connecting influencers and and managing campaigns effectively.
- [01:03]
Ben Shab
This podcast is also sponsored by Ahrefs. What if I told you that you could monitor your website's SEO, health backlinks and organic rankings at no costs? Sounds too good to be true. Well, it's not, because my friends at Ahrefs just launched Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. Ahrefs new Webmaster Tools product quickly helps you improve your site's visibility by pointing solutions to over 100 technical issues that might be holding your search performance down. Plus, AWT monitors for backlinks so you'll know the most linked to pages and how those links are affecting your rankings. And AWT shares what keywords your website ranks for and compares how you stack up against competitors for key metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty and traffic value. Look, monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools and now, thanks to Ahrefs, that's not the case anymore because AWT will help you monitor your SEO, health, backlinks and keywords for free. And no, it's not one of those 14 day free trial offers. It's a powerful site audit tool that will keep working for you for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.com AWT that's a H R E F S.com.
- [02:20]
Jordan Cooney
AWT Today, Alex and I are going to discuss link building automation. Okay, here's my conversation with Alex Gopstein, the co founder of pitchbox. Alex, welcome to the Voice of Search podcast.
- [02:33]
Alex Goffstein
Nice to be here, Jordan. Thank you so much for having me.
- [02:35]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah, super excited to dive into our topic. We actually really believe on our podcast that link building and digital PR and influencer or content influencer outreach and that whole mechanism is going to Have a real resurgence here as AI, AI search becomes more prevalent and as Google really tries to become better at defining who is the most authoritative resource for any given topic or prompt. I'm curious to learn more about pitchbox, what you guys do, what your concept of influencer is before we kind of go into the whole topic of link building. Automation.
- [03:15]
Alex Goffstein
Yeah, absolutely. So Pitchbox is basically an automation software or platform designed to manage the full cycle of link building which really very similar to sales. It's everything starts at prospecting, personalization, outreach and then managing the relationships part. You know, if this is a conversation about automation, link building can be done and still, I'm not sure why still is done manually by a number of agencies out there. But a lot of the parts of the process of that life cycle is extremely labor intensive. We have machines out there now with AI. If you're not automating, you're really stuck in the cold ages because there's going to be somebody out there that's just going to outrun you. And the quality that automation and technology brings today, it's even better than what you could do manually. So some people say, you know, bespoke outreach is still, still there. And it is, there's definitely space for that. It just depends on the target audience. If you can segment the type of people you're reaching out to. There is definitely a place for sort of one, one to one. But there's more and more space now for more automating because automation really saves you time, saves you money and gets you to the end result much faster.
- [04:46]
Jordan Cooney
Now let's talk a little bit about just the concept of what link building is today in the market. I think I get the sense that when you talk about automation and why we need automation in this industry, it's because the core foundations of what link building used to be are not the same as they are today. And what I mean by that is you're not just getting this age old spreadsheet from someone who's been stalking you on LinkedIn and harassing you for your email address to buy a couple of sweet links that they found scattered through the Internet. What does link building look like today? What is quality link building in your perspective?
- [05:25]
Alex Goffstein
Yeah, I mean if we think about link building, the purpose of link building that essentially has not changed, it just it has evolved. Right. Initially the older days you could get any kind of links and because the web is interlinked and that is still part, was and still is part of the the algorithm or is in the top three most Important things. We're still building links to get visibility. We just, the names around link building has changed. Digital pr, influencer outreach, and so on and so forth. And the essence is still the same. You have to find the right partner. And that could be, you know, a platform, it could be a site, it could be a news. Digital PR is very hot right now and you're going to build some kind of relationship with them and that relationship hopefully is going to turn into obviously visibility, traffic and ultimately a link. Because like for example, even large companies, enterprise companies, large organizations, they still very much involved in link reclamation or just unlinked mentions. Even till this day our blog, we link to some big brands or talk about some big brands. That may be an example of a company that does really well in the space. And we still, this day we get emails saying, hey, you're, you're mentioning us, but can we get a link? So they're hoping for the traffic that's coming to our website. They're hoping for that traffic come to them. They're hoping for that user. If they express interest, they could just click and go there. So that's the traffic part. And obviously the algorithm is still there, it still values those links. Now the quality of the link is extremely important. Right? The old days of like, let me just buy a link on any site to my casino website. Yeah, okay. Of course that's, you know, that doesn't really work anymore. It needs to be, there has to be that topical authority there. It has to make sense, it has to be legitimate, it has to be a reason. Right? So it's like no more just spray and pray somebody gives me a link. That's great. But a lot of the older, a lot of the traditional, I should say not older, but the traditional strategies still work. The skyscraper coined by Brian Dean, that's still a thing because the content gets older. Even like ourselves, we've done a data study a couple years ago with Brian Dean himself about like what kind of outreach emails works, what kind of subject lines, you should, the length of the subject line, how many follow up emails should you have? Should you include personalization, what the signatures needs to write? It was a really, really good data study. It was based on like 12 million emails or so. Now link building and just generally outreach have changed, the rules have changed, right? So the data has changed. We're working on a new data study. Well, guess what? We will implement a skyscraper campaign. We're going to say we did a data study with Brian Dean. It's a few years old now. We have a new set of, you know, 10, 20 million emails that we evaluated and we have some new findings. Right. So whoever's linking to that particular article will most likely have interest in now pointing into a newer data. Because if they care about their audience, they care about the traffic that comes their way, they want to send them to a more relevant, more fresher, newer type type data so that they still, if they're going to implement such thing, so that it makes sense to implement something new. Right. And that's why you're recording this episode and this, this podcast been around for a while. But for whatever reason, people are listening to the newer stuff. I know myself, like when I'm going through podcast and I'm looking at a podcast, I'm going like, what's newer? Right, it's, yeah, most of the time you go to the new stuff. So yeah, the traditional strategies still work. Now when we talk about AI and we talk about the chat, GPTs of the world now become a search engines, right? How are they ranking? Right? So that's like, you know, the SEOs are still trying to figure that out, but we are already figuring things out. And they are using the publishers as their sources. So if there is a publisher that is able to using their content, ChatGPT is able to answer that query, that answer, they will use that content. Right? Because now they like. I think Claude was initially showing the source, not Claude, it was perplexity. They were showing the sources. I think they were the first ones, like, here are the sources of the, of the answers. Now more and more of these guys are starting to show that data. They're going there. How are they considering these places being authoritative? Well, that's digital pr and in, you know, in a simple terms, it's the link building. So these, the digital pr, if you have some, let's say we, you know, take an example of some kind of a data study and we reach out to journalists that write about, let's say cold outreach in general, and we say, here's an interesting study, they will write about it, they will publish it. And now our study, our data is getting published in the journal and news outlet, whatever, by journalists. And now ChatGPT is picking that up. Now I am actually ending up in those results.
- [10:30]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah, let's, let's go backwards real quick because I think one of the big missing pieces of this, before we get into the AI, the discovery, all that stuff, which is great, great stuff, is what's the strategy? How do you guys determine where to start? Like, why are we Doing data studies. Why are we doing this kind of outreach? Like, when you're thinking about link building, where are you starting that kind of prioritization of who we're going to be connecting with as it pertains to content influencers?
- [10:56]
Alex Goffstein
So I think even we probably need to step back and say, what is it that we're going to reach out about? Right. So if we need to ask ourselves in any cold outreach, what's in it for them? We know what's in it for us. Right. If I'm in sales and I'm reaching out, I want to sell you something, but what's in it for them? Right. I need to make that so, yeah, we talk about content, I need to come up with some, some really interesting angle. And if we talk about digital pr, is it going to be a. Data studies are going to be something that is really proprietary to our company, that we have some really, really cool information that we're able to derive from somewhere, somehow, that we could reach out and actually ask a question. What's in it for them? Well, they're going to get some really cool stuff. They're going to, they're going to share that with their audience. And that's somewhat new. And their audience will like it, they will appreciate it. And like, think about journalists. Journalists are tasked with writing a ton of content on a daily basis. Where do they get this information? They have to get it somewhere. Right. And that's why Haro was, was around, and that's why it was so popular, because it was actually the journalists themselves would ask for the information. They would ask those questions for the help of the people that have the knowledge. And then how do we decide who we reach out to? And that's really simple. You know, if we talk about like just a straight up link building, again, we go to Google and we search for Google. In Google, we search for keywords that really describe our type of content. And then, then Google will serve sites and content that has relevance to it. Not necessarily. That's a sort of the art of keyword research in itself. But not necessarily. Like, if I have a data study on outreach, I could also say, you know, my keywords could be around just like outreach data study, but it could also talk about deliverability. Right. So that's sort of like a shoulder niche or just like shoulder keywords, like things that are related. I could really go the absolute opposite, like, you know, find people who are challenging the whole concept of cold outreach. Cold outreach sucks. Could be one of my keywords. Right, right. Or like what's called outreach. Why do people go to court outreach? Well, because they don't want to cold call because it's harder. Right. So maybe now I can start coming up with ideas around cold calling. Can I reach out to those people, talk about cold calling and pitch them ideas on cold outreach? Absolutely. I think that's very relevant. Right. And now I'm, now I have a whole pool of sites that are related to my topic. I can now pitch them. Now it's all about writing the right pitch with still keeping in mind what's in it for them.
- [13:30]
Ben Shab
Time for a one minute break to hear from our sponsor, Pre Visible. So you're looking for SEO help and you got a couple of options. You could start replying to spam from agencies that claim they can get you to rank number one on Google. You can pay an hourly rate for a consultant who will inevitably nickel and dime you with hourly charges. Or you can work with a cookie cutter agency to quickly launch a strategy less project with low success rate. None of those sound very good now do they? Well, that's where Pre Visible's integrated consulting model comes in. Pre Visible draws From a collective 40 years of SEO and digital marketing experience to unlock your organic growth opportunities. They build custom solutions that combine strategy, technical expertise, content and reporting to effectively operationalize SEO for your business. Pre Visible's four stage approach ensures that your SEO programs thrive by starting off with a strategy first approach. Then they support you in your efforts to create quality content, help you identify technical issues, and most importantly, they'll work with your cross functional teams to integrate your SEO strategies to make sure that your SEO budget actually drives results, not just your agency's bottom line. So join brands like Yelp, eBay, Canva, Atlassian Square, all who rely on the SEO consultants at Pre Visible. For more information, go to Pre Visible IO. That's Pre Visible P R E V I S I b l e.IO.
- [14:58]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah, one of the things that stands out that you said earlier in our episode is that in order to do all this work, you have to have really good automation, right? Like this just doesn't happen in a very manual way anymore. So in this example, right, about cold outreach, you're probably using automation to find those, those potential places to outreach those websites, those pieces of content. You're probably using some sort of automation to help do do the work of connecting with those folks. And as you think about like that journey to developing a digital PR link building strategy and implementing it, where do those automation checkpoints really start to slot in? Is it right from the beginning when you're talking about the strategy or is it even happening like before that or after that moment when you're working with a client or a new project?
- [15:45]
Alex Goffstein
Yeah, I think so. The I would, if I was to have zero automation, everything was manual, right? I would look at my workflow and I would identify how much time I would break up the process, right. So I have ideation, keyword research, prospecting, contact discovery, personalization, outreach and then relationship building. I would try to look and identify how much time do we spend in each one of those steps of the process. Usually ideation you get not necessarily automation tools, but you get, call them assistants, copilots. Now you have AI, they're going to help you to do that. Can we call that automation? I think that's more like AI agents. That's more like using technology to assist me. Not necessarily want to speed that process up. I don't mind investing a good bit of time there, getting a couple people involved and really thinking it through and getting something really, really, really creative. Now what's next is the prospecting. Now that could take a long time. So yes, prospecting is definitely something that falls into the automation category. How can I speed that process up? Now? What does a manual process look like? Well, I'll go to Google, I'll do a search. I'll maybe have a plugin in my Chrome browser that's going to take down all the URLs. I'll take them, I'll put them into a spreadsheet. Now I want to probably get, if I use ahrefs or Semrush or Moz or some other tool, I want to get some of those metrics. So let's, let's take Ahrefs as an example. I'm trying to pull Dr. Right. I don't want to reach out to anybody who's Dr. Lower than X, whatever that X is for you. Let's say 40, right? I need to probably even write scripts inside my Google sheet or Excel with APIs to boot that data in. Or I have to do that manually, you know, shoot me. It takes way too much time. So you know, a system like pitchbox or there are others where can automate that process. I can drop in Pitchbox for example, obviously most familiar with our tool, I can drop a couple keywords in there in a matter of seconds. I could have hundreds, if not thousands of sites already in my queue. And also pull in data from Ahrefs and tell me, here's, you know, sites that are Dr. 40 in fact, they won't even bring them in because I can when I'm setting up my campaign, I can say make sure that whatever sites you find, I don't want to see anything below or over X. And that's just, that's going to help me a ton of time. Also the next step, which is extremely time consuming is contact discovery. Okay, I found the website, I want to reach out to somebody at pitchbox. Where do I go? Like how do I find that email address? Right now I have to use some kind of tools. There's a number of tools on the market that can help you scale that process. So you have to use them. It is also part of pitchbox. When you run a campaign at pitchbox, it's find sites, gets to the Ahrefs metrics or Moz whatever, semrush, whatever it is that you want, filters them out and then goes and finds contacts for you. So in a matter of another a minute or two now you have a thousand sides all with contacts and the contacts already you have the email verification in place. Now you know you're going to be sending people email and they're not going to be bouncing. They're going to get into the right inbox. Right, right. So that part in its own like a lot of people that we have conversations with or Pitchbox been around for 12 years and I've had a number of conversations with agencies and in house folks that do this process manually. And you know, I was asked why, right. And they well, we've never really taken the time to see the automation. I don't think you have another choice today. Yeah, like with everything that's going on, you have to have something in place to help you scale that process. And then the next step is the outreach. Can you imagine sending a thousand emails one by one and then recording it somewhere in your CRM that you need to follow up with them in a couple days because they didn't respond. And guess what, whoever's listening and never done out cold outreach, you're not going to get a response every single time. Right. Majority of responses are going to come in on follow up emails. And so if you're not following up, you're not in the cold outreach game. You might as well don't even start. Right. So that must be automated. And then I would probably say that the outreach part is probably the most consuming, time consuming part of the entire life cycle without having follow ups and sometimes second follow up and third and you know I keep making a comparison with link building and sales because the process is very similar, right? Yeah, yeah. With sales, I think they say like the minimum amount of touches through email is 7. So you know, if you have a thousand people on your list, you're talking about 70,000 emails, you know, 7,000 emails, sorry. And then you multiply that by multiple people within the organization. So that multiplies it. It's just not possible to do it by, by hand.
- [20:33]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah. Automation is key here and I want to close out this episode and leave our listeners with some data on the automation. You were just kind of segueing that, right? Like if you have a thousand people, seven emails, it's 7,000 emails. 7,000 emails turns into set amount of responses and set of amount of responses turns into a set amount of links. Like, can you give our listeners a little bit of data? Because tomorrow we're gonna jump into the topic of email deliverability. Right. And I think it's a great segue to understand, like how do you guys look at the data? How do you look at what success looks like in one of these link building campaigns and then we can kind of segue into what that looks like from an email deliverability standpoint tomorrow.
- [21:16]
Alex Goffstein
Yeah, absolutely. So I kind of, I see durability success slightly different way than most. So there's a concept of like how many, if we calculate numbers, we say, well, how many emails that I've sent? I've sent 100 emails, right? But in Pitchbox we look at how many sites have I reached out to, right? How many prospects? Because if I get a, if I have a website and there's three people that I have from this website, the first one might not respond, second one might not respond, but the third one will. And we have, the way we do this in Biji, we don't blast all three at the same time. We have a confidence going. We say, let's reach out to this first person, they don't respond, let's send them a follow up, maybe another follow up. They don't respond. Okay, well let's go to the next contact in line. Most people will say, well, I've just sent nine emails to this site and therefore they're going to calculate their response rate based on that. I don't think it's right, especially because of automation. Now if I was to do this manually, yes, I've sent nine emails, I had to go to the Gmail and say compose. And I did it nine times. But when you do, when you utilize automation, when you reach out to the site, you technically click the button once and you say, I want to reach out to the site and automation is going to, behind the scenes, send nine emails. Do I care? No, because I've put in the work once. So if I get a response, then I'm going to measure that response against the number of sites that I've reached out to.
- [22:38]
Jordan Cooney
Yeah.
- [22:39]
Alex Goffstein
So having that math in place, I want to say that your response rate, like when you have a solid cold outreach campaign in link building and you're basically saying, I reached out to a hundred sites, doesn't matter how many emails I've sent on one site, I had one contact, another had five. It doesn't matter. I wasn't doing the work, you know, the automation was handling for me. I've got 20 sites that responded to me. Now I have cold outreach, 20% response rate, and I can go from there. Right. Because I don't really care again, what happens behind the scenes. Right. I just click the button and now I'm getting responses. So I look at a successful outreach campaign and it's really going to depend on the, on the, on the niche that you're in. Obviously, you know, if you're, it's going to be very different if you're in beauty or travel or technology or crypto, you know, or even casino. Nothing wrong with that sector as well. Their response rates are going to be a lot lower. But on the average, I want to say, like, if you're running a 20% response rate, you're running a pretty successful campaign and that's really what you should be targeting. Awesome.
- [23:40]
Jordan Cooney
And that's a great place for us to wrap up this episode of the Voices of Search podcast. Thank you to Alex Gobstein from Pitchbox for joining us in part two of this interview, which we'll publish tomorrow, Alex and I are going to discuss email deliverability. If you can't wait until our next episode and would like to learn more about Alex, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or visit his company website, pitchbox. Com.
- [24:03]
Ben Shab
Okay. Thanks to Jordan Cooney, the founder of Pre Visible. If you'd like to get in touch with Jordan, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can contact him on Twitter. His handle is J.T. cooney. That's J T K O E N E. Or you can visit his company's website, which is Pre Visible. IO that's P R E V I S I B L E I O. And a special thanks to Ahrefs for sponsoring this podcast, monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools. But that's not the case anymore, thanks to Ahrefs, because they just launched their Ahrefs Webmaster Tools product, which monitors your SEO health, helps you keep track of your backlinks, and gives you the insight into what keywords are performing for free. So check out Ahrefs webmaster tools@ahrefs.comAWT that's Ahrefs a h r e f s.comAWT just one more link in our show Notes I'd like to tell you about if you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to voicesofsearch.com, where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which we'll answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is voicesofsearch on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is benjschab B E N J S H A B and if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day during the work week, so hit that subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data.