HARO SEO Strategy - The Free PR Tool That Grew My Site to 60,000+ Pageviews

SEOEmail Marketing

Apr 24

This is my weekly newsletter, Market Smarter, Not Harder💡posted to my blog. If you’d like to join the conversation and have it delivered straight to your inbox, click here.

HARO is back!

When I started my home and garden blog, I wasn’t running ads, I didn’t have a huge social media following, and yet my traffic was growing. Fast.

In just 18 months, I hit over 60,000 pageviews, and one of the biggest drivers of that growth was something many business owners don’t even know exists:

HARO —

What is HARO?
HARO stands for Help A Reporter Out. It’s essentially a matchmaking service between journalists and sources. 💞

Every day, reporters send out requests looking for quotes, insights, and expert opinions. I’d scan the list, find relevant topics, and reply with short, clear, and helpful responses.

All I did was show up and share my expertise. When a journalist used my quote, I got two amazing things in return:

A backlink to my website (SEO gold—more on that in a second)
A media feature I could proudly display on my website. (a.k.a. the homepage “glory bar”😉)

Why Do Backlinks Matter for SEO?

A backlink is when another website links to your site. Google sees it as a signal that your site is credible and trustworthy. The more quality backlinks you have, the higher your site can rank in search results.

So when a huge site like Realtor.com , Apartment Therapy, or Forbes links to your website, that sends a powerful signal to the search engine gods that you are a site with content worth noticing. They will boost your rankings in kind.

Smaller sites will also boost your website's authority ranking and are less competitive!

So while I was out there answering a few HARO queries a week, my website was quietly climbing the SEO ladder and getting featured in some top-tier publications.

It’s free and it really does work, so don't sleep on this!

HARO is the easiest low-hanging fruit for SEO and social-proof you can get. 🍇🍉🍍

Seriously.

Bring your expertise to the table by providing a thoughtful, concise response, and you have the opportunity to be featured in media outlets that might otherwise extremely difficult to penetrate.

The reason I bring it up now is because HARO was purchased a while back and effectively shuttered for the better part of a year. As of this week, a new owner has brought it back!

Check it out here.

Bonus Tip: A Small Email Tweak with Big Results

Before I share the quick win, if you don't have an email list, start one. (I swear I will only put one foot on my newsletter soapbox today, but here it is: 📦🦶🏻)

Proof is in the data:

Here's a chart just released by NP Digital showing the conversion rates for different marketing mediums:

Graph showing the conversion rates of email, ads, seo, and social media — *Lead quality: conversion rates of email vs. social vs. SEO vs. paid ads. -* *NP Digital*

Email is the winner by 2x!

SO....now you either have a newsletter or are about to start one, right? Great!💪🏻

OK, on to the email quick win:

I was listening to email expert Jay Schwedelson on Amy Porterfield's podcast and he said:

“Your logo or header in your email gets around 20% of your clicks. So don’t link it to your homepage—link it directly to your offer or services.”

Jay went on to say that 1 in 5 clicks is going to the 'wrong page' (because it's a general page) and you can significantly change the consumption of your offers through that one simple link change.

I'm constantly surprised by how many people have a logo or header that's unlinked - talk about a missed opportunity.

BUT, I thought I should just link my header to my homepage.

Needless to say, I relinked as soon as I heard him say it.

✅ If that's you too, change that link. Today.