Using HARO To Boost Page Rank
Photograph of man exploring, with search bubble overlay asking about HARO and Page Rank. Photo by Thom Milkovic on Unsplash
As a small business it’s easy to ignore your page rank and SEO, even when you provide those tertiary services. Working on yourself can be a harder task that working on a client. You can be too close to the situation, and not be looking at things objectively. That’s where I found myself with Troubador. I only have so much time each day, so rather than spend time working on our SEO I was using my time to work on client needs along with other portfolio pursuits that are more creative in nature than search engine optimization. My thought process was “we get most of our work through word of mouth, so why bother trying to rank high on the search pages?”, but when Dom and I started Troubador, we didn’t really know what kind of work we wanted to do. We had not whittled down our services at the time into a sustainable niche. For businesses like ours I now understand that SEO can drive the whole business. It unlocks so many doors for your business. Through SEO we can pitch work on websites, illustration, copywriting, etc to the kinds of clients that we want to work with. So I’ve renewed focus on optimizing our SEO, and HARO is one of the tools that I’m using to boost our page rank.
Cision & HARO logo.
What is HARO?
HARO, or Help A Reporter Out, is a service that many businesses use to get backlinks to their website. You trade your expertise and a quote for backlinks from high page rank websites which in turn help your website build it’s authority, trust, and ultimately your business’s page rank.
Photograph of phone display google search of analytics. Photo by Edho Pratama on Unsplash
Results
I’m going to update this blog each time we have success using HARO, so that people can understand the work that goes into using a service like HARO. We started using HARO in early February of 2021, and have replied five times to different requests.
On March 23rd, we got our first success when Upcity used a quote of ours about the best practices of displaying your online reviews on your website. Upcity as a business aims to connect businesses with B2B service providers that they can trust, which is a niche I would definitely like my business to be in. As you can see below we have a screenshot of Upcity’s domain analysis as provided by Moz. Upcity will be our highest authority domain link. As of today Troubador’s domain authority is 5 as opposed to Upcity’s 51, but our rank has not yet accounted for the new link from Upcity. Our contribution to Upcity was a two paragraphs that we wrote on February 3rd, and now we have a success story.
On June 7th, we got our second success when Review Robin used a quote of ours about our best method of boosting audience engagement on social media. We had sent our quote to them on April 16th, so it took nearly two months for the blog post that they were working on to come out. Review Robin appears to be a new site so as of now our links back to them are more valuable than theirs, but they seem to have a much larger budget that we do so hopefully they grow fast and can boost us.
Screenshot of Upcity’s domain analysis according to Moz.
Conclusion
We have had success now with 40% of our replies in our small sample size data set, which is much higher than we’ve seen other services boast. We have heard that you should feel very good if 10% of replies end up with a backlink to your site, so don’t feel bad if you don’t have success right away and also remember that it took a month and a half for our response to become a backlink. We have a new high authority domain linking to our website, and our page rank will rise because of this.