Reach For Links

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We started our two-person company during the COVID-19 pandemic, but my co-owner and I both have day jobs so we do this as a side business. Our website is called Telescope Guide and is an informational and educational resource for people who are interested to get started with astronomy. We provide guidance through introductory articles and telescope reviews.

What challenge were you trying to address with Reach For Links?

We are hoping to grow the website’s influence, reach, and audience. The specific challenge with increasing our website’s traffic is to acquire very high-quality backlinks from other websites to our own. Google will typically interpret a backlink as a vote of confidence in the target website — the more quality backlinks we get, the more Google and other search engines will prioritize our webpages when people search for related topics. 

We’re now in the promotional phase so we want to start reaching out to other websites and give them the opportunity to link to our own. Reach For Links specializes in link building or backlink creation and is helping us in this process.

What was the scope of their involvement?

The first step in the process was for Rakibul (CEO) to understand my website, our goals, and our target audience. He then offered his advice on our backlink strategy and I gave him my feedback on his suggestions. We went back and forth a little bit until we decided on the resource page strategy, and then he took the lead from that point forward.

Once we were under contract, the first thing Reach For Links did is conduct prospecting, where they looked at all the websites and filtered them to decide which ones to reach out to. Their firm was able to identify and obtain the contact information of astronomy websites that had resource pages.

The next major step is the actual outreach, which the team now does by emailing the website owners. Rakibul and I coordinate on the template and he sends out the emails through a software that would ensure the quality of the delivery and protect the domain reputation of my site. We keep off the spam list by honoring unsubscribe requests and complying with CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing act of 2003) requirements.

Ultimately, the outreach emails are asking website owners to take a look at my website and let me know if it is good enough for them to feature. They’ve done just that, so we’ve had a successful campaign thus far.

What is the team composition?

I work directly with Rakibul, who has guided me through the process and has educated me on how to work with a links-specializing company like theirs.

How did you come to work with Reach For Links?

I originally found Rakibul on UpWork. We still work through that platform.

How much have you invested with them?

Our February contract cost $100 and our March contract costs $120, so we’ve spent $220 so far. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in early February 2021.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

From the first month and a half of working with Reach For Links, they’ve conducted outreach to approximately 1,000 websites and have managed to acquire between 30–40 backlinks. We have an overall success rate is about 3%–4%, which is actually pretty good, and the links that we’ve gotten were of a much higher quality than what I could get with other, more typical SEO firms. They’ve done a great job.

How did Reach For Links perform from a project management standpoint?

Rakibul, in particular, is extremely responsive, communicative, and thorough. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

What I like about Reach For Links is that they’re able to do pure, white hat SEO link outreach, which means they do things in full accordance with Google’s guidelines for best practices. A lot of SEO companies will offer to pay for backlinks or run a private blog network (PBN). These are not good ways to get high-quality backlinks and are considered very dangerous for the long-term growth of any company. We, however, are not purchasing backlinks nor promising anything in return for them, and this is important for us to not have our website penalized by Google. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

Overall, I wouldn’t give anything specific for Reach For Links to improve on. I might be a bit more particular about a few things if I was paying thousands of dollars, but at the price point I’m at, the quality of their service is extremely high.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Something I learned in this process is how important it is for your website to have really high-quality content because no one is going to link to your site if your site isn’t high quality. Had I known this in advance, I would’ve spent a little bit more time building skyscraper articles that they can use to promote the site. For anyone considering to work with Reach For Links, make sure that your website is good enough to work with.