Outreach is whatever the team has time for. Generic guest-post pitches blasted to anyone with a domain. Hit rate stays single-digit.
Outreach is templated. The agency pitches the same generic story to 500 sites. Placements happen on low-relevance domains nobody reads.
Pitches are story-led, journalist-aware, and tied to real data or expert commentary. Hit rate is dramatically higher; placements are in publications your buyers actually open.
Targets are picked from a DR-sorted spreadsheet. Relevance to your category is an afterthought.
Targets are high-DR domains regardless of audience overlap. Reports look great; the placements move nothing because the readers aren’t your buyers.
Targets are picked by reader fit first, DR second. Trade press, category podcasts, analyst coverage, AI-corpus sources, places that build real topical authority.
Reports show DR change and link counts. Pipeline contribution from referral traffic is invisible.
Reports show "links built per month". The links sit on dashboards but never show up in CRM as referrers, branded searches, or AI citations.
Reports show branded mention growth, pipeline from referral traffic, AI-citation share of voice change, and topical authority lift, board-ready, not vanity.
Paid links and PBNs are quietly used to hit monthly quotas. One Google update wipes the gains.
Paid placements are mixed in (sometimes labelled as "sponsored", sometimes not). Long-term risk lives in the backlink profile.
100% editorial. Earned placements only. Slower upfront, dramatically more durable across Google updates and AI-engine retrieval shifts.