Asking the wrong question: how should I do outreach?

It would be nice to read about how you used siteguru to improve SEO for siteguru to rank among big players.

As a disclaimer, I'm much more negative about cold emails than many people, so feel free to counterbalance my opinion with that of someone who has gotten better results from it ;). But since it's relevant to your stuff, and since I agree with your overall goal, allow me to be a bit more specific about where I've seen it work well vs. act as a trap.

It's okay as a brute force temporary tactic to get the wheel spinning on your initial word of mouth audience, but that only works if you've already got a product with fairly good retention/engagement/referral. (If you don't already have a strong funnel, then those hard-won new leads just leak out.) It can also be effective to get from, say, 5 to 50 users. But in that case, you don't really need to worry about spending lots of time optimizing it -- you just brute force it and then discard it once you've outgrown it (which happens fairly quickly).

Emailing strangers is also okay if you can find a clever way to make the approaches less cold... Extended network, shared interest, joint community, etc. Many influential strangers can be reached surprisingly warmly, once you get strategic about it, and the conversion rate will jump 10-100x as a result.

My problem with cold outreach, and where I see lots of IH folks getting stuck on it, is when it's used as an excuse to avoid a clearly better -- but more awkward or difficult -- path.

For example, I was once talking to a founder in London who was trying to reach consultant types from Accenture etc. He'd been wasting his time for months sending a bunch of emails to strangers (which were being immediately trashed). But we were in a pub in London, where you can't swing a cat without hitting a consultant, so I just stood on a chair and shouted, "Hey, is anyone here a consultant?" About twenty hands went up, so I walked over to the nearest, friendliest-looking one and started asking questions. The dude had literally been in the same room as twenty of his customers but found it emotionally easier to fail for months sending a bunch of cold emails than to say hello to them.

Another issue is that you probably already know a few SEO types. If none of them are already passionately using your product every day, then it makes me wonder whether things will go differently with a stranger. A lot of folks try to bandage over a flawed product with increased marketing, but that's just pouring water into a leaky bucket, as they say. And it burns bridges with strangers, whereas you can make your product mistakes/iterations quickly and harmlessly with folks you already know.

Of course, it may be possible that the folks you already know are using it every day and love it, in which case 1) the funnel is tight and 2) your existing social network is maxed out, so you need to get some fresh blood in there, absolutely. And influencer outreach (if you can find a way to make it slightly less cold) makes a ton of sense, at least until you add the next couple zero's to your user numbers.

I plan on doing something similar, let me know how the outreach to SEO experts goes :)

A lot of SEOs are on Twitter. Why not DM them personally?