Jack Hawtin
Head of Outreach
- 6Years in industry
- 6Years at Absolute
- RemoteBased at
- 6Regulated sectors worked in
He works closely with the SEO team on keyword targets and campaign direction and reviews every prospective site himself rather than going after volume
Jack Hawtin’s experience
What kept him in outreach early on was the team, and a manager who shaped how he approached the work, plus the fact that the job is never predictable
What Jack does here
He works closely with the SEO team on keyword targets and campaign direction and reviews every prospective site himself rather than going after volume
Day to day, Jack oversees outreach placements and the wider team, negotiates directly with publishers, and sets placement budgets based on a client's niche and the metrics they need, working within agreed ranges. He works closely with the SEO team on keyword targets and campaign direction and reviews every prospective site himself rather than going after volume.
A lot of the job is explaining why a link is or isn't worth having: what referring domain metrics actually tell you, why relevance beats authority on its own, and which keywords are worth going after in the first place. Cleaning up after previous agencies comes up a lot. Jack has taken on iGaming clients whose old agency had used low-quality, PBN-style sites because they were easy wins, and rebuilt their profile around fewer, better-matched placements instead.
Where Jack makes the difference
Areas of expertise
- Placement quality control and vetting sites for PBN and low-quality network patterns
- Relevance-based link building for restricted/regulated sectors (iGaming
- adult)
- Publisher relationship management and negotiation
- Outreach budget scoping by client niche and metric requirements
- SEO analytics and competitor research using Ahrefs and SEMrush
Industry specialisms
- iGaming (2–3 years)
- Financial services (6 years)
- Healthcare and pharma (6 years)
- Legal (3 years)
- Insurance (6 years)
- Adult (6 years)
What drives Jack
Backlink profiles deserve to be taken more seriously than they usually are, rather than treated as a number to chase in bulk
Jack's view is that backlink profiles deserve to be taken more seriously than they usually are, rather than treated as a number to chase in bulk. The industry still overvalues Domain Rating and organic traffic at the expense of relevance. A 70 DR site with no connection to a client's niche is worth less than a 20 DR site that sits squarely in it. Buying a high-ranking domain and turning it into a PBN is easier than building an independent, niche-focused site from scratch, but to Jack that's the point: the harder route is the one that actually moves rankings.
Connect with Jack
Jack is Head of Outreach at Absolute Digital Media. If you have a question about placement quality control and vetting sites for PBN and low-quality network patterns, or a brief that needs someone who has done it before, LinkedIn is the quickest way to get hold of Jack.
