How To Filter HARO Queries With Gmail (Without Spending a Cent on Premium Subscription)

Last updated on August 25th, 2023.

In a recent post (in German) I introduced you to HARO. HARO stands for Help A Reporter Out and is one of my favorite backlink acquisition methods. On HARO, Journalists and Publishers submit requests seeking experts for stories they’re working on.

If you subscribed to HARO you receive roundups of these requests every day. Some clients of mine felt overwhelmed by the number of emails and queries they receive. Typically, they get three emails per day: the morning, afternoon, and evening edition. All of them contain several dozens of queries from journalists.

My clients were scanning a lot of irrelevant queries to find some they could pitch on.

But don’t fret, if you work with Gmail, there’s a simple solution to walk away from this misery.

You can set up a filter that scans the HARO emails for keywords you pre-defined. All emails that contain one of the keywords get straight into your inbox. All the other HARO emails will be excluded from your inbox and archived.

A huge time saver. Without spending a dime on the premium HARO plan.

Time needed: 4 minutes

How to filter HARO queries with gmail – I will walk you through step by step.

  1. Take a moment to identify your keywords.

    Typically this is your niche. Topics you are confident speaking about and act as subject-matter expert. For myself I identified: SEO, Freelance, German and Switzerland.

  2. Log in to your Gmail inbox. Click on the gear icon Settings.

    settings gear in gmail interface

  3. Then click on See all settings in the upper right corner.

    printscren of gmail

  4. Next up, select the tab on Filters and blocked addresses

  5. At the bottem, select create new filter

    create a new filter on your gmail

  6. Add parameters to the filter



    Filter for Gmail
    I add the following parameters to the filter:
    From: haro@helpareporter.com
    To: your email address
    Subject: leave blank
    Includes the words: leave blank
    Doesn’t have: insert your keywords separated by a comma. In my case SEO, Freelance, German, Switzerland

    Then click on Create filter (not on Search). This is important

  7. As I don’t want to deal with HARO emails that don’t include one of my keywords I mark:

    ✓ Skip the Inbox (Archive it)
    ✓ Mark as readfilter to skip inbox and archieve

  8. Confirm by clicking again on Create filter

That’s it. You’re done. In the future, you will only receive relevant queries to your Gmail inbox and can focus on delivering stellar pitches ⭐.

Hope that helped! If you want to be noticed when I publish new posts, subscribe to my newsletter.

Corina Burri

Corina is a SEO professional from Zürich. Since 2016 she's in SEO and has contributed to publications such as SEOFOMO, Tech SEO Tips, or iPullRank. When not grinding, she enjoys exploring Switzerland.

This Post Has 3 Comments

  1. Andrew Laws July 9, 2023 Reply

    This is great! I’ve been trying all sorts of complex ways to filter the HARO emails, including complex zapier filtering and all sorts of crazy. I can’t believe the answer was in Gmail all along!

    As a nice extra step in the filter that forwards the email to a service I uses that converts emails into items on an RSS feed. That way I just monitor relevant HARO requests in Slack and share them with my colleagues!

  2. Corina Burri July 9, 2023 Reply

    Hi Andrew
    Love the extra step to convert to RSS and prompt to Slack. Thanks for sharing.
    All the best, Corina.

  3. DP September 6, 2023 Reply

    Excellent advice, just what I was looking for.
    Many thanks!

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