Different tools to identify link opportunities and their effectiveness
Identifying link opportunities and doing outreach is one of the most critical parts in SEO campaigns. As SEO is a fast-changing industry, there is the need to adapt your outreach strategies in order to make sure you get the best value out of your link building efforts.
Before you can start your outreach, it is important that you have the correct set of tools and techniques to identify relevant blogs, magazines and journalists. There is a huge range of different tools, databases and media outlets out there – but how effective and useful are they?
GroupHigh
GroupHigh is one of the most important and comprehensive blogger outreach platforms on the internet. It helps you find tens of thousands of different blogs relevant to your campaigns. You can also filter your search results according to many different variables.
This is quite useful when working on international campaigns that require you to identify link opportunities on foreign websites. It also allows you to find websites in many different locations and languages.
If you need websites that fulfil certain SEO criteria, GroupHigh gives you the option to select MozRank and Domain Authority. Obviously these are not the only metrics you should look at when assessing a website’s quality, though it is quite useful if you need to get rid of some low-quality sites that are not of interest.
You can then easily export all the data into an Excel spreadsheet. The good thing about this is that you can tick boxes to determine which data you want to have in your sheet. By doing this, you will have all relevant data including blog location, contact page, social accounts and statistics.
Followerwonk
Followerwonk is particularly recommended when doing outreach via Twitter. It helps you identify the most influential bloggers in a particular niche and shows you their number of tweets, their followers, who they follow and how long they’ve been on Twitter. All you need to do is simply type in a keyword/term in the search box and in addition you can filter the location, name and URL.
I would recommend however, not to search for more than two terms at a time, as this limits down your search results to a very low number.
Gorkana
I have been using Gorkana as part of quite a few of my client campaigns – not only to find relevant magazines and blogs, but also to find media requests in which journalists look for competition prizes, expert interviews or guest contributions. Gorkana has helped me a lot in identifying high quality niche magazines.
This media outlet is especially useful if you are looking to integrate PR in your SEO campaigns (which everyone working in SEO should be doing), and trying to establish relationships with journalists.
Once you subscribe to the (free) service, you get regular notifications with current media requests from journalists in industries across the board. They include requests related to healthcare, business, finance, travel, education, media, technology, lifestyle and more. It sometimes takes a while to find some requests that could be of use to you, but it is definitely worth a shot.
The good thing is however, that you immediately have the right contact details and requirements at hand, which is not always the case with unsolicited enquiries on other platforms.
MajesticSEO
Majestic SEO is a great tool that not only shows you a website’s metrics, such as Citation Flow and Trust Flow, but it also allows you to look into your competitors’ backlinks - and that can be of huge value when looking for new link prospects.
Simply type in your competitors’ URL in the search field and Majestic will show you all backlinks, including the flow metrics for both URL and domain. You can then create a report, export it to Excel and sort it via Trust Flow to find the most powerful sites.
This is probably a lesser known tool, but actually does a decent job and is recommended if you quickly need a big list of websites around a certain topic.
You can basically look for as many terms as you want at once; providing you with a huge list of URLs. Sometimes however, I have found that quite a few of the URLs in the list are either of low quality, or are not necessarily related to your search terms.
I have used the Google blogger search a few times, but to me it does not do as good of a job as the other methods that I have mentioned.
The Google blog search service is quite straight forward – and shows you fresh search results. The topicality of the SERPS is definitely an advantage; however a drawback is that it does not give you the option to narrow your search down further.
If you are looking for blogs in a certain language, you need to do so via the respective Google domain.
Is that it?
By no means am I saying you should only stick to these tools, there are obviously many more ways to identify link prospects. And these can be found both online as well as offline.
