Link building can be an arduous pursuit. Sorting through site after site to find a handful that could potentially offer a valuable backlink, performing outreach to blog authors and influencers, doing backlink research, and thinking up ever more creative methods to earn links takes time and effort. At a certain point, it can all start to feel a bit overwhelming.
Lucky for you, plenty of resources exist to help alleviate much of the stress and tediousness of deploying an effective link building campaign. Dozens of tools, softwares, and online resources are at your disposal, and we’ve gathered some of the most useful ones that will give your link building efforts the jump-start they need.
1. Link Prospecting Tools
These tools help you to identify and compile lists of the best link building opportunities for your needs. No matter what type of link building you’re engaging in, be it guest posting, broken link building, brand-mention reclamation, or any others, prospecting tools allow you to quickly find relevant blogs, dead linked pages, and other linking prospects.
•Dibz
Dibz is a very powerful tool that delivers detailed and useful analysis of various types of link building prospects. This tool distinguishes itself by being a tool that is purpose-made for prospecting link building opportunities, meaning that while you’ll miss out on some features of other broader-use tools, Dibz comes equipped with more robust features dedicated solely to helping you find the best possible sites, blogs, and influencers for link building in your vertical.
Like other tools, Dibz offers solutions for identifying and compiling influencers in all verticals, as well as insights about those prospects. But where it really stands out is in its balance between simplicity and robustness. While easy to use and learn, Dibz sports the ability to compile influencer contact information, create customized filtered lists based on your needs, and provides detailed information on influencers including domain rating, referring domains, and a very impressive SPAM signal evaluation.
•BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a broader-use tool that provides analysis primarily on what kind of content is being shared on social media platforms, reports on keyword activity, competitor analysis, and most importantly for link prospecting, gives up-to-date and valuable information on industry influencers.
While not as specifically designed for link prospecting as Dibz, BuzzSumo is still a useful tool for this purpose. It allows you to follow influencers directly through the tool itself, along with an analysis of their content generation and sharing habits. All of this makes it simple and efficient to keep track of which key players you should be prioritizing for your outreach efforts at any given time.
2. Outreach Management
Once you have a list of prospective link building opportunities, your next task is to reach out to the various sites, blogs, and influencers you’ve identified. Depending on how many prospects you’ve compiled, that could be quite the monumental task.
So the big question now is how you manage all of the outreach you’ll be doing.
•BuzzStream
Another tool tailor-made for one purpose, it’s not hard to see why BuzzStream is more-or-less the industry standard for outreach management. This tool offers features that allow you to perform effective influencer research, but more importantly it allows you to manage email conversations with influencers outreached to, store influencers in a central database, and generate custom reports on the effectiveness of your outreach campaigns.
BuzzStream makes email outreach easy by offering the ability to build email templates and customer filters based on a number of variables including domain, DA, author, referring domains, even number of social media followers. The customization really is just staggering.
Once you’ve reached out to influencers, BuzzStream stores and organizes email conversations in a user-friendly and customizable central database, accessible by anyone on your team. All of this stored data can then be used to run granular reports on the performance of your outreach — and when I say granular, I mean granular: performance can be measured against variables such as subject line, team member, influencer, site type, and on and on. And all of that is before customized reporting.
•NinjaOutreach
NinjaOutreach is a tool that wears many hats: Lead Generator, CRM, and Blogger Outreach tool, to name a few. Although it’s less specialized than BuzzStream, it does have bragging rights as a particularly powerful outreach automation tool.
Once an email template is customized, it can be scheduled to automatically send, even offering the option to automate up to 2 follow-up emails. NinjaOutreach rounds out its suite of blogger outreach features with customizable auto-fill contact forms, an in-app inbox that syncs with your regular email client, statistics reporting, and notifications of interaction from your leads.
3. Backlink Analysis
Understanding your backlink profile — as well as your competitors’ — is the beginning of any link building campaign. Knowing where your competitors are succeeding and where the holes in your own backlink profile are is crucial to understanding what kinds of links you should be trying to earn and how.
•Ahrefs
When talking about the best tools for backlink analysis, SEOs across the industry agree that Ahrefs is king of this space, and for good reason. It’s a powerhouse of a tool for a multitude of purposes, and you’d be hard pressed to find a better application for analyzing backlink profiles.
To this end, Ahrefs offers a suite of features that allow you to take a very granular look at a lot of different competitor metrics, such as search ranking and organic traffic for specific keywords. You can also see where you fall behind the competition by finding the pages that contribute the most to their success with the very useful “content gap” feature. Similarly, the “link intersect” feature allows you to identify domains and pages that link to your competitors’ sites but not yours.
As for your own profile, Ahrefs is the quickest and most user-friendly way to discover nearly any metric about your own site and pages you could want, like number of backlinks, referring domains, and organic keywords, along with overviews of organic and paid search as well as a holistic analysis of a page’s content.
There are a lot of facets to keep track of in a well-designed link building campaign. Link prospecting, outreach, and backlink profile analysis can be some of the toughest work in this process. Fortunately, the above tools will save time and effort, and turn link building headaches into powerful insights.
