Navneet Kaushal — July 2, 2018 — July 2, 2018
When I first started doing SEO it seemed like a piece of cake to me. In 2018, boy, how wrong I was. This job can drive you crazy, sometimes. Literally.
You have to do stuff like:
- Analyzing a ton of competitors links
- Finding the right keywords for the content
- Finding the right influencers for the campaign
- Finding their contact information
- Outreaching all of them in an organic way
- Tracking any little link trend
Folks who don’t know how it works could think it’s not stressful. But I used to drink more coffee than a whole Starbucks client base during my first campaigns. And, for some unknown reasons, my right eye used to do a really weird nervous twitching thing.
So, if you don’t want to run for a Guinness world record as the most stressed SEO pro of the world, check out these link building tools and use them to run your campaigns. They’ll make your life much easier (and less caffeinated!).
- Ahrefs This is probably the most popular tool among SEO professionals, because it takes many useful features and puts them all in one place.This platform gives you pretty accurate metrics about:
- The organic traffic keywords and top site pages that drive more visits to your competitor’s website
- Thousands of keyword suggestions, keyword trends and a keyword difficulty score, which will make it easier to decide what keyword you’re going to target.
- Backlinks. With advanced reports and filters.
- Most shared content around the web for specific keywords
- Rank trends. You’ll could not only see trends in clear and handy charts, but also set up alerts for specific changes in your rankings.
- Buzzsumo Struggle to find the people to contact for your guest posts or links to your site? This tool reveals the humans behind the domains you’ve put your eye on.Most marketers prefer using this platform to find the right influencers and analyze what content is performing better on the net, in order to prioritize outreach.
It also allows you to build and manage lists of Twitter influencers by industry. And this makes it a hell of a lot faster to connect with the valuable publications you’ve found.
- Buzzstream Want to track and manage all the steps of your elaborated outreach campaigns from one single place?Well, Buzzstream is right up your alley.I have to say that the contact finder feature may not the best.
But you can:
- import from other sources the contacts you don’t find here
- create different contact lists for different campaigns or different purposes
- run bulk emails
- avoid being too spammy, adding personalization to your pitches
- monitoring responses
- Hunter.io If you don’t know how to find the email of an influencer, this tool will be gold for you.It’s much better than Buzzstream in finding emails on a site, and much easier to use.Thanks to the Chrome extension, you don’t have to switch tabs or tools.Just activate the plugin on the prospect’s site and let it do the magic. You’ll have your much-desired email address in just a few moments.
- Mailshake While Buzzstream offers you more features to manage your outreach campaigns, it would seem a bit complicated for some people. Not to mention that it could be a bit expensive for not established marketers.In which case you should opt for Mailshake. You must accept less functionality, but you’ll also have a simpler interface and a cheaper price plan.This makes Buzzstream better for large campaigns, while Mailshake for smaller ones.
- Facebook Most of the businesses have a Facebook page.If you check the about section of the page, you’ll often be able to find the email you were looking for. Even if it’s not present on their site and the plugins can’t pull it out.
- GuestPostTracker This site has the largest list of sites that accept guest posts.The list is constantly updated and integrated with the contact information of the site owners.Your whole campaign can’t be based on this site alone, but it’s obviously a great time-saving tool.
- Linkedin This social media giant is a huge business database that can make your outreach much smoother.You can find a company info and message the directly, without the need of their email.But, if you prefer to manage all of your outreach in one platform, you can just pull out the contact info using Hunter.io, as you would do on the company’s website.
- Google Sheets
Some tools have developed specific features and reports to manage lists of influencers, links, domains, keywords and all the other stuff without leaving their platform.Nevertheless, Google Sheets are an awesomely useful tool for any marketer. You can easily export the data in these documents from any of the best SEO services, including all the above-mentioned ones. So, sharing all this data with your colleagues in an organized way will be a piece of cake.
Add to this a simple and good-looking interface and you’ll have a hell of a rockstar link building tool.
Conclusion
Some of the link building tools mentioned here are very similar to others.
For example, SEMRush, NinjaOutReach, Pitchbox, CognitiveSEO, Kerboo, Majestic, SpyFu and others are very solid alternatives to the services I’ve talked about.
If you’re on a tight budget, check them all out to compare the pricing plans and the features, to make sure you pay only for the things you need the most right now.If you’re an advanced marketer, on the other hand, you could try several tools at the same time, especially for finding, analyzing and tracking links.
Having large amounts of data from different sources will make your campaigns more accurate. But such a sophistication is required only for large, complex and expensive campaigns. Definitely not the cup of tea of the average newbie.
If you have other favorite link building tools, feel free to tell us about them in the comments.
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