Outreach campaigns involve several stages, so it’s important to have the right army of tools at your fingertips. Having the right tools can enhance the success of each stage of the campaign, as well as the whole project. However, you need the best foundation possible with a great outreach strategy. Honchō have put together the 14 elements every successful outreach campaign needs. From this, you can add the tools discussed below where appropriate.
There is a whole range of tools out there that can assist with your link building efforts, and more importantly, help you become more time efficient. Here are three of the best link building tools we use and what we use them for.
It’s one you may not have heard of but is perfect for prospecting and campaign management. PitchBox is an influencer outreach and content marketing platform, and a tool that we cannot go a day without. It helps our outreach process from start to finish. Pitchbox allows us to find potential prospects, personalise contact information, add email templates, and send and manage all our email communications.
There are lots of reporting options that allow you to show your clients how your outreach campaigns are coming along. You can determine how many emails you have sent, as well as how many prospects are ‘almost there’ at linking to your site.
One thing we really like about this tool is that we can quality check the prospects without taking them out of the tool and running them through the likes of Majestic or Moz. Just add your API for these tools and it pulls in all the data you need.
If you filter for let’s say, minimum 30 domain Trust Flow, pages from 30 Trust Flow onwards will come up and display nicely all within the tool. Overall, this tool is a huge time saver.
Great for checking the quality of links and monitoring deep links, Majestic allows you to check the Citation Flow and Trust Flow of a website. It is great for judging the quality of the domain you are looking to contact or to check the domain that has linked. However, this information is available to you straight away when you are prospecting in Pitchbox.
Link building with a tiered approach strategy is one of the most effective methods to building strong, effective links and Majestic is perfect for monitoring the backlinks of your backlinks.
We also use Majestic to see what type of links the competitors have and what could be influencing their rankings. If one of your competitors is doing something different and it’s working, maybe it’s time to do something similar. It’s also a good indication to find out what content works and attracts natural links.
Good for spotting those broken link opportunities and claiming citations, Ahrefs is the tool you need for link reclamation. It’s a great quick win to try and fix links that were present, but have either been deleted or the page no longer exists. The webmaster is already familiar with your brand, so you all you need to do is convince them to add the link back.
Ahrefs is also great for claiming citation projects to turn those unlinked mentions into branded links. Normally, this would be a long-winded manual approach going through all the site that have mentioned you without knowing if they have linked or not. It helps with this process by allowing you to export only the sites with unlinked citations.
—
Each of these three tools has helped immensely with many time consuming, yet rewarding SEO projects. Why not give them a try and see how they can help with your outreach campaigns this year?
If this blog post has helped with your outreach success or there are other tools that you cannot work without, let us know in the comments below or tweet @Honcho_Search.