Over the last decade, I've tried
dozens of link building tools. Some that weren't very good, some that used to
be great, and many that continue to be essential. Now, you don't need dozens of link building
tools to build backlinks to your site. In fact, you only need a handful of tools to
reach maximum efficiency and effectiveness. So if you don't want to waste your time
or money testing a million and one tools, then keep watching because in this tutorial,
I'll show you the 5 best link building tools, my favorite features in each, and how
they fit into the link building process. Stay tuned. [music] Alright, before we get into the tools, it's important
that we briefly discuss the 3 stages of link building because these are the three areas where tools
are going to help streamline your processes and make your link building efforts
more effective and efficient. And these stages are prospecting,
vetting, and email outreach. So prospecting is the process of finding people
who may be interested in linking to you. And this can be for a variety of reasons
like they've linked to a competing page, they've talked about a relevant topic that
you've created content on, or whatever. Vetting is the process of evaluating whether
prospects are actually people you'd want to get a link from. And beyond manually reviewing pages, you can
use various criteria like the quality of the content, SEO metrics like website authority and organic
traffic, and content relevance to name a few. And email outreach is the method link builders
use to contact prospects to ask for a link. So as we go through the tools, I'll explain where each
tool helps and give you a preview into how it helps. Alright, so let's kick things off with
the first tool and that's Google search. Google is one of my favorite prospecting tools
because you get to search through the world's largest index of web pages. But because the index is so large, you'll need to use
my favorite feature which are search operators. And these will help you narrow in
on specific subsets of pages. For example, if you wanted to build links
from resource pages, you can search for something like inurl:resources.html and
then a topic related to your niche. Then you can visit the pages and see if
there's a potential link opportunity for you. Now, you can go way beyond well-known
tactics like resource page link building by identifying footprints. And a footprint is simply a commonality
among multiple web pages. For example, I know that Muckrack has a ton
of indexed pages like these where they show major publications that journalists
and authors have written for. And the footprint is in the URL structure. As you can see, all URLs have muckrack.com /
the author's name / articles. And the only dynamic variable
here is the author's name. So, assuming we wanted to find journalists
for a digital PR campaign we can start by searching for site:muckrack.com, which will
narrow results down to just pages from Muckrack. Then I'll add inurl:articles, meaning, all
results must have articles in the URL, and then I'll add a topic related to our niche
which will search anywhere in the HTML code. From here, you can build your list of prospects
and pitch your story to people who might cover it. Alright, the next tool is Ahrefs. Now, while Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO toolset
where you can run a competitor analysis, do keyword research, track keyword
rankings, and perform site audits, I want to focus on just one thing that helps
in the link prospecting and vetting stages. And that's backlink analysis, specifically
to your competitors' pages. To see the backlinks to a page, just paste
it into Site Explorer and run the search. Then go to the backlinks report. And right away, you'll see all of the backlinks
that point to your target along with SEO metrics for the linking pages. Now, if you don't have an Ahrefs account, you
can use our free backlink checking tool to see the top 100 backlinks to a target. Now, backlink checking is just
a way to find link prospects. You have to manually filter through these
to find prospects worth contacting because people aren't going to magically link to
you because you have a page on a similar topic. Your chances of scoring a link increases if
you actually have a good reason for contact which brings us to how Ahrefs Site Explorer
can help with vetting prospects without having to actually visit the pages. If we head over to the anchors report, you'll
see all anchor texts used on backlinks that point to this page. And we have some generic ones related
to the topic, which likely came as a result of brand equity and a consistent
high-ranking position. But then you'll see this one on
the 50/30/20 budget rule. So let's click that which will take us back to the
backlinks report with the anchor set as a filter. And as you can see, they've gotten hundreds
of links because of that one concept. But it's actually a pretty outdated budgeting rule and
I personally think that I have a better way to budget. So if I were to create a competing page on how
to budget, I'd include my method and reach out to all of these people who are linking to
NerdWallet because of their budgeting rule. We actually have a step-by-step case study on
how we used this method to create content and build links to it, so if you want to learn
how to execute on this, then I'll leave a link to it in the description. Alright, the next link building tool is Hunter.io. Hunter is an email finding tool that'll help
you find email addresses for your prospects. And with a free plan, you can
run 25 searches per month. Now, this tool falls somewhere in
between the vetting and outreach stages. But nevertheless, finding emails
for your prospects is critical. So to find a person's email address go to
the finder tool and enter the first and last name of your prospect, as well
as their domain name. Run the search, and you might just
see a handsome fella. Now, I have two favorite features in Hunter. The first is their API which helps
to scale email finding like crazy. And my second favorite feature
is their Author Finder. Just paste in the URL where your
prospect is the author of the page, and they'll search for the author's
name as well as an email address. Now, as you can see, this isn't
the right email address. And that brings us nicely to the next
tool which is Neverbounce. Neverbounce is an email cleaning and verification tool. And it's main purpose is to tell you whether
email addresses are deliverable or not. Now, the reason why I recommend using
it is because by sending tons of emails to undeliverable addresses, you're going to negatively
impact your present and future deliverability. And if your emails aren't reaching
prospects, then good luck getting links. Now, the tool is free to try and then you'll
have to choose a pay as you go option if you want to continue using it. And it's really simple to use. Just paste in your list of email addresses and
Neverbounce will tell you whether the email is valid, invalid, catchall, or unknown. Now, just like Hunter, my favorite
feature in Neverbounce is the API. You just write up some code, and
you can verify your emails at scale. And if you don't have a developer to work with,
you can use Zapier to find and verify emails in Google Sheets. We have a full video on how to set this
up, so I'll link that up in the description. Alright, the next tool is Pitchbox. Pitchbox positions themselves as an influencer
outreach and content marketing platform. And that's probably because they have
a ton of features inside their tools. But personally, I've only used their tool
for link prospecting and email outreach. Now, my favorite part of Pitchbox
isn't so much in the features. It's the fact that they've structured their
email outreach module as a workflow. And this works particularly well when
you're working with larger teams. And they've streamlined the outreach process
in 3 steps: inspect, personalize, and compose. The "Inspect" stage is where you'll
do your initial vetting. And you get Ahrefs' SEO metrics right
beside the pages to help with that. Now, in the "Personalize" stage, this is
where you can look at your prospect's pages and add any personalization fields
for your actual email. And writing the email is done
in the "Compose" stage. This is where you can write and send
personalized emails to your prospects. Now, Pitchbox doesn't have a free option available,
so if you don't have the budget, then you can use Hunter, which also has an outreach tool, or
if you're the type to work with spreadsheets then any other tool like Mailshake
or Buzzstream will do the trick. Alternatively, if you don't plan to scale your
link building, then using a free Gmail account with Canned Responses will do the trick. Alright, the next tool is Screaming Frog SEO spider. Now, this tool is a web crawler that's mostly
used for on-page and technical SEO audits. But I personally like using it
more for link building. Now, they have a free plan which lets you
crawl up to 500 URLs, but the paid plan is where my favorite features are. And that's custom source code search
and custom extraction. So let's talk about using Screaming Frog
for an unlinked mentions campaign. Now, if you're unfamiliar with this link building
strategy, it's when you find pages that have mentioned your brand name or products
but didn't link back to your website. And it works really well because the authors are
already familiar with your brand, they probably like you, but they just didn't link to you. So, to build my list of prospects, I'll search
in Content Explorer for our brand name but not from pages on our own site. I'll also set a Domain Rating filter and
a website traffic filter to narrow down our list for the sake of prioritization. Then, I'll choose the "One page per domain"
filter since I don't need to reach out to the same website multiple times. Finally, I'll export the results. Alright, so we have a list of pages that mention
our brand, but at this point, we don't know if they're linking to our site from the page. So I'll open up Screaming Frog, hit Configuration,
and then choose Custom search. Next, I'll hit the Add button. Now, for the Condition, I'll set it to "Does not
contain," and I'll also choose regular expressions as the search type. Finally, I'll paste in some regex code. So what this is going to do is search through
the source code of URLs and tell us if they link to any page on our website or not. Let's hit OK. Now, I'm going to paste the list of URLs
that we exported from Screaming Frog and run the crawl. Now, when the crawl has completed, you
can head over to the custom search tab, and then filter for your custom search. And now we have a list of hundreds of
pages that have mentioned our brand but didn't link to us on their page. Now, these tools all work great for various tasks. But they work even better when you integrate
them into your link building systems. Now, if you don't have a link building system yet,
then I highly recommend watching our tutorial on creating a scalable system before you
mindlessly go off and buy a bunch of tools. Now, these are just some of my favorite
link building tools and in my opinion, the only ones you need. Let me know in the comments what
your go to link building tools are. And if you enjoyed this video, then make sure to
like, share, and subscribe for more actionable SEO and marketing tutorials. I'll see you in the next one.
