If you have a business with an online presence, one of your biggest goals is to drive customers to your site. An important strategy for building your online traffic and boosting your site's search result rankings is link building or strategically placing links to your site's pages on other sites.
If you're a seasoned online entrepreneur, you may already be familiar with link building. However, you probably also know that it's a complicated field and that tools and techniques constantly change.
Link building solutions like PureLinq make it their business to stay current on these topics. Therefore, they have extensive guidelines on the best tools and can implement them for maximum impact. Some of the top tools used by the pros include:
1.Brand or Site Name Alerts
Link building is much more than just finding random sites to link back to your own. Successful campaigns require you to find targeted opportunities. You need to link from sites that are related to your product or service.
To find these sites, you'll want to look for mentions of your product or market niche or even your specific brand name. Sites that already include this type of relevant content are more likely to be willing to link back to your site.
You could spend time every day searching online for brand mentions, but there are much more efficient strategies. A tool like Google Alerts or Ahrefs' Alerts will notify you when mentions pop up online. You can work on something else and let the tool search for you. However, even the tool is not perfect, and the results will still require human analysis. Link building professionals have advanced strategies for combing the internet for opportunities and deciding which are the most advantageous.
2. Ahrefs' Site and Content Explorers
All serious link builders should be familiar with Ahrefs' Site Explorer and Content Explorer tools. Site Explorer is Ahrefs' most popular tool and worth the price of a subscription. It's a research tool that helps you learn about competitor sites and has three functions that are particularly important for link building:
- Organic Traffic– This tool finds the topics, keywords, and individual pages with the most organic search traffic.
- Paid Traffic– With this tool, you can discover the paid search ads your competitors are using. It will show you the pay-per-click keywords, the actual ads, and the ads’ landing pages.
- Backlink Checker– Use this function to find the pages and sites linking to your competitors. You'll also get information on the quality of those sites.
These are crucial tools for building backlinks because they give you detailed information about potential easy opportunities that competitors are already taking advantage of.
Content Explorer is another essential Ahrefs' tool. It will help you build the content for your own site, which you will use to earn backlinks by helping you learn more about your competitors' content. Find out what types of content your competitors are creating and which types of content get the most links over time. This tool will guide your creation of highly shareable and linkable content that is most likely popular with your target audience.
3.Prospecting Tools
When building links, consider not just the target audience but also the quality of the site. You don't want just any old site linking back to your page, as Google considers the quality of any site linking to you when evaluating your site. Prospecting tools help you learn more about the sites you're considering including in your campaign.
Helpful prospecting tools include Moz Link Explorer, Buzz Sumo, and Majestic. They help you analyze competitor backlinks so you can implement what works from their strategies while also improving upon it for your methods. You'll get information on prospective sites' domain authority, anchor text, and more. This will help you decide which sites are worth targeting.
4.Outreach Tools
Once you have a list of worthy prospects, you're ready to reach out and contact site administrators about the possibility of placing links on their site.
This process can be relatively simple if you only have a few links to place or sites to contact. However, for a more extensive campaign, you'll need an outreach tool to organize and streamline your efforts. Buzzstream and Pitchbox are good examples of outreach tools. Because they can be complicated to implement and outreach campaigns can grow quickly, it may be smart to enlist professional help with outreach.
5.Basic Graphic Design Tools
Written content is essential for link building, but it can also be limiting. You will also need graphic content. Infographics are especially popular because they are easy to share and break information down in ways that are accessible to more people.
If you're not a graphic designer, you'll need some help crafting linkable infographics. Tools like Canva, Pixabay, and Infogr.am can all help you build appealing infographics. If you're especially invested in creating high-quality infographic content, consider working with a professional designer.
When In Doubt, Turn to the Pros
These tools are essential to link building basics and can help you get started, but there are many moving parts to a successful link building campaign.
If you're struggling to get results, consider using a professional service. Working with one for at least a while is important to understand the complicated art of link building. At the end of the day, like many other complex processes, it may be best-executed by a skilled team.
