As much as SEO has changed over the past few decades, some things have remained the same. Next to keyword targeting, link building has stayed one of the most important parts of a solid SEO strategy.
But as more and more businesses have entered the ring, it’s become harder than ever to execute efficient link building efforts that provide a reasonable bang for your buck. The average businessperson receives more than 100 emails per day, which can be exhausting. This makes it difficult to execute cold email campaigns that drive meaningful ROI.
Luckily, there are many different link building outreach tools that your business can use to stay competitive. Here are 11 that you should know about.
1. Mailshake
Mailshake can help you scale and level up your link building efforts in several ways. First, it makes it easy to send a large amount of fully personalized emails in a short amount of time, cutting the hours you’ll spend on menial tasks.
Next, it provides several tried and tested link building outreach templates that have been proven to be effective. Just choose a template, personalize it a bit, and hit send.
Plus, you can keep track of your leads using Lead Catcher. This feature allows you to set the criteria for what counts as a lead (a reply, three opens, etc.) and then sort those into a separate queue within Mailshake.
If you need help with your campaigns, you can also get a one-to-one campaign review from one of the experts at Mailshake.
2. Right Inbox
Right Inbox provides tools for email tracking, templates, and sequences that can make your outreach efforts more effective than ever.
You can use email tracking to keep tabs on who’s opened your email and who hasn’t, which can help you make better-informed decisions about when to send follow up emails.
Additionally, Right Inbox allows you to save templates, so you can quickly pull up your most effective email copy, tweak it as needed, and send it out.
If you want to put your emails on autopilot, you can also design follow-up sequences. These allow you to automate your follow-up emails based on criteria you set, like time elapsed, whether you received a reply, etc.
3. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is one of the biggest names in the SEO space, and for good reason: it offers several highly useful tools that can improve all aspects of your SEO strategy.
When it comes to backlinking, however, the most applicable tool is Site Explorer. This tool allows you to compare your site to your competitors. For link building, it tells you which sites are linking to your competitors’ sites, but not your own.
If sites are linking to your competitors, there’s a solid chance that they’ll also give you a link. Using this tool, you can come up with a good list of sites to reach out to.
4. GroupHigh
GroupHigh can best be thought of as a search engine for bloggers: enter a search term, and it will pull up tons of relevant blogs that you can reach out to.
The amount of blogs and bloggers that it can retrieve can be overwhelming, so GroupHigh lets you filter by criteria like Domain Authority, audience size, etc. to narrow down your search.
Once you’ve found a blogger you want to reach out to, you can draft your message from within GroupHigh. This makes the workflow much more efficient, especially if you’re sending out email after email and there’s an email overload.
5. BuzzStream
BuzzStream helps you find email addresses, reach out to them, and then track your conversations.
For example, if you’re planning to reach out to blogs, you can upload a list of blogs that you want to contact, and BuzzStream will track down relevant email addresses for you.
Then, you can use BuzzStream to send out emails to them. After that, you can monitor each conversation’s progress within the platform.
Plus, you can use BuzzStream’s Chrome extension to find email addresses while you’re browsing the web with Chrome.
6. NinjaOutreach
NinjaOutreach is another platform designed to help you find and reach out to various digital outlets. However, this tool focuses specifically on YouTube and Instagram.
With NinjaOutreach, you can search a database of millions of Instagram and YouTube influencers to find the right fit for your brand. You can filter your search with criteria like Domain and Page Authority, backlink count, etc.
Plus, you can also use NinjaOutreach’s preloaded templates to make sure that your emails are always well-written and sound professional.
7. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a tool that’s primarily used to identify trending content opportunities, but it can also be useful for backlinking outreach.
With BuzzSumo, you can find influencers, bloggers, and journalists who shared content from your competitors. This makes it a great tool for identifying opportunities to hop on a trend to boost your email marketing efforts.
You can also use its Brand Mentions feature to find places on the web where your brand is mentioned, but there’s no link to be found. When you find occurrences of this, you can reach out to those sites and see if you can get them to add in a backlink.
8. Voila Norbert
Voila Norbert is one of the best tools around when it comes to finding emails. It has a huge database of professional emails that you can search through to find the contact info for bloggers and other influencers.
You can search for emails either one at a time or by uploading a CSV of names you want to track down. You can also use the platform to verify or enrich your current list.
9. Pitchbox
Pitchbox is a tool designed to help you find bloggers, influencers, and publishers to reach out to. It integrates with platforms like Moz, Ahrefs, and SEMRush to help you find only the highest quality opportunities. In fact, you can filter based on site quality, either by setting your own criteria or by using the built-in “Good” and “Great” filters.
You can start your search off using one of several campaign templates, like Blogger Outreach, Product Reviews, Competitor Backlinks, and Link Removal.
From there, you can personalize your emails using merge fields and even automate follow ups from right within the platform.
10. Klear
Klear is a tool that helps you find, analyze, manage, and measure influencers and their connected outreach campaigns.
Klear allows you to search for relevant influencers to reach out to, and after you’ve found some, you can use Klear’s AI to evaluate how much influence they have (their influencer score) as well as see data about their audience’s demographics.
Then, you can use the Klear CRM to manage your influencer relationships. Finally, Klear also allows you to track your campaign’s success with analytics tools.
11. JustReachOut
While most outreach tools are focused on reaching out to bloggers, JustReachOut bucks the trend and provides a tool that’s made to help businesses get in touch with journalists. At heart, it’s a PR platform, and it has a large database of journalists and influencers to choose from. It can be used for great PR for tech startups.
One nice feature of JustReachOut, besides the journalist database, is its broken link detector. JustReachOut can identify sites with broken links so you can swoop in and ask them to replace the dead link with a link to a similar article of your own.
The Bottom Line
If you want to stay competitive, you need to make sure you’re using the right tools. There are lots of useful link building tools out there, and most of them can work well with each other.
To pick the right tool for you, start by identifying your primary pain points. Each tool will help you in a different way, so it’s just a matter of picking the right fit for your unique needs.
