Link Prospecting Strategies: A Step-by-Step Comprehensive Guide
An excellent link-building outreach campaign starts with link prospecting. Knowing the dos and don’ts of link prospecting will set you higher in the SEO game.
As you may already know, link prospecting refers to searching for websites with authority and relevance for link-building.
The quality of websites sending backlinks your way determines the strength of your backlink profile. Hence, going for the top sites for your niche is not something to trifle with.
If you want your link prospecting to yield results, you need a clear strategy. It can prevent everything from getting messy.
This blog should help you develop practical, straightforward, and quick plans for your link prospecting project.
What Is Link Prospecting?
Image Credit: Ahrefs
Link prospecting means finding websites for link-building. Yes, it involves only the searching part, so there is no reaching out or collaboration.
Listing top sites for link-building is an inevitable and inseparable part of link-building. Whether you are getting fresh new backlinks or want to replace broken links, it is vital to identify the suitable sites first.
Note that the websites you seek here must be within your industry. There are indeed some benefits from getting backlinks from irrelevant sites, but it’s nearly not enough.
While your page and domain’s link equity will still rise after getting an inbound link from an irrelevant site, you can’t expect many leads.
It loses one of the primary purposes of link-building per se. So, always try to aim for relevant sites. How do you find them, you ask? We will discuss that in-depth later in the blog.
For now, let’s show you some advantages of link prospecting strategies-
- Time Efficient: With a proper strategy, you can directly go for the right sites to reach out to without wasting time.
- Backlink Opportunities: Not all websites with high domain authority (DA) will want to send backlinks. However, finding the ones that do with a laid-out plan will save you some hassles.
- High-Quality Links: The links you are getting are sure to do some magic since the site is carefully selected from an array of options.
- Cost-Effective: Since you are less likely to make any mistake with a strategy, your link prospecting should cost less.
What Are the Usual Steps in Link Prospecting Strategies?
You can divide link prospecting into three stages. They are-
- Creating or choosing a link-building strategy
- Determining your target domains (which niche and DA should you go for)
- Sorting out a list of websites to reach out to for links and collaboration
Let’s start with the first step on this list in the next section without further ado.
Choosing a Link-Prospecting Strategy
A full-fledged link-prospecting strategy goes a long way, as it will help you throughout your link-building endeavor. So, where to start?
First things first, you need to decide what you are prospecting for. You are probably looking for a suitable site to –
- Let you guest blog on their site
- Link insertion
- Use the skyscraper technique (linkable asset strategy)
- Get backlinks
- Replace any broken link
Each of these may take an entirely different link-prospecting campaign. Let’s go over them one by one.
Link Insertion
Link insertion is the act of placing a backlink on existing content on a website to a specific page on your site, usually for a fee.
As its name suggests, the site won’t add links to your site when creating new content but inserts them into already existing ones. Since this requires extra cost, it is better to only target quality sites.
How to Prospect for Link Insertion
A website that charges sky-high for a link may not be worth the expense. On the other hand, you may not easily get links from a website with DA over 70.
So, it is better to stick within DA 30 to DA 70 when looking for websites for link insertion and backlinks.
Why Link Insertion Is Essential for Link-Building
Link insertion can help you with-
- Improve your SEO ranking
- Driving traffic
- Less waiting to get the links
- Certainty of getting a link
- Easy and straightforward, with no requests needed
Cost of Link Insertion
Depending on your niche, the DA of the other website, and other factors, the cost of link insertion can be anywhere from $50 to $500 per link.
So, if you want 3-10 high-quality links with link insertion, you may need to prepare a budget of $1,500 to $5000.
What to Avoid During Link-Insertion
When prospecting for sites for link insertion, avoid link farms, as they are dangerous for your SEO. Remember that they will also sell links at a low cost, but Google will deem them link spamming.
Many such link farms may even have a high DA or domain rating (DR) through underhanded means, making those metrics somewhat unreliable.
You can check their organic traffic using tools like Ahrefs’s ‘Site Explorer’ to get a better idea of whether they are a legitimate website or a link farm.
Skyscraper Technique or Linkable Asset
Linkable assets are content that is worthy of linking. The linkable asset strategy is to ask a website to send links to high-quality content you just created. It increases the chance of getting a backlink.
A linkable asset campaign in which you try to replace a website’s backlink to one of your competitors with your own by creating better content is called a skyscraper technique.
Here, you check which pages of your competitor got a backlink from a high-DA website. (We have discussed competitor backlink profile analysis later in this blog).
Then, you create similar content with more value.
Afterward, you ask the authoritative website owner to replace their backlinks to your content.
How Can Linkable Asset Campaign Help You
Linkable asset campaigns can aid you in the following ways-
- Backlink Opportunities: Since your content is high quality, the websites will likely send a backlink.
- Backlink Control: It helps you control the backlinks you receive by telling website owners where to send them instead of to any random page on your site.
- Allows Skyscraper Technique: The skyscraper technique is proven to work wonders in SEO ranking and competition.
How Do You Prospect for a Linkable Asset Campaign?
When prospecting or searching for websites for your linkable assets, you can-
- First, find suitable websites with a topic or niche like yours.
- Then, find specific pages on that site with content that may benefit by linking to your asset. For instance, if your content is a case study, other pages that require that information may gain value from linking to it.
- Finally, ask the site owner to send backlinks, mentioning why your asset is suitable content for a link from that page on their domain.
What Not to Do During a Linkable Asset Campaign Prospecting?
When looking for sites to send links to your linkable assets, avoid the following-
- Don’t go for irrelevant sites or pages.
- Avoid using low-quality content as your asset. While it may be worthy of linking, remember that others may try to build skyscrapers on your content.
- If the website charges an amount, ensure that the site has a high DA to avoid any ROI loss.
Getting Backlinks
The most common reason people run a link prospecting campaign is to get backlinks from a website. To do this, you simply ask a site to send backlinks to your domain without specifying anything.
As always, you have to prospect for websites within the same niche and of high quality for the backlinks to hold high value. Otherwise, you can’t expect much link equity to pass.
Remember that many link farms will try to sell backlinks. Since this is black hat SEO, be sure to avoid them at all costs. Prioritize the quality of the link rather than the quantity.
If you are wondering how to find high-DA websites for links, you can use different SEO tools. There are free tools like Linkody or paid tools like Ahrefs or Semrush.
Guest Posting
Guest blogging is fun when you do it right. It is the process of writing blogs for another website that they will publish on theirs. You can add a backlink to this piece on your own site.
An effective guest posting strategy requires multiple steps done right-
- First, you need to prospect for the right websites suitable for a guest post. Obviously, not all of them will accept blogs from guests.
- Next, you need to study that site and generate ideas for guest post topics. The topics must be relevant to the group’s audience so that you can contribute value to them.
- Then, pitch the ideas to the website owner in a requesting and sincere tone. The pitching must be personalized. If it is made from scratch, that is all the better.
- If the site owner accepts your request, you write the article following their guest post guidelines and submit it. The site owners then publish it on their site.
Why Do You Need Guest Posting for Your SEO?
Guest posting can impact the SEO of your site positively in the following ways-
- Generate Traffic: After reading your guest post, audiences from another site may become interested in what you have to offer, which can drive organic traffic to your site.
- SEO Improvement: Having a backlink from a high-DA website (be it your own blog) contributes greatly to your SEO ranking.
- Potential Collaboration: Helps build relationships with high DA sites, making a future-proof backlink source for you.
How to Find High DA Websites That Accept Guest Posting?
Prospecting for a specific site within your niche that takes guest posting can be tricky. However, you can try the following methods-
- Some of these sites will promote the fact that they accept guest postings (which helps them too). Look out for them and reach out.
- Check a site’s ‘author’ or ‘about’ page for people working there. Then, check the names of the people who wrote the blogs or content there.
If they don’t match, the site probably accepts guest posts from outside people.
- You can use tools like ‘Guest Post Tracker’ to find sites with specific DA. Usually, a rule of thumb is to stick within sites with 30-70 DA for starters.
Anything below 30 DA will not contribute much to guest blogging, and anything over 70 DA will likely have too strict rules or be picky.
- Use Google’s search operator to specify “Guest Post,” “Add Article,” or “Write for Us,” etc. in your search, and Google should show you results that contain these keywords.
We have explained Google search operators in more detail later in this article.
- Analyze the backlink profiles of your competitors using Ahrefs or SEMrush. Check each competitor’s top linking sites. See which of their backlinks came from blog posts.
This way, you can find several guest posting sites quickly without having to spend so much.
- Check the author’s info under articles and see if it mentions the author to be a ‘guest blogger.’ If it does, then that article can be a guest post as well.
- Notice a website’s forums and comments and search with ‘guest blog’ on the site. You may find topics related to guest blogging.
Moreover, you can also visit Slack Communities and other online forums with topics related to SEO and guest posting and get ideas from people there.
- Search for names of guest bloggers on Google. Then, search with each name on Google.
Chances are that you will find some of their published articles on various websites that accept guest posts.
- You can use AllTop to get a list of blogs in your particular niche. Then, research some of these sites, and sure enough, you will find some that accept guest posts.
Use Ahrefs ‘Website Traffic Checker’ to estimate a website’s search traffic. Aim for ones with at least 1000 organic visitors.
Guest Post Farms and How to Avoid Them
There are websites that only post blogs from guests and charge a fee for them. These websites hardly provide any value to their audience and typically have low organic traffic.
A site can be a guest post farm if you notice the following-
- No content on it is published by the name of any worker (from its author/about page) of the site.
- The website has no payment option for guest posts or charges a fee during outreach.
- Its posts are on topics that aren’t often within the same topic, niche, or industry.
Determining Your Target Domains for Prospecting
Now that you have chosen what you are prospecting for, you need to make some aims about your target domains. You usually have to look at the site’s niche and authority or rating.
Niches You Should Aim for
Deciding which niche to target for link prospecting is more complex than it may sound. Yes, you may want to go for the ones that focus mainly on your own niche.
However, you may not always find high-authority sites within your niche. Sometimes, you must broaden your search and check out sites with a related niche.
You may even have to choose a much broader niche if the site is highly authoritative. For example, suppose your niche is in gazebo building DIY. You can either-
- Stick to a similar niche by prospecting other sites that discuss DIY gazebo building. Or,
- Go for related niches, like sites that focus on different types of DIY buildings, like houses, sheds, piers, boats, etc. Or,
- Target websites with an even wider niche, like housing content, different DIY sectors, bigger structures, construction sites, interior designing, landscape designing, gardening, etc.
The more relevant the website content is to your site’s content, the better to target them.
Target Metrics and How Much or Less to Aim for
As we said, you can’t aim for too low or too high when prospecting websites. However, before that, you should understand the SEO metrics well. There are-
- Domain Authority (DA): From 0 to 100, you can quickly check a website’s DA with any SEO tool. We advise you to prospects for sites within 30 to 70 DA.
- Domain Rating (DR): Also ranging from 0-100, you can check the DR of a website using various SEO tools. There is hardly any difference between DA and DR.
- Organic Visitors: The traffic count of a website in one month. Sites with an organic traffic of over 1,000 are worth prospecting for.
- Traffic Value: The value of a site’s visitor. Simply put, it refers to the amount the site can profit from the traffic it gets.
The lowest you should aim for is sites with at least a $1,000 traffic value or higher.
How much DA, traffic, and traffic value you should aim for depends on your own site’s condition. If you are totally new, aiming for the lower end of the spectrum we mentioned above is suitable.
If your site’s ranking is decent now, look for sites with at least equal DA and traffic as you, if not higher.
Deciding on a Prospecting Method
So far, we have been making strategies and creating aims for link prospecting. Next, it is time to find some websites that fall within your criteria and list them out.
Afterward, you can try them one by one.
Finding websites to make a list is not as difficult as it may seem. There are various methods to perform this, and you can try all of them. They are as follows-
- Google Prospecting
- Ahrefs Prospecting
- Competitor Link Analysis
- Generative AI Prospecting
Google Prospecting
One of the most straightforward links prospecting methods is using Google’s search option for websites. However, it is not as simple as you will be using search operators here.
What are search operators, you ask? Have you ever noticed that Google often shows search results where some part of your search keyword is missing?
When that happens, Google asks whether you want your result to contain those keywords. If you click it, Google search again, but with quotation marks around those keywords.
This is an example of a search operator. For example, check the difference between the search results in the image below-
On the left side, you got results that literally excluded a significant part of your keyword, ‘headlight.’ However, on the right side, you used Google’s search operator.
So, you got more focused results. Google added these operators to allow deep searching. Some other such search operators you may need during your link-prospecting are-
- Excluding Certain Terms from the Search Results: Add the term at the end and add a minus symbol ‘-’ before it with a space before the minus.
- Get Alternative Results: Add an uppercase ‘OR’ between two keywords, and Google will show pages that include either the keyword before the ‘OR’ operator or the one after it.
- Including Certain Keywords: If you only want search result pages that include a particular keyword, add quotation marks around it, as we did in the image above.
If you are prospecting for websites within a particular niche and for specific reasons, you can use the search operators to deep-search them.
For example, if you are searching for sites with headlight content, you can try prompts like-
- Headlight “blog”
- Headlights “information”
- Headlights “websites”
Listing the Google Prospects
Adding your findings to a list may be time-consuming, considering you must insert many. Tools like LinkPitch can help you add your search results directly to a spreadsheet.
Ahrefs Prospecting
One of the biggest reasons to use Ahrefs or other paid SEO tools to prospect over Google is that you get to filter many things easily. Some filters you may use here are-
- Selecting a specific DA or DR range
- Choosing a specific type of content
- Choosing site language
- Choosing a time range, allowing you to see recently published content
How to use Ashrefs Prospecting
Here is how you can use the Ahrefs SEO tool to prospect for your preferred website types-
- Go to Ashrefs and sign in
- Go to their ‘Content Explorer’ page
- Search with your preferred content title
- Use the filters to sort the results within your criteria
- Add the results to a Google sheet to list them out
Competitor Link Analysis
You can see what websites your competitors are getting links from to aim for those sites. It is a widespread tactic that many SEO experts use, known as competitor analysis.
Here is the process of Competitor Link Analysis-
Find your competitors first.
You can do it with a simple keyword analysis (keywords that help your site rank within the top ten pages of SERPs) using Ahrefs’ “SERP Overview” tool.
You first search with the keyword here. Then, check the top ten ranking sites with that keyword and a DA or DR similar to yours. Make a list of three. These are your competitors for that keyword.
Remember to use the filter to only ‘Dofollow.’
Next, check your competitor’s backlink profile using Ahrefs’ free ‘Backlink Checker’ tool or its paid ‘Site Explorer’ tool. The latter shows more than just your competitors’ backlinks.
Now, you can see which authoritative sites are sending backlinks to your competitors. You can also check the specific pages that are getting the inbound links.
These pages can help you find several referring domains. Use the ‘Referring Domains’ tool by Ahrefs for any given page.
So, go to your competitors’ top pages and find their referring domains (i.e., domains that are linking to that page).
Among these referring domains, you can use your previously made prospect target criteria to sort out some websites, adding them to your prospect list.
Generative AI Prospecting
You may already be aware of various generative AIs that may help with prospecting. Some of them, whether free or paid, have promising results.
In fact, many suspect they will replace search engines in the future. Of course, these generative AIs will improve much as time passes. So, should you use them for prospecting?
Well, as alluring as the idea may sound, the accuracy of even top AI models is still unclear. There have been instances where they showed irrelevant results.
We don’t think the casual generative AIs are ready to take on complex SEO tasks yet unless you have found or developed a top-notch one.
However, you can always use AIs for various reasons when developing link-building strategies. According to Forbes, many are already using them.
A simple search is all it takes for you to create a list. You may need some prompt engineering skills to make the results more focused according to your prospecting needs.
Depending on the necessity, you may need to use brand keywords or non-brand keywords in different prompts.
What’s Next with the Prospect List?
Your link prospecting campaign should be followed by the outreach campaign. Here, you will reach out to the site owners from the list of websites for backlinks, guest posts, link insertion, etc.
You can either create personalized outreach methods, like writing bespoke emails for each site, or create automated outreach to a high number of sites.
The latter may be better for your ROI. However, it is best to leave some of the best websites on your prospect from the mass outreach and use manual outreach for them instead.
Some Outreaching Methods
If you are confused about what outreach method you should choose for the prospected websites, any of the following may help you-
- Guest post outreach
- Email outreach
- Link insertion outreach, where you are paying for the link.
Which method you select depends on the reason for your prospect. If you want to guest post on a site, a guest post outreach with some blog ideas in the pitching is mandatory.
Meanwhile, if you simply want some backlinks, you can write personalized emails to the website owner about your posts worth sending links to.
