Link Prospecting

Link Prospecting is the art of finding new pages you want to get a link on.

There are many places where you can search for new link sources: The Google search results, your competitor’s backlinks or your competitor’s link targets. With the right strategy, you can move on top of the link chain. Unfortunately, we still see many SEOs doing this manually in Excel sheets.

You will find the most powerful link sources when you know how to use the Link Prospecting tools correctly.

The best linking opportunities are often right at your fingertips: The Google search results. The best link for the keyword “link research” is the #1 ranking website for “link research”. Then #2, #3, #4, etc. But why go through the results manually? We recommend using a tool that prospects for dozens of keywords at once and helps you find strong blogs and forums in your niche.

Recommended tool: SERP Research Tool (SERP)

An advanced link building technique is the prospecting for co-citations within domains. You can analyze dozens of domains and check what backlinks they have in common. Use it to find the backlinks of your competitors and try to get linked there. This proved Link Prospecting method will move your website into the right neighborhood and boost your rankings incredibly.

Recommended tools: Common Backlinks Tool (CBLT), Missing Links Tool (MLT)

Another very advanced and little-known link building technique is to look at the outbound links of a group of domains and find out which link targets they have in common. There are many tools that can do outbound link analysis. But why collect the results one by one and search for commonalities in Excel, when you can have on tool doing all of this for you?

Recommended tool: Link Juice Thief (LJT)

Prospecting for linking opportunities has always been a challenge for SEO. You need to understand your own backlink profile, the average risk for you, your competitors, and the whole niche to know exactly what links you want to build. Then, you need to know where to search for new links, and what place would be better than the competitors and the niche you just analyzed so precisely? Link Prospecting is, therefore, the last step before building awesome links and boosting your rankings.