- What's up guys?
So today I'm gonna teach you exactly how
to prospect properly for your link-building outreach.
Now, when it comes to prospecting,
this isn't the most glamorous,
rock and roll job in the world.
But at the same time, if you get your prospecting right,
then we'll get much higher quality links,
which means that you'll get much better results from SEO.
So, prospecting is so crucial
for your link building outreach campaign.
And that's exactly what I'm gonna show you
in this video today.
So, first of all, we're gonna start off on ahrefs.com.
We're going to find a blog to scrape, right?
So I've got this example here.
and we're gonna check back link profile,
because once we've got the back link profile,
we can then scrape everyone who linked to this page.
And if we're link building,
we can reach out to them and say,
Hey, would you consider linking to us to, you know,
you link to our competitor, and go from there.
So you can go to the back links section over here.
And once that loads, you're gonna see something like this.
Now, you want to filter this list down, first of all,
because there's gonna be loads of duplicates on here,
you've 50,000 similar links.
But actually if you do one link per domain
and you cut out duplicates,
then that figure is going to be much lower.
In fact, it goes from 50,000 to 14.486.
And then also when you're prospecting,
you really want to find, do-follow links only,
because if you're reaching out to websites
that give out no-follow links only,
then those links aren't really that valuable.
It's not really worth your time doing the outreach.
And therefore you should filter
just for do-follow links only.
Now, what you can also do is you can filter by platform,
by language, by traffic.
And in fact, if you really want to be strict
on the quality of websites you're getting links from,
then you could actually filter the traffic down here.
So if we go to 100 minimum traffic,
for example, click apply,
then that figure is gonna drop significantly
from 12,000 to 200 do-follow domains.
But, if you only want high quality websites
that actually get traffic,
then this is a very quick way of filtering it down.
However, if you don't want to do that, x off of here,
and then we can export this sheet just like this.
Now, if you want the full export, you can click here.
But just for the example of this video,
we're gonna do a quick export.
And once that's downloaded,
I can take that sheet and upload it to Google sheets.
So on Google sheets, go to file import, upload,
grab the spreadsheet you just downloaded,
and this will import everyone who's linked
to your competitor.
So you can go through the prospect list
before your outreach to them,
and filter down to the websites that are high quality,
and get rid of the crap.
So one way to do this is to filter by domain rating.
So if you go to data, sort range,
and then sort by domain rating,
what you might want to do,
is remove any sites that have a very low domain rating,
because, you know,
if you're like a domain-rated-50 website you know,
getting links from, you know, dr-5s and dr-10s,
isn't really gonna move the needle that much.
So you can delete them like this,
and then you're left with high domain-rated websites.
Now you could also do is scroll down the list,
and just make sure that the links you're getting
are from relevant sites, right?
So if we look at the referring pages here,
and we look at the URL,
some of these aren't gonna be that relevant, right?
So like you can see a few home pages here.
Now you might want to get rid of the homepages,
because most people aren't gonna Link to you
from the homepage.
And in fact, if you reach out to homepages only,
trying to get links from them,
most of the time, they're gonna say no.
When it comes to link outreach, you only get one shot,
you only get one opportunity, right?
So you might as well save these prospects for another time.
When you can find a more relevant page to them about.
Let's get rid of some of these home pages.
And there you go.
Now, what you would normally do
is go through the whole list,
and then get rid of all the homepages, just like that.
Another thing to be aware of
is if you look at the referring page like this,
some of these websites aren't gonna be in English.
And if you're reaching out about a page,
that's in English to a foreign website, chances are,
they're not gonna understand you like Good Leads Vietnam.
They're probably not gonna understand you.
So they're probably not gonna link to you either.
So probably want to get rid of those too.
So any sort of websites that aren't in your language,
you can just get rid of like this, this one is Spanish.
You can go through the whole list
and filter out any sites that in a foreign language.
And that will save you a lot of time too.
Now, one thing to be really careful of is,
in this list, there's gonna be some sites
that are a little bit dodgy, you know,
maybe they're gambling sites
or casinos and just by spam or by chance,
they've linked to the prospects you were scraping, right?
So you want to filter out anything that looks irrelevant.
Now, in this example, there may not be any relevant stuff.
But what you can do is if you press control and F
and find on the sheet, you can type in a few keywords,
and just filter out anything that looks dodgy.
So you can see here, for example, we've typed in casino.
And that's a prospect about casinos.
So to be honest,
you probably want to remove them from your prospect list
because casino links are not good for your site.
You don't want to be associated with them
in your back link profile,
and therefore they're not worth reaching out to.
So I'll delete those too.
So what you can do is create like a list of keywords,
or sanity checks you can make,
and find before you finalize your prospect sheet.
Now, another thing that you wanna do
is scroll through the referring page title,
and make sure that the sites you're reaching out to
are actually related to the piece of content
you're gonna be promoting and building links to.
So scroll through most of these pages are about SEO,
which is good, okay?
So it's all looking good so far.
But let's say you're promoting a page
that's about link-building SEO,
or you know about on-page SEO,
maybe reaching out to a page that's talking about local SEO
may not be relevant you.
So you can delete those sort of pages too.
And basically what you wanna end up with
is a very relevant list of high quality sites
that you actually want links from,
because there's no point in reaching out to sites
you don't wanna link from.
You have to filter them out somehow.
And it's better for your back link profile.
If you stick to high quality sites.
Now another thing that you can do,
if you really want to go into some granular detail
on your prospects is,
you can check out the site itself,
and you can make sure it's a real site,
and not one that, you know,
spam or designed just to sell back links,
that sort of thing.
So scroll through the content, have a read of it,
check if it's good quality.
Like you can see, this is a decent quality page.
It's got a lot of content, it's unique,
it's nicely designed.
Isn't just a page that's been created as spam
or for back links.
So this is probably a site you want to reach out to.
Now, what you can also do, is take the site's domain,
and just make sure that it's actually getting some traffic,
because if the site isn't getting traffic,
then the chances are Google doesn't like it.
And if Google doesn't like that page,
then you probably don't wanna link from it either, right?
So what we can do is load that domain into ahrefs,
like this.
And first of all, you can check out it's organic traffic.
So this site is getting 2,700 organic visitors per month,
which is decent.
And also you want to look at it's history, right?
So you can go into organic search,
and you can see, right,
is this website's organic traffic on the right path?
And has it taken a penalty at some point, right?
So you can see it's dropped a little bit here,
but that's kind of normal, you know, but overall,
since 2016, the amount of traffic for this site
is gradually increasing exponentially.
So that's a good sign.
Also, if we look at the back link profile,
you just wanna make sure
this site isn't doing anything unnatural.
So you could see like the number of referring domains here
is gradually increasing over time,
which looks kind of natural.
But if you saw like a sudden spike from like, you know,
the 29th of September to the 3st of October,
and it built like a hundred links in one day,
then that looks very unnatural,
and you probably wouldn't want
to be associated with that sort of site too.
So avoid any sites
that do unnatural link-building methods
for their website too, because chances are,
it's gonna receive a penalty at some point.
And therefore you don't want to get links
from that sort of website.
So thanks for watching guys.
Really hope you enjoyed this video.
If you did, please smash like on it.
And if you haven't already,
please subscribe to my YouTube channel,
because my link building videos
will help you boost the number of links to your site,
or help you grow your traffic, boost your rankings.
So my channel is definitely designed for you
if you address it in link building.
Also I have a few playlists here
that you might want to check out.
Now, when it comes to link-building prospecting,
it takes time, but it's 100% worth it in terms of results.
So, you know, the more care you put into your prospecting,
the better the results you're gonna get.
Now, if you have any questions
about Link building prospecting,
or how to do outreach,
then let me know in the comment section below.
I'd be happy to answer any questions you have.