It's a painful and tedious process to do it manually, so I'm looking for ways I can potentially automate some of it to benefit my time. By automate, I'm talking about tools or services that allow for better management of my building and allows me to use templates. Can anyone recommend a good, solid tool or service that offers me to perform editorial outreach but gives me some templates to tweak and automate emails that send out and follow up after a certain amount of time. I also have clients primarily focused on local SEO, so does anyone have any experience with someone like BrightLocal? I'm happy to write my own content and I'm not too particularly interested in companies like FatJoe where the link will probably be 0 value and die off within a matter of weeks. I know a lot of good ways to build backlinks, but I figure I can just spend my time a little better if there were tools or services out there to help take off the manual edge of outreach which works 5% of the time. If I can do it in more volume then it helps increase my chances of it actually working. Any advice is appreciated, cheers. 53 💬🗨
BeBennyBe Can also recommend buzzstream – pretty cheap and straightforward. You can save templates, create followups, find contacts (though I haven't used this before) and schedule outreach.
GringoTheDingoAU ✍️ It looks pretty good to me. I've got SEMrush but I've never tinkered with their link building outreach tool, so I'm looking for something more purpose-built towards that. What plan are you on? The one that looks good to me is the $99 one.
BapaLynde I agree with BeBenny, Buzzstream is a good tool employing a good workflow for link building. We used to use it and then stopped and certainly began to notice how useful it had been once it was gone. GringoTheDingoAU ✍️ This is great. I'll sign up for a free trial tomorrow and give it a whirl. Thank you. maarcinl Yeah buzzstream is good but there's just no easy way around it other than… create absolutely amazing content that makes people link to it naturally And of course directories are a quick win too BeBennyBe I think it's the custom plan but only because I'm in a team of 20+. I reckon the group plan ($99) has all you need if it's just you though!
maggiathor So this might be not answering your question, but what I found is really neat for local SEO is sponsoring local amateur Sports Teams. They often times have small sponsoring packages or you can ask for one that includes Logo+Link on their websites. They have a good Public Relations (PR) since a lot of news sites / sports sites link to them. And I always take a quality backlink for 50 bucks / year or something like that.
GringoTheDingoAU ✍️ I've actually got this one down, but I just need to find more local sports teams near us. A lot of them aren't playing any sport right now, don't update or use their website, so I'll have to keep cracking on. Cheers though, appreciate it. TheAustinEditor Do you find that clients are willing to green light the expense? That's the kind of thing I'd never be able to convince them to try.
maggiathor It really depends on the budget, but if you find things that the client likes personally, it's a lot easier. But I might be underestimating the cultural differences in how Club sports are played around the world. In Germany everything Is privately financed and most people are part of some kind of sports club, so they understand how this works.
deveto80 Might not be something you are looking for but – in Germany for the local business of my sister we figured out we can create a small bill board and use it in the soccer games (same place like at professional game the lens along the stadium) but as this is a small quite village they wanted to have like 500 eur for that, imagine how many client she got after that and brand awareness of course. Sure it's not a backlink but a huge traffic increase tho
Andycrawford_1 It seems that many of the current outreach tools are very time consuming because you spend almost as much time inventing pitches as you do writing the content for posts you would like links to. I'm waiting right now to get to test the beta of a new tool called Tabtimize and their link community feature. The tool analyzes your content with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and provides relevant link options that you can reach out to directly on their platform. However, there is a waiting list, but you get a 3-month free trial, and you keep a free account after the trial period has ended. You can sign up by Google tabtimize link community and select the page that leads you to their waiting list page. Definitely thinking it's worth a try for you too. laurentbourrelly Offer to pay for the links and doors will open. It's not illegal. I don't care if Google doesn't like it. Any website that displays Ads sells links. That gives you an unlimited number of easy and high quality targets.
GringoTheDingoAU ✍️ That's true, but there's forever going to be a grey area on what people do with buying links vs what Google wants. It's something about backlink building that's forever going to leave me salty because everything in this world that gives you a benefit, you pay for. It's sort of like if you can't beat those buying links, just join them.
laurentbourrelly You have the solution to create amazing content that people will gladly link. Good luck with that… Googlers who spread this bad advice don't know shit about what it takes to create content that deserves links. It's possible, but extremely difficult. Only the top 1% of the content producers pyramid can achieve it on a regular basis. Please look at the podcast I shared above. It tells the truth. GringoTheDingoAU ✍️ Not sure if you were meant to reply to me or not. But I know. There's players in this SEO industry who can write anything they want and it'll be eaten up and linked to – that's just how it is with every industry. I believe in the 'write great content and you'll be linked to' phrase as a long term plan, but it absolutely won't produce any immediate or fast results because that's just how it is.
kickit
Any website that displays Ads sells links
probably 80% of websites that display ads do not sell follow links most of the ones that do are so obvious about it that i would never pay for a link from them.
laurentbourrelly You don't know how to buy links my friend.
Kobaltdr I am the co-founder of a small web company. We manage around 150 niche websites so link building quickly become an issue for us too. I don't know what your needs are in terms of backlinks but if you want something scalable, there are not many options available out there. We buy links from agencies and platforms in addition to building links from our own network. Obviously as we are the website editors and have a good understanding of what SEO is, we have some leverage here when it comes to LB but I sincerely don't know how you can do it in a different way. When I was working in a big SEO agency in Zurich, we were buying links from high-quality websites only because we worked with large companies but that still implies buying links. That's still the most easy-going and effective way to get links imo. What can be hard though is finding good link providers. It took us month before having reliable and trustworthy providers. If you want to deal with high-quality websites, services are usually not advertised as SEO, but rather as traditional advertising. Prices are high though. I can't help you since I virtually know nothing about the U.S. market but you certainly can find good providers whether it's a proprietary network or a plateform to connect link sellers and buyers. At the end of day, it's all about your needs. If you need 30-50 links per month, I guess you can find some tricks to speed up your current process but if you need hundreds of links, you don't have so many options imo.
GringoTheDingoAU ✍️ Backlink building is literally at Google's whim. Reciprocal backlinking is discouraged, buying backlinks is considered against their terms, and I hate the whole 'just create quality content and you'll be fine' viewpoint sometimes. Sure, I'll sit here and wait 10 years before I build up a natural flow of backlinks that finally gives me some value. I'm fortunate enough to be doing a lot of local SEO so backlinks aren't that critical, but for my own site, it definitely is and sitting here grinding my teeth together doing manual outreach for niche edits is mentally killing me. Thanks for the advice though, I'll keep it in mind.
Kobaltdr
Backlink building is literally at Google's whim. Reciprocal backlinking is discouraged, buying backlinks is considered against their terms
Definitely but I invite you to tackle the issue with a broader perspective. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is essentialy hard because your performance is subjected to what you do but also to what your competitors are doing. And trust me, everybody buy links. If you are unwilling to do it, you are putting yourself in a tougher position since your competitors are certainly doing it. Google despises paid links because they can't precisely determine whether a link is bought or natural. Yes, it's against their terms but at the end of the day, we want to rank to make money, not to please Google. You hate link building but that's pretty much the case for everyone. This is why solutions were built. Because link building is annoying, solutions to facilitate it were made. Really, you should reconsider your perpsective on paid links or exchange links because it can make your SEO career easier. GringoTheDingoAU ✍️ Trust me, I agree with you. They have had a hard time proving paid links for so long now, that's why they even have rel=sponsored as an attribute. I appreciate you putting it very black and white for me, makes me realise the gravity of the situation in a different light. MrRedditKing I can only imagine how much better the web would be if we were not all spending our time chasing link buying opportunities, as opposed to making great websites … altrepublic If you think about the ultimate goal of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in its purest sense – which is to improve the end user's internet experience by getting them the information they need, in an easy to use and understand format – then yeah it really is about just creating quality content. If you want to accelerate the timeline then you pay in other ways. You pay for ads. You pay for Public Relations (PR). You pay someone do social. This gets eyes on your product and if you're worth a shit then people will link to you. GringoTheDingoAU ✍️ I agree, but I think lately the patient game has been weighing on my mind with that kind of strategy. I think every SEO would be lying to themselves if that aspect of SEO didn't annoy them from time to time.
grindingallday1289 I'm curious what local SEO niche needs that much backlink building. Is everything else perfected like reviews, content, citations, etc?
GringoTheDingoAU ✍️ Oh yeah it doesn't really. I was just curious about BrightLocal for it's citation 'fixing' service, we don't really need many backlinks to rank for the keyphrases we want. Everything else is well on target, we just need time given this site only went live about 2-3 months ago.
grindingallday1289 So by "link building" are you talking about citation building or doFollow blog posts, Private Blog Networks (PBN)s, outreach campaigns, etc?
Promotech_Solutions I will never recommend to do it automate or tool. Because it can never beneficial than manual back links, as manual work is actually an organic work, which we all should be adopt, to grow up and keep stable in search engine raking, you can talk with us (inbox) in details. automate and robot working can be harmful as even de-indexing from google… marshdurden I have used a few tools but didn't got reply as good as manual outreach, but as you are in local SEO business I think it will work pretty well. I can suggest you buzzstream and mailshake they are very well built and I have used it. Recently I also bought BacklinkSEO tool for their lifetime deal, its cheaper in longer run compared to other monthly paid tools you can buy it from life time deal resellers on Facebook groups.
