A big thanks to our Pubcon 2014 sponsor, LinkResearchTools, your off-page SEO toolkit. Link Detox: Recover – Protect – Build.
At Pubcon 2014 in Las Vegas I had the opportunity to talk to Stephan Spencer of Science of SEO about how to scale link acquisition efforts.
Stephan is an author of three books, including The Art Of SEO which comes out in its third edition next year. With Stephan’s extensive knowledge I literally could have asked him about anything, but what I really wanted to pick his brain about was link acquisition.
Stephan has written a lot about it in the past, and I wanted to know more. In the video below Stephan talks about what tools you can use for better link acquisition.
Here are some key takeaways from the video:
- One of Stephan’s favorite tools for link acquisition, specifically link outreach, is Pitchbox. What that tool allows you to do is find good prospects based on domain authority and things of that nature. Then Pitchbox builds a list of prospects for you and puts it in a CRM system.
- What Stephan does next using Pitchbox is prioritize his list of prospects. Once that’s done, then you can even upload templates of emails to send to those prospects. During this phase, Stephan doesn’t recommend pitching at them right away, but rather focus on starting a conversation.
- Incorporate things into your outreach emails that makes them sound individualized and personal. Anything that comes across too much like an email blast is likely to get ignored. Mention one of your prospect’s recent post or something they have done in the past that you admire.
- What Stephan does to make each email sound personal is have templates set up, and then get an assistant to go through each site and pick out something personal to insert into that prospect’s outreach email.
- Stephan recommends sending more than one email to your prospects. if you send two or three emails, Stephan says your response rate will increase by at least 60%. With that being said, don’t go overboard and send too many emails. Three emails with 7-10 days between them is a good formula.
- Stephan combines Pitchbox with link analysis tools so that he can identify great, authoritative sources to send outreach emails to.
Please visit SEJ’s YouTube page for more video interviews.
