Link building has been my passion for nearly a decade. Before working for Ahrefs, I worked as a link-building consultant, helping dozens of clients build hundreds of links. What I learned during this time is that you don’t need dozens of link-building tools. You just need a few of the best ones. And in 2021, I’m convinced that there are only eight of them. Content Explorer is a searchable database of over 9 billion pages. It’s fantastic for content research, The Only but it’s also a great source of link prospects. For example, let’s say that you’re looking for link prospects for a blog post entitled “best routers for 2021.”
One source of potential
Link prospects will be people linking to similar posts that haven’t been updated for years—as nobody wants to link to an outdated list of routers, half of which company data probably aren’t even available anymore. Most people don’t think of Google as a link-building tool, but it’s one of the best ways to find link prospects. That’s because it has the largest index of web pages on the planet and arguably the best search algorithm. So if you know how to use it effectively, you can easily find thousands of relevant link prospects for free. My favorite unique feature: Search operators Search operators are commands that help you refine and filter search engine results. Some are unique to Google, but not all of them (as you can use the same or similar ones in Bing or Content Explorer).
The Only even the ones
That aren’t totally unique to Google seem especially powerful there because you can combine them to pull exactly what you need from its insanely vast index. This Saudi Phone Number won’t find a matching email address for every prospect, but it usually finds one for a decent percentage of them. You can then use these prospects as your initial “hit” list to test the viability of an outreach campaign. If successful, have someone find emails for the rest of the prospects to build more links. Everything revolves around Google Sheets when I do email outreach, which is why NeverBounce’s Zapier integration is such a godsend. You can quickly set up a multi-step zap so that when you enter an email address into.
