With brands and businesses increasingly using blogs as a pseudo-marketing strategy to put themselves out there, market their products and services, and provide information, blogs and articles are integral. Such that these, under the gambit of content marketing, are a separate industry.
More so, quite a few businesses and brands explicitly have a designated blogs section on their websites. Open any blog, and you will see some keywords or terms highlighted as hyperlinks; these are part of a powerful link building strategy. All SEO services agree that link building campaigns are among those preferred strategies to help improve your organic rankings.
Before diving into the top link-building tools, one should understand the rationale behind doing so.
Advantages of link building
First and foremost, the strategy renders credibility to your website. These links, also known as hyperlinks or inbound links, serve as third-party sources that provide authority and importance to your site. This, in turn, helps increase the ranking of your website in search engines such as Google and Bing. These links determine the rank of your webpage. The advent brings forth the concept of SERP.
More the backlinks, the better. Doing so increases your competitive edge by fueling traffic to your page. It elevates the site metrics and also helps increase the SEO or Search Engine Optimization scores, opening your business and brand to revenue opportunities. Also, it helps lower the bounce rate for your website.
Now that you see why link building is paramount to your website, below are the five top tools that help achieve this endeavour.
SEMrush Backlink Gap Tool
The tool helps brands and businesses run a backlink gap analysis. The SEMrush Backlink Gap Tool renders you a digital summary of your market standing through competitor analysis. The competitor insights allow you to identify opportunities that openly link out to others – industry rivals – that directly compete with you in the same space or sector.
To uncover any untapped link building opportunities, all you need to do is enter your domain, along with up to four competitors. Once done, hit the ‘find prospects’ tab to get the results. These results will reveal to you the domains that link with the other sites or the ones that you missed.
More so, you can work to close this so-called gap by acquiring links that they have missed. The good news is that SEMrush shows you the backlinks that your competitors share.
The competitive standing is assessed through four categorical filters:
- Weak – domains pointing to you that are less than the competitors
- Strong – these point to you and not your competition
- Shared – these are common to you and your competitors
- Unique – these are linked with one domain
Google Search
Google, the most popular search engine the world over, serves as an invaluable tool for augmenting your link building strategy. It does this through its handy list of search operators. The operators fall into the categories – punctuation-based search operator, boolean search operator and advanced search operator.
The search operators enable users to transform regular search queries into targeted and specific results. The potent tool then presents these opportunities, including resource pages, link roundups, guest posts, journalists and more. However, these search operators require that users run their queries in a particular way by adding specific search commands.
Scrapebox
Another powerful tool for your link building campaign is Scrapebox. It is influential when used with specific Google Search Operators. Previously, it was a holy grail for black hat SEOs through the advent of automated blog commenting.
However, its strength is that it helps curate results from SERPs in seconds. The tool helps save considerable time and effort by scraping the prospect URLs and exporting them to you. No longer need you to engage in manual sorting and compiling of the URLs.
The unique selling proposition for Scrapeboxcomes from its standout features. It is highly customizable and offers several expansion options to users. In addition, it provides over 30 addons that help you pivot your strategy for better results. More so, it renders an excellent support system through videos, guides and 24/7 tech support staff.
HARO
HARO is incredible as it takes the credibility of your domain off the charts. The reason is it is the go-to link building tool for journalists. Journalists and media writers use HARO to seek out quality businesses and brands to quote in their articles. They search for businesses daily – or rather the weekdays – that helps pump the juice for the media news cycle. These publications are then authenticated and are backed up by comments, statements or advice when citing sources.
Businesses can sign up with HARO as a source. Once done, you are in for an excellent treat as journalists will send their requests right into your inbox.
GroupHigh
GroupHighis the lifeblood that has pumped the world’s largest, richest and up-to-date database for blogs. If you have an informative and engaging thinkpiece, a blog or write up and are looking to further its reach, Grouphigh serves as an ideal contender. It helps you find new prospects or influencers and other individuals who can help spread the word of wonders of your newly launched content piece.
A standout aspect is it helps with the natural picking up of links. It is excellent for widening the reach and amplifying your content.
What You Must Know
Blogs are informative and captivating and hence, are integral for businesses and brands. So profound is the content marketing gambit that business websites have a designated blogs section. A factor that enables some blogs to stand out from the crowd is link-building. Link-building helps increase visibility, improve SEO scores and lower bounce rates.
More so, it increases the site metrics. These translate into revenue opportunities for your brand. Among the numerous link-building tools out there, the top five are SEMrush Backlink Gap Tool, Google Search, Scrapebox, HARO and GroupHigh.
