If you’re in the business of link building, then you know how important it is to constantly be on the lookout for new link prospects. After all, the more link prospects you have, the more likely you are to be successful in your link building efforts.

Link-building prospecting is a great way to drive sales and generate leads, as it helps create valuable connections and improve your online presence.

But where do you find new link prospects? And once you find them, how do you know if they’re worth pursuing?

In this article, we’ll share with you 5 ideas for link building prospecting. These ideas should help you generate a steady stream of new link prospects, so you can keep your link building efforts moving forward.

Choose Your Link Building Strategy

The main reason you need to choose your link building strategy before prospecting is because the type of links you want will determine the type of websites you target. 

For example, if you want to build links for SEO purposes, then you would want to target websites that are relevant to your niche and have a high domain authority. 

On the other hand, if you want to build links for brand awareness, then you would want to target websites that have a lot of traffic and are trusted by their audience. 

For example when targeting salary information you should link to a leading website in the salary and jobseeker market.  

By choosing your link building goal first, you will be able to save a lot of time and effort in the long run.

In addition, there are countless link building strategies out there, but the three most popular are: 

• Anchor text strategy
• Guest posting
• Competitor backlinks

Each has its own unique approach to prospecting, which we will be looking at further down in the article.

Determine Your Target Metrics

There are a number of reasons why you should first determine your target SEO metrics when doing link building prospecting. By doing so, you can ensure that you are focusing your efforts on the most important metrics, and that you are not wasting time on metrics that are not relevant to your goals.

Domain and Page Authority

Domain Authority and Page Authority are two important metrics used by SEO professionals to gauge the quality of a website. 

Domain Authority is a measure of a website’s overall link popularity, while Page Authority focuses on the link popularity of a specific page. 

Both metrics are important for link building prospects, as they can help to identify websites that are likely to have high-quality links.

Another surprising fact is that 56% of non-native English speakers actively avoid English language websites altogether and spend the majority of their time on websites that are written in their native language. There are many opportunities to gain quality backlinks from multilingual content. When you consider that only 4.5% of the world’s population are native English speakers, with a further 19% speaking it as a second language, to varying levels of proficiency, it quickly becomes clear that “everybody speaks English” is a myth.

In other words, more than 75% of the global population doesn’t speak any English at all. That’s a vast potential to build up your domain authority from high authority domains across the languages, i.e. Spanish, Deutch or French. You even do not have to translate website content for the very start of your journey to increasing organic traffic. But nowadays, it is more and more easier with advancement of content management systems.

Number of Backlinks

The number of backlinks is an important metric for link building prospects because it indicates the popularity and authority of a website in the Digital Marketing process. 

A website with a large number of backlinks is more likely to be visited by users and is more likely to rank higher in search engine results pages. 

Additionally, a website with a large number of backlinks is more likely to be trusted by users and is more likely to be considered an authority on the topic.

Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is the lifeblood of any website and an important digital touchpoint on the prospecting journey. It is the visitors that come to your website from search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. These are the people that are looking for what you have to offer.

The math is simple: the more people come to a page, the more people will ultimately click on your link, which is exactly what you want. 

Outbound Links

The number of outbound links on a page is an important metric for link building prospects because the more outgoing links there are, the more diluted the PageRank each link can pass on. 

Having more outgoing links from a page means that each link has less PageRank to pass on, making it less valuable as a link building prospect.

So, pages with fewer outbound links make for better link building prospects.

Use Advanced Search Operators 

Some strategies, like the anchor text strategy, resource page link building, or even guest posting involve finding your prospects through Google – either manually or with the help of prospecting automation tools.

These strategies require very specific types of prospects, which can be difficult to find with generic searches.

Luckily, there are countless advanced search operators that can help you narrow down your search A LOT.

The three most valuable Google advanced search operators for link building prospecting are:

• Inurl: returns results with a specific word/phrase in the URL;
• Intitle: returns results with a specific word/phrase in the title;
• Intext: returns results with a specific word/phrase in the body of the content;
• “-”: excludes results that meet your chosen criteria.

Let’s take a look at an example:

Inurl:blog -intitle:”link building” intext:”link building prospecting”

This search string tells Google to only return pages that are part of the blog, mention link building prospecting somewhere in the content, but are not directly about link building.

Such results would make for prime anchor text link building strategy prospects for an article such as this one.

For guest posting, it’s even easier: simple type in your niche + “write for us”, and you will be greeted with a list of websites in your niche that openly accept guest posts.

Steal Your Competitors’ Backlinks

There are a couple of reasons for this. First, by checking your competitor’s backlink profiles, you can quickly and easily see what kind of links they are building. 

This gives you a good idea of the kinds of links that are valuable to your niche, and it also gives you an idea of the kinds of links that you might be able to get for your own website.

Second, by checking your competitor’s backlink profiles, you can also get an idea of the kinds of link building strategies they are using. 

This can give you some good ideas of how to go about building links for your own website.

If your content is better than your competitors’, the websites linking to them also make for prime link building opportunities. 

Also, with this approach, you can generate hundreds of link prospects within just a few minutes, whereas manual prospecting can take hours on end.

There are many backlink monitoring tools available, such as Ahrefs and SEMRush.

After you have created your list of prospects, find the contacts, for example with a linkedin search and contact them directly with your pitch.

Take Advantage of Software For Prospecting

We have already mentioned Ahrefs and SEMRush for competitor backlinks prospecting. Of course you could always outsource this to a professional.

However, there are also many web scraping tools available that can help you speed up the tedium of manually selecting anchor text/resource page/guest posting prospects. If you’re organising an event look into proper business management systems that offer conferencing capabilities.. 

And example of such a tool is Respona – it pulls results directly from either Google or Bing, can run multiple queries at the same time, and further streamlines your link building outreach process by helping you find proper contact information and even automating the personalization of your link building pitches.