SEO
12 Great Link Building Tools That Are Essential To Your Success
![12 Great Link Building Tools That Are Essential To Your Success 12 Great Link Building Tools That Are Essential To Your Success](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/1674146573_12-Great-Link-Building-Tools-That-Are-Essential-To-Your.jpg)
Link-building strategies, along with SEO tools, have certainly changed over the years.
Since the old automated link-building tools that automatically placed content like KontentMachine or GSA’s Search Engine Ranker, modern tools have moved to manual research and outreach platforms.
Tools that many of my link-building colleagues and I use today look more like ones used for public relations (PR) rather than link-building. However, there are still tools specific to link building that aren’t going anywhere.
These can be divided into four categories:
- Link research.
- Prospecting and outreach.
- Reporting.
- AI-powered tools.
Emerging technologies powered by AI can make the link-building process easier.
Link Research | Prospecting And Outreach | Reporting | AI-Powered Tools |
1. Majestic
Excellent for identifying the types of domains you should generate links from. |
3. Pitchbox
Combines email outreach with SEO metrics. |
8. Agency Analytics
Connects a variety of performance metrics. |
10. Link Whisperer
Good for internal linking efforts. |
2. Ahrefs
Provides useful reports to analyze trends. |
4. BuzzSumo
Use to identify authors and sharers/backlinkers. |
9. Cyfe
Customizable but automatic reporting. |
11. Postaga
Find opportunities and initiate outreach. |
5. Hunter.IO
A browser extension that helps you find contact information. |
12. CTRify
WordPress plugin that generates content. |
||
6. BrightLocal
Submit and manage citations. |
|||
7. HARO |
Link Research Tools
Link research is vital to figuring out what type of sites you should be approaching. This includes establishing quality criteria, categories of sites, authority metrics, and others.
Majestic and Ahrefs are two research tools that provide large databases and robust reporting.
I’ve included both of these sites as I constantly see each having data that the other doesn’t.
You may find some links to your competitors’ sites in Majestic that aren’t listed in Ahrefs and vice versa.
These tools can be used together to build a comprehensive list of sites to analyze. As with many SEO tools, the pricing depends on how many features your team needs.
1. Majestic
- Pricing: $49.99 per month with one user for the ‘Lite’ package. $99.99 per month for the “Pro” package, which they recommend for SEO agencies and consultants.
- Payment options: Monthly or receive a discount for an annual subscription.
Here are some recommendations on using it and what reports should influence your link-building.
- Topics: This data can be used to identify the types of sites you should be generating links from. Consider running this report on the link profiles for top-ranking sites, then finding sites that fit into similar categories.
- Referring Domains: Use this to evaluate the number of unique domains you should focus on building for your site. This also offers a look into the trust/citation flow distribution (count of domains by trust/citation flow).
2. Ahrefs
- Pricing: $99 per month with only one user for the ‘Lite’ plan. $199 per month for the “Standard” plan.
- Payment options: Monthly or receive a discount for an annual subscription.
![12 Great Link Building Tools That Are Essential To Your Success Ahrefs tool](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/1674146572_924_12-Great-Link-Building-Tools-That-Are-Essential-To-Your.png)
In contrast to Majestic, Ahrefs has some reports that are much easier to run inside the tool. It certainly costs more, but if you want more data, then Ahrefs is the right choice.
Here are reports to use in Ahrefs over Majestic:
- Pages > Best by links: Two useful applications of this report are:
- Identify competitors’ most linked content to influence your content strategies.
- Identify the type of sites that link to the content you will produce.
- Pages > Best by link growth: This is a “trend” report providing content that has been generating links over the last 30 days. Find content here that is receiving a rapid number of links and create more robust content.
Prospecting And Outreach Tools
Finding highly relevant sites that may link to your content is the most excruciating part of link building.
You can create a large list of sites and bulk outreach to save time, but when evaluating your link-building success on links gained per hour and the quality of those links, it’s best to handle prospecting manually or in a semi-automated approach.
I’ll go through five tools, Pitchbox, BuzzSumo, Hunter.io, BrightLocal, and HARO.
These tools can be used for the most popular link-building strategies.
3. Pitchbox
- Pricing: Averages $500+ per month.
- Payment options: Prices are dependent on an individual walkthrough with Pitchbox.
Pitchbox is one of the pricier tools on the market compared to email tools like MailChimp, but integrated prospecting helps reduce the time to qualify sites.
The prospecting sites list builder and SEO metrics integrated right into the opportunities report make the tool stand out.
![12 Great Link Building Tools That Are Essential To Your Success Pitchbox](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/1674146572_524_12-Great-Link-Building-Tools-That-Are-Essential-To-Your.png)
4. BuzzSumo
- Pricing: $99 per month for the “Pro” package. $179 per month for the “Plus” package. There’s a pared-down free version with limited searches per month.
- Payment options: There is also a free version with limited features.
This is an excellent tool for building lists of blogs, influencers, and authors. Out of all the prospecting tools on the list, BuzzSumo has the best filtering options.
You can use the tool for a lot of purposes, but for link building, these are two effective use cases:
- Identifying authors: The content research and influencers sections provide lists of authors/influencers that are searchable by keywords in the content they shared or produced. One fantastic use for this is to search through the “most shared” report and find influencers that received more than 2,000 shares of their content, then outreach to them to share yours. This can yield a lot of natural links.
- Identifying sharers/backlinks: The second use goes a layer deeper than the first, finding those that have shared the content. Pull a list of shares or backlinking websites by content, then create similar but better content.
![12 Great Link Building Tools That Are Essential To Your Success Buzzsumo platform](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/1674146572_496_12-Great-Link-Building-Tools-That-Are-Essential-To-Your.png)
5. Hunter.io
- Pricing: Starts at free. The first two upgraded packages are $49 per month and $99 per month.
- Payment options: Free for 25 monthly searches up to $399 per month for 30,000 searches.
This browser extension finds email addresses for easy contact options.
It helps cut down on time spent sifting through About pages. You can also take it a step further and use the tool for outreach.
![12 Great Link Building Tools That Are Essential To Your Success Hunter.io](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/1674146572_854_12-Great-Link-Building-Tools-That-Are-Essential-To-Your.png)
6. BrightLocal
- Pricing: $29-$79 per month, depending on package size.
- Payment options: You can also pay for the citation builder, reviews, or enterprise.
Citation building is important for local SEO and should be considered a link-building project.
One of the tools with the best value for submitting and managing citations is BrightLocal.
There are two components: citation monitoring and citation building. The tool also allows you to figure out how you’re ranking based on the local competition.
![12 Great Link Building Tools That Are Essential To Your Success BrightLocal](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/1674146572_69_12-Great-Link-Building-Tools-That-Are-Essential-To-Your.png)
7. HARO
- Pricing: Starts at free. The first paid plan is $19 per month, which adds alerts and search functionality.
- Payment options: The free options offer media options delivered to your email three times a day and up to $149/month for premium.
While this tool is traditionally used in the journalism world, it can also help link builders. It connects you with credible sources and allows you to build natural backlinks.
![12 Great Link Building Tools That Are Essential To Your Success HARO](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/12-Great-Link-Building-Tools-That-Are-Essential-To-Your.jpg)
Reporting Tools
Although many of the tools in the previous section have reporting functionality built in, I’ve found them lacking in custom reporting or the ability to associate links to ranking performance.
These tools solve that issue; AgencyAnalytics and Cyfe.
8. Agency Analytics
- Pricing: $12 per month, per campaign. $18 per month per campaign for custom reporting features.
- Payment options: Pay annually to save money.
Agency Analytics automatically populates the dashboard with data from Moz and Majestic and connects that data to critical performance metrics, like ranking and organic traffic.
Qualified traffic that converts to leads or sales is the purpose of link-building and SEO efforts, so reporting needs to make a connection between them.
![12 Great Link Building Tools That Are Essential To Your Success Agency Analytics](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/1674146572_602_12-Great-Link-Building-Tools-That-Are-Essential-To-Your.png)
9. Cyfe
- Pricing: $19 per month for one user, with higher tiers for more users.
- Payment options: Unlimited users for $89/month.
This tool can be built out as a hybrid between Google Sheets and Agency Analytics, meaning it’s very customizable but can also automatically and easily aggregate data from multiple sources to create a meaningful report.
![12 Great Link Building Tools That Are Essential To Your Success Cyfe](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/1674146572_638_12-Great-Link-Building-Tools-That-Are-Essential-To-Your.png)
AI-Powered Tools
AI-powered tools can significantly simplify otherwise complex and time-consuming tasks. Remember that some of your processes will require a human touch, so always evaluate how performance is impacted when integrating AI into your processes.
The following tools, Link Whisper, Postaga, and CTRify use AI to discover opportunities and automate processes.
10. Link Whisper
- Pricing: $77 per month for one site, with additional plans for more sites.
- Payment options: One to 50 site licenses.
Link Whisper is useful for internal link building.
AI technologies offer automatic link suggestions as content is produced. It can also help you recognize old content that needs more links directed to it.
The tools also automate links based on keywords and offer internal link reporting. It’s pretty all-inclusive and can help speed up internal link-building automatically.
![12 Great Link Building Tools That Are Essential To Your Success Link Whisperer](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/1674146572_54_12-Great-Link-Building-Tools-That-Are-Essential-To-Your.png)
11. Postaga
- Pricing: $84 per month for one account with five users. $250 per month for 30 accounts with unlimited users.
- Payment options: Save by paying annually.
Postaga does everything from finding opportunities to initiating outreach.
AI comes into play with the outreach assistant, which finds relevant information from influencers to include in emails. You can also enter your domain into the tool to find relevant campaign ideas.
![12 Great Link Building Tools That Are Essential To Your Success Postaga](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/1674146572_492_12-Great-Link-Building-Tools-That-Are-Essential-To-Your.png)
12. CTRify
- Pricing: A free version. $197 or $497, depending on the plan.
- Payment options: Single payment.
CTRify is a WordPress plugin that is great for content creation.
All it takes is a single keyword, and the AI creates the content you need for a specific campaign. You can then automatically publish the posts – it doesn’t get much simpler than that.
![12 Great Link Building Tools That Are Essential To Your Success CTRify](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/1674146572_191_12-Great-Link-Building-Tools-That-Are-Essential-To-Your.png)
Conclusion
I’ve curated this list with the intent to offer a tool for every reader, providing enterprise-level affordable solutions and highly technical tools.
There is diversity in the available tools, and you will need to select the right one for the job.
You don’t need to have a $1,000 monthly tool budget to be a link builder, but all of the tasks will take time. Allocating your time and budget in the right combination improves business outcomes.
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
SEO
WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation
![WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/WordPress-Insiders-Discuss-WordPress-Stagnation.jpg)
A recent webinar featuring WordPress executives from Automattic and Elementor, along with developers and Joost de Valk, discussed the stagnation in WordPress growth, exploring the causes and potential solutions.
Stagnation Was The Webinar Topic
The webinar, “Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?” was a frank discussion about what can be done to increase the market share of new users that are choosing a web publishing platform.
Yet something that came up is that there are some areas that WordPress is doing exceptionally well so it’s not all doom and gloom. As will be seen later on, the fact that the WordPress core isn’t progressing in terms of specific technological adoption isn’t necessarily a sign that WordPress is falling behind, it’s actually a feature.
Yet there is a stagnation as mentioned at the 17:07 minute mark:
“…Basically you’re saying it’s not necessarily declining, but it’s not increasing and the energy is lagging. “
The response to the above statement acknowledged that while there are areas of growth like in the education and government sectors, the rest was “up for grabs.”
Joost de Valk spoke directly and unambiguously acknowledged the stagnation at the 18:09 minute mark:
“I agree with Noel. I think it’s stagnant.”
That said, Joost also saw opportunities with ecommerce, with the performance of WooCommerce. WooCommerce, by the way, outperformed WordPress as a whole with a 6.80% year over year growth rate, so there’s a good reason that Joost was optimistic of the ecommerce sector.
A general sense that WordPress was entering a stall however was not in dispute, as shown in remarks at the 31:45 minute mark:
“… the WordPress product market share is not decreasing, but it is stagnating…”
Facing Reality Is Productive
Humans have two ways to deal with a problem:
- Acknowledge the problem and seek solutions
- Pretend it’s not there and proceed as if everything is okay
WordPress is a publishing platform that’s loved around the world and has literally created countless jobs, careers, powered online commerce as well as helped establish new industries in developing applications that extend WordPress.
Many people have a stake in WordPress’ continued survival so any talk about WordPress entering a stall and descent phase like an airplane that reached the maximum altitude is frightening and some people would prefer to shout it down to make it go away.
Acknowledging facts and not brushing them aside is what this webinar achieved as a step toward identifying solutions. Everyone in the discussion has a stake in the continued growth of WordPress and their goal was to put it out there for the community to also get involved.
The live webinar featured:
- Miriam Schwab, Elementor’s Head of WP Relations
- Rich Tabor, Automattic Product Manager
- Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO
- Co-hosts Matt Cromwell and Amber Hinds, both members of the WordPress developer community moderated the discussion.
WordPress Market Share Stagnation
The webinar acknowledged that WordPress market share, the percentage of websites online that use WordPress, was stagnating. Stagnation is a state at which something is neither moving forward nor backwards, it is simply stuck at an in between point. And that’s what was openly acknowledged and the main point of the discussion was understanding the reasons why and what could be done about it.
Statistics gathered by the HTTPArchive and published on Joost de Valk’s blog show that WordPress experienced a year over year growth of 1.85%, having spent the year growing and contracting its market share. For example, over the latest month over month period the market share dropped by -0.28%.
Crowing about the WordPress 1.85% growth rate as evidence that everything is fine is to ignore that a large percentage of new businesses and websites coming online are increasingly going to other platforms, with year over year growth rates of other platforms outpacing the rate of growth of WordPress.
Out of the top 10 Content Management Systems, only six experienced year over year (YoY) growth.
CMS YoY Growth
- Webflow: 25.00%
- Shopify: 15.61%
- Wix: 10.71%
- Squarespace: 9.04%
- Duda: 8.89%
- WordPress: 1.85%
Why Stagnation Is A Problem
An important point made in the webinar is that stagnation can have a negative trickle-down effect on the business ecosystem by reducing growth opportunities and customer acquisition. If fewer of the new businesses coming online are opting in for WordPress are clients that will never come looking for a theme, plugin, development or SEO service.
It was noted at the 4:18 minute mark by Joost de Valk:
“…when you’re investing and when you’re building a product in the WordPress space, the market share or whether WordPress is growing or not has a deep impact on how easy it is to well to get people to, to buy the software that you want to sell them.”
Perception Of Innovation
One of the potential reasons for the struggle to achieve significant growth is the perception of a lack of innovation, pointed out at the 16:51 minute mark that there’s still no integration with popular technologies like Next JS, an open-source web development platform that is optimized for fast rollout of scalable and search-friendly websites.
It was observed at the 16:51 minute mark:
“…and still today we have no integration with next JS or anything like that…”
Someone else agreed but also expressed at the 41:52 minute mark, that the lack of innovation in the WordPress core can also be seen as a deliberate effort to make WordPress extensible so that if users find a gap a developer can step in and make a plugin to make WordPress be whatever users and developers want it to be.
“It’s not trying to be everything for everyone because it’s extensible. So if WordPress has a… let’s say a weakness for a particular segment or could be doing better in some way. Then you can come along and develop a plug in for it and that is one of the beautiful things about WordPress.”
Is Improved Marketing A Solution
One of the things that was identified as an area of improvement is marketing. They didn’t say it would solve all problems. It was simply noted that competitors are actively advertising and promoting but WordPress is by comparison not really proactively there. I think to extend that idea, which wasn’t expressed in the webinar, is to consider that if WordPress isn’t out there putting out a positive marketing message then the only thing consumers might be exposed to is the daily news of another vulnerability.
Someone commented in the 16:21 minute mark:
“I’m missing the excitement of WordPress and I’m not feeling that in the market. …I think a lot of that is around the product marketing and how we repackage WordPress for certain verticals because this one-size-fits-all means that in every single vertical we’re being displaced by campaigns that have paid or, you know, have received a a certain amount of funding and can go after us, right?”
This idea of marketing being a shortcoming of WordPress was raised earlier in the webinar at the 18:27 minute mark where it was acknowledged that growth was in some respects driven by the WordPress ecosystem with associated products like Elementor driving the growth in adoption of WordPress by new businesses.
They said:
“…the only logical conclusion is that the fact that marketing of WordPress itself is has actually always been a pain point, is now starting to actually hurt us.”
Future Of WordPress
This webinar is important because it features the voices of people who are actively involved at every level of WordPress, from development, marketing, accessibility, WordPress security, to plugin development. These are insiders with a deep interest in the continued evolution of WordPress as a viable platform for getting online.
The fact that they’re talking about the stagnation of WordPress should be of concern to everybody and that they are talking about solutions shows that the WordPress community is not in denial but is directly confronting situations, which is how a thriving ecosystem should be responding.
Watch the webinar:
Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Krakenimages.com
SEO
Google’s New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO
![Google's New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO Google's New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Googles-New-Support-For-AVIF-Images-May-Boost-SEO.jpg)
Google announced that images in the AVIF file format will now be eligible to be shown in Google Search and Google Images, including all platforms that surface Google Search data. AVIF will dramatically lower image sizes and improve Core Web Vitals scores, particularly Largest Contentful Paint.
How AVIF Can Improve SEO
Getting pages crawled and indexed are the first step of effective SEO. Anything that lowers file size and speeds up web page rendering will help search crawlers get to the content faster and improve the amount of pages crawled.
Google’s crawl budget documentation recommends increasing the speeds of page loading and rendering as a way to avoid receiving “Hostload exceeded” warnings.
It also says that faster loading times enables Googlebot to crawl more pages:
Improve your site’s crawl efficiency
Increase your page loading speed
Google’s crawling is limited by bandwidth, time, and availability of Googlebot instances. If your server responds to requests quicker, we might be able to crawl more pages on your site.
What Is AVIF?
AVIF (AVI Image File Format) is a next generation open source image file format that combines the best of JPEG, PNG, and GIF image file formats but in a more compressed format for smaller image files (by 50% for JPEG format).
AVIF supports transparency like PNG and photographic images like JPEG does but does but with a higher level of dynamic range, deeper blacks, and better compression (meaning smaller file sizes). AVIF even supports animation like GIF does.
AVIF Versus WebP
AVIF is generally a better file format than WebP in terms of smaller files size (compression) and image quality. WebP is better for lossless images, where maintaining high quality regardless of file size is more important. But for everyday web usage, AVIF is the better choice.
See also: 12 Important Image SEO Tips You Need To Know
Is AVIF Supported?
AVIF is currently supported by Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, and Safari browsers. Not all content management systems support AVIF. However, both WordPress and Joomla support AVIF. In terms of CDN, Cloudflare also already supports AVIF.
I couldn’t at this time ascertain whether Bing supports AVIF files and will update this article once I find out.
Current website usage of AVIF stands at 0.2% but now that it’s available to surfaced in Google Search, expect that percentage to grow. AVIF images will probably become a standard image format because of its high compression will help sites perform far better than they currently do with JPEG and PNG formats.
Research conducted in July 2024 by Joost de Valk (founder of Yoast, ) discovered that social media platforms don’t all support AVIF files. He found that LinkedIn, Mastodon, Slack, and Twitter/X do not currently support AVIF but that Facebook, Pinterest, Threads and WhatsApp do support it.
AVIF Images Are Automatically Indexable By Google
According to Google’s announcement there is nothing special that needs to be done to make AVIF image files indexable.
“Over the recent years, AVIF has become one of the most commonly used image formats on the web. We’re happy to announce that AVIF is now a supported file type in Google Search, for Google Images as well as any place that uses images in Google Search. You don’t need to do anything special to have your AVIF files indexed by Google.”
Read Google’s announcement:
Supporting AVIF in Google Search
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands
SEO
CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO
![CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/CMOs-Called-Out-For-Reliance-On-AI-Content-For-SEO.jpg)
Eli Schwartz, Author of Product-Led SEO, started a discussion on LinkedIn about there being too many CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) who believe that AI written content is an SEO strategy. He predicted that there will be reckoning on the way after their strategies end in failure.
This is what Eli had to say:
“Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO.
This mistake is going to lead to an explosion in demand for SEO strategists to help them fix their traffic when they find out they might have been wrong.”
Everyone in the discussion, which received 54 comments, strongly agreed with Eli, except for one guy.
What Is Google’s Policy On AI Generated Content?
Google’s policy hasn’t changed although they did update their guidance and spam policies on March 5, 2024 at the same time as the rollout of the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update. Many publishers who used AI to create content subsequently reported losing rankings.
Yet it’s not said that using AI is enough to merit poor rankings, it’s content that is created for ranking purposes.
Google wrote these guidelines specifically for autogenerated content, including AI generated content (Wayback machine copy dated March 6, 2024)
“Our long-standing spam policy has been that use of automation, including generative AI, is spam if the primary purpose is manipulating ranking in Search results. The updated policy is in the same spirit of our previous policy and based on the same principle. It’s been expanded to account for more sophisticated scaled content creation methods where it isn’t always clear whether low quality content was created purely through automation.
Our new policy is meant to help people focus more clearly on the idea that producing content at scale is abusive if done for the purpose of manipulating search rankings and that this applies whether automation or humans are involved.”
Many in Eli’s discussion were in agreement that reliance on AI by some organizations may come to haunt them, except for that one guy in the discussion
Read the discussion on LinkedIn:
Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands
-
SEO7 days ago
Google’s Revamped Documentation Shows 4 Reasons To Refresh Content
-
SEARCHENGINES5 days ago
Daily Search Forum Recap: August 26, 2024
-
SEARCHENGINES7 days ago
Google Ranking Bug Fixed, August Core Update Swings, AI Overviews, Google Ads Bug & More
-
WORDPRESS7 days ago
How to Secure Your WordPress Store
-
SEARCHENGINES4 days ago
Daily Search Forum Recap: August 27, 2024
-
AFFILIATE MARKETING7 days ago
Business Owners are Batting 1,000 With This All-in-One Management Hub
-
SEARCHENGINES6 days ago
Google Migrating All To Google Merchant Center Next By September
-
WORDPRESS5 days ago
10 Best StudioPress Alternatives (Genesis Framework)
You must be logged in to post a comment Login