How to launch a link building campaign for your existing content

Before you start

You’ll need to be familiar with how to perform keyword research and possibly have a keyword strategy already. Check out SOP 011 (web version) to learn how to do that

Key steps 40 steps

1. 1 Install the Hunter Chrome extension and set up an account.
2. 2 Get an ahrefs account.
3. 3 (Optional but recommended) Create a Buzzstream account. We recommend the Group plan since it allows you to send bulk email campaigns.
4. 4 Open the “Template 025: Link Opportunities Worksheet (web version)” document, go to “File → Make a copy” to create your own copy of the worksheet.
5. 5 Determine the blog posts or pages on your site that you wish to build links to. Add the URL to each of those to column A of the “Research” sheet.
6. 6 Write the title of each page / post in column B of the “Research” sheet.
7. 7 Determine the topic / searcher intent that you want to build links around for each of those blog posts or pages. If you are not sure about how to perform this step, you should read SOP 011: How to Do Keyword Research for SEO (web version).
8. 8 Write the target keyword for each post in column C of the “Research” sheet.
9. 9 Using Google Chrome, open an incognito window (Ctrl+Shift+N if you use PC, or Cmd+Shift+N if you use Mac), and perform a Google search for each of the target keywords—this will show you the best-ranking content for your target keyword or, in other words, the content you’re competing against.
10. 10 Open each of the organic search results (those below the ads) in the first page. You job will be to determine whether your content is better than the one provided by the competitor and why:
11. 11 Repeat steps 6 and 7 for all of the blog posts / pages from column A that you wish to build links to.
12. 12 Log into your ahrefs account.
13. 13 Open your copy of the “Link Opportunities Worksheet” on the “Research” sheet.
14. 14 Open the links in column E, this will bring up the ahrefs page for all pages linking to each competitor (one page per domain)
15. 15 Click “Export”, select “All {number of rows}”, select the type of encoding format for download and click “Export”
16. 16 After a few seconds, the export will be ready at either one below
17. 17 Go back to the “Link Opportunities” spreadsheet, and follow the steps below.
18. 18 Open the new sheet you just imported and keep only the “Referring Page Title”, “Referring Page URL”, and “Target URL” columns—delete the rest.
19. 19 Update the name of the sheet by changing it to “Link Opportunities - [Target keyword]” with the target keyword you selected for the campaign (column C of the “Research” sheet).
20. 20 Add columns titled “Author name”, “Contact name”, “Email address”, “Status”, and “Notes”
21. 21 Open each of the URLs in column A of the “Link targets” sheet.
22. 22 Write down the name of the author of the post in column D.
23. 23 Try to find contact information for the webmaster or content manager:
24. 24 Add the contact name and email address to columns E and F the “Link targets” sheet, respectively.
25. 25 Repeat the steps above for each URL in column A.
26. 26 Open Buzzstream and create a new project
27. 27 Go back to the “Link Opportunities Worksheet”, navigate to the “Link targets” sheet, and click on “File → Download as → Comma-separated values (.csv, current sheet)” to download a .csv file.
28. 28 Go back to Buzzstream and click on “Create a Research List”
29. 29 Choose to upload a CSV and select the “Match My CSV” option.
30. 30 Click “Create New Sequence”
31. 31 Name your sequence. Our suggestion is that you name it: “Link Building Campaign” + target keyword (e.g., in our example, this became “Link Building Campaign - social media automation”).
32. 32 At your “Research List” Dashboard, select the sites you want to outreach to by checking the box on the left.
33. 33 Click on “Outreach” tab located above the list of sites -> Send Individually
34. 34 Click on Start Outreach.
35. 35 To check or personalise the next email, Click “next >” at the upper right.
36. 36 Click on “Start sequence now” after you are ready to send the emails.
37. 37 Click on Outreach -> Bulk Send.
38. 38 Choose a sequence or template.
39. 39 Click on Next: Review.
40. 40 Check again to see if everything is correct.

What is inside 48 headings

The document 23 pages

Related resources