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Ryan Pitylak is the CEO of Unique Influence, a full-service search marketing and digital PR agency. Unique Influence is not only a BuzzStream customer, they also provide content creation and link building services to a number of other BuzzStream customers. I’ve known Ryan for a long time and I’ve heard great things about their work from our customers, so when he offered to explain how BuzzStream and Citation Labs ties into his processes for link prospecting and relationship management, I jumped at it.
Background
75% of a website’s ranking in Google comes from its link profile, according to SEOMoz. This means that the quantity and authority of the links pointing into your website are critically important to its performance. At Unique Influence, we help our clients increase the number of organic, high quality links from relevant websites across the web.
We build relationships with top quality websites that are:
- Contextually relevant – Websites that are in the same industry or share the same audience
- High authority – Websites that have a high number of quality inbound links
- High quality – Websites that maintain a high level of quality in the content that they post on their site
Two of the key challenges to building high quality links are:
- Finding acceptable websites
- Contacting the sites in order to establish a relationship
Our Workflow
We use SEO tools like Link Prospector from Citation Labs (in collaboration with Whitespark.ca) and Buzzstream to build these relationships. Here’s how you can use these tools to find and create relationships with relevant websites:
Citation Labs
- We brainstorm search queries that will return websites that are relevant to our client.
- We then use the Citation Labs Link Prospector tool. Under the appropriate Campaign, we click on “Find Prospects” and define the search type, search depth and date range. Then we enter our queries and hit submit.
- Once the report is complete we export a CSV file of the “paths” to get the full list of URLs that resulted from the search.
Excel
- We open this CSV file in Excel and filter the results. For example, we may decide to eliminate duplicate domains or sort by a specific keywords etc.
- Then, we visit the websites in the list and check to see if these websites meet our quality filters. We have a long list of qualitative quality filters, so most of the websites get rejected at this stage. This is a critical step in the process because you want to make sure that you’re only building relationships with high quality, relevant websites.
- In Buzzstream, we import the qualitatively relevant websites into the appropriate project. These websites are imported as “Link Partners”.
- Buzzstream examines each URL for authority information, such as PageRank and MozRank. We look for sites that pass our quantitative screening process and weed out the websites that have low authority.
- Once we have a list of websites that have passed both our qualitative and quantitative filters, we will contact the owner of each website. Buzzstream can track your communication history if you give it your imap server information. Alternatively, you can BCC Buzzstream during your email conversations.
- We change the “Relationship Stage” for the Link Partner to “Attempting to Reach” in Buzzstream after we contact the website owner.
We update the Relationship Stage once we are successful at establishing a relationship with the website owner.
Using Citation Labs Link Prospecting tool allows us to define a universe of potential websites with whom we can develop relationships. Buzzstream allows us to filter out websites with low authority and track the conversations we have with the website owners.
The fact that these tools work together is a critical factor in delivering success for our clients. These tools allow us to successfully develop high quality link profiles for clients across industries and business models. Citation Labs, Buzzstream and Unique Influence are the ingredients in a recipe for search engine optimization success.
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