Unclank: Link Prospector: A Link Prospecting Tool by Citation Labs

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So I came in touch with one of the best Linkbuilders in the field of SEO, Garrett French. I follow his posts in Search Engine Watch – simply because they are awesome and provide high-value information to me and my team. I asked him if I could have a sneak peek into one of his latest projects - a link prospecting tool named Link Prospector.

Garrett helped build one of the most popular linkbuilding tools available in the market right now – Ontolo. Knowing that, it’s pretty much a no-brainer that I really had to look into what he’s up to now in his new-founded company Citation Labs.

After going through Link Prospector, here’s my two-cents about it:

Ease of Use

Link Prospecting Capability

Link Prospects Quality

Features

Overall:

Dashboard

The dashboard lets you check out your previous prospects, rename or delete them. It also lets you create a new campaign. Using Link Prospector is very simple and easy to use. You don’t have a whole lot of options to confuse you. You only have to start by creating a new campaign.

After you have created a new campaign, you will see this screen. Obviously, you have to click on Find Prospects to start prospecting.

Prospecting

When you are inside your campaign, you can then create a new report. The Prospects section of Link Prospector lets you choose your Report Type and filter your report by Region / Country, Search Scope, Depth, TLD and Date Range. These are very powerful filters and can really help you narrow your prospecting down.

There are different report types you can choose from. You can filter your reports to:

Guest Posting – Discover blogs who allow guest posts and offer your writing services.

Links Pages – Find the resource and links pages that will add a link to your site.

Content Promoters – Find writers who are likely to cover your story, or repost your infographics and articles.

Reviews – Look for people who review products or services in your space.

Giveaways – Offer goods and services in exchange for coverage.

Donations – Be charitable and earn links through sponsorship opportunities.

Commenting – Find the posts relevant to your key phrases. Join the conversation, and link to your site.

Expert Interviews – identify domain experts you can interview, or pitch your own expertise.

Directories – Identify quality directories to help you get your site listed quickly.

Forums – Add value to the conversation and build brand equity.

Topical Blogs – Pinpoint the blogs that cover your industry, and are likely to post about your site.

Professional Organizations – Locate trades and professional organizations you can join.

Research: Content – Find top tips for writing great content.

Custom – Use any amount of research phrases you like.

You can filter your prospecting further by using the Select Region filter – to which country and region you’re looking for a prospect in. You can also filter the Search Scope of your results -either web only, blog only, or both.

You can also narrow your results down further by filtering the depth of the results to the first 20 results – giving you the top 20 most relevant results from the tool.

TLD filter is one of the best features of Link Prospector. Getting a thousand .edu or .gov most relevant results that can help you in your link building opportunities is the ‘shiznit’. It’s amazing to have a list of 1,000 .edu prospects – even if you get just a 3% conversion rate, that’s still 30 .edu links for you. If you didn’t know, .edu and .gov are high authority links – and it’s really difficult getting some for yourself.

To top it all off, you can choose the freshness of your prospects by being able to choose a date range. You can choose ‘Any time’, ‘Past 24 hours’, ‘Past Week’, ‘Past Month’, or ‘Past Year’.

The Research Phrases section is all about your keywords and/or niche. This is where you are telling Link Prospector ‘These are the kinds of websites I’m looking for’. ‘Exclude Domains’ deals with your exclusions (in the exclusions section of the tool) – which you should fill up to tell Link Prospector which URLs you want Link Prospector to exclude from the report. You use the exclusion tool if you have already been to that URL and have contacted the webmaster or you have gotten a successful link, etc