Building U.S. Domain Authority: Best applications for your linkbuilding campaign

If you’re serious about search engine optimization (SEO) strategies, you know that building backlinks is an inevitable part of this process. Backlink campaigns are part of offpage SEO—all the activity that takes place “off the page”. It includes your social media posts, PR, building relationships with influencers. Offpage works with onpage SEO and technical SEO. You really need all of these methodologies to be working together.

Now, with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), the link-building landscape is undergoing a big transformation. In this article, we will focus on the ways that AI has affected the linkbuilding landscape. Part of link-building’s evolution are new AI apps that are expediting the link-building process.

AI,  SEO and Building US Domain Authority

Link building plays a pivotal role in improving a website’s visibility and authority in search-engine rankings. When other websites link to your content, search engines perceive it as a vote of confidence—it validates your website and increases your Google authority. This, in turn, leads to higher rankings and increased organic traffic. Furthermore, quality backlinks help search-engine crawlers discover new pages and index them, ensuring that your website is visible to users searching for relevant keywords.

The evolution of link-building strategies

Linkbuilding strategies have adapted to changing algorithms and user preferences. Keyword stuffing and spammy directories are out. We’re now being held to higher ethical standards with guest blogging, influencer outreach, and content marketing.

AI means we’re at a new juncture

Search engines are smarter about understanding context and the relevance of links. AI algorithms can now distinguish between natural and artificial links, rewarding websites that have earned high-quality backlinks. Link-building strategies must now focus on creating valuable content that naturally attracts backlinks from authoritative sources. It aligns with Google’s 2022 Helpful Content Update—creating content that helps people do their jobs.

How to use these AI applications?

• Note that while all of these applications are using AI to build links, the approach for each is different. For some, you can start with a free trial, so take advantage of that as some of these apps get pricey.
• None of these apps is going to do the work of building backlinks for you. You still have to reach out and build the relationships that will lead to the links. It remains a time-consuming and tedious process, but these apps can be difference-makers.
• Take advantage of free trial subscription to get a feel of whether or not one of these apps is something you’ll really use.
• Here are five applications that use AI in the backlink building process:

1.Hunter

     

Hunter is an all-in-one email outreach platform that helps marketers, recruiters, salespeople, and anyone else who wants to connect with more people using emails. Hunter focuses on getting email addresses and communicating through that channel to create campaigns. It’s about cold emails and relationships–the source for building backlinks. Hunter’s been around since 2015.

Pricing:

• Free—with 1 user, 25 searches and 50 verifications/mo
• Upgrade to $50/month

2. LinkHunter

Outrank your competitors. LinkHunter is a DIY link-building tool that “helps you build more backlinks in just 7 days.” How this works. LinkHunter:

• Finds hundreds of relevant websites in seconds and shows their SEO value
• Lets you review websites from within the LinkHunter app
• Instantly discovers a website’s email
• Built-in email templates for messaging
• Add website lists into a spreadsheet

Benefits: So many ways to build backlinks: Guest post opportunities, promote content to influencers and get influencers to review your product.

Pricing:

• Free trial for 7 days
• Starter: $50/month
• Small business: $99
• Agency: $199 

3. Link Whisperer

Input the keyword you want to build links from and then specify the URL you want those links to go to. Link Whisper automatically builds links from all past and future mentions of those targeted keywords to the page of your choice. It also finds broken links and target keywords.

Link Whisper is a smart internal linking tool. Powered by artificial intelligence, Link Whisper starts suggesting relevant internal links when you start writing your article–right within the WordPress editor.

Pricing by license with all features:

• 1 license: $77
• 3 license: $117
• 10 seat license: $167

4. Can I Rank

CanIRank: Industry’s first SEO Intelligence tool. Can I Rank collects data and metrics from other SEO services, then adds a layer of machine learning intelligence. The deliverable? Besides insights, opportunities and personalized recommendations, you’ll spend less time fooling around with data and more time growing your website traffic.

• Find out which keywords your competitors are targeting. Think competitor research.
• Learn what Google considers related terms for your website, and which terms offer the greatest potential
• Lots of ways to cut the data–sort by search volume, ad value, and ranking difficulty

Keyword Research is done, automatically, for every campaign you launch.

Pricing:

• Free for very limited use. You will find that you quickly blow through the default free version.
• DIY individual @ $50/mo.
• DIY Pro @ $70/mo.

5. Brandcitations

Brandcitations is based on a simple premise: Their business is selling links and citations. The methodology is predicated on creating natural links on social, directories, and identifying guest posting opportunities.

• A link profile
• Attract a target audience that aligns with that profile
• Increasing keyword positions for Google

Pricing:

• Pricing is based on packages. 40 Dofollow links for 1 month is $390.
• 50 local directory links is $250
• Complex link-building for 1 month: $330

6. Pitchbox

Pitchbox helps you quickly find influencers in your niche—in a matter of seconds. It integrates with the major SEO providers–Moz, Majestic, SEMRush, Ahrefs and LRT. Assures that you only get the most authoritative publishers.

Save hundreds of hours each month by controlling your messaging. Customize each outreach email to your target opportunities, without manual input. Automatically follow up with prospects who haven’t responded, boosting response rates.

Pricing: Two levels

• Pro: @ 5K emails/mo @ $495/mo., billed annually
• Enterprise: @ 5K emails/mo; $1350/mo, 3 users, 3 email accounts, billed annually

7. BuzzStream

Get more links, traffic and coverage. BuzzStream is an end-to-end outreach platform that helps you stay organized and grow your digital PR and link-building results. A team of one or one hundred.

• Build better lists in a fraction of the time.
• Scale and send emails
• No more lost emails inbox overload
• Create actionable data

Pricing:

• Free trial
• Starter: $24/mo for a single user and 1000 contacts
• Growth: $124/mo for three users and 25,000 contacts

Conclusion:

• Building backlinks is an inevitable part of an SEO strategy.
• Search engines are smarter about understanding context and the relevance of links—a result of our increasingly longtail search queries.
• AI algorithms can now distinguish between natural and artificial links.
• We’ve detailed five of the best linkbuilding applications. Unlike a lot of app reviews where all of the apps do pretty much the same thing, that’s not the case here. These five apps all help build backlinks, but the methodology is different for each of these applications. They’re providing emails of prospective contacts or you’re buying backlinks outright. Another app connects users with influencers. Weigh cost vs value.

Contact Top of Mind Marketing. We’re writers and digital media specialists, 510.292.1843, jpeischel@top-mindmarketing.com