In the short year that I’ve been involved in digital marketing, one of the most infuriating yet rewarding aspects of the job is link building. The ability to find perfect opportunities amongst the various niches, blogs, journals and articles would be near on impossible were it not for the tools and hacks (techniques) that I’ve been introduced to.

So here we have it, my favourite search tools and hacks to find great link building opportunities:

Buzzsumo

Usually my first port of call, this tool helps you discover viral content, along with a variety of influencers within a particular niche.

Looking for content ideas is really easy on here, as it shows you the interactions across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pintrest and Google+, with information such as amount of shares, who is sharing and whether the content is an infograph, article, image, or video.

Using the influencer tab highlights a vast array of bloggers, companies and journalists within chosen a niche. You can also use various filters to find that perfect outreach opportunity by looking at the average number of tweets, retweets, reply ratio and page/domain authority.

The ability to export all of this data into excel is also great little feature.

Followerwonk

This tool is rather similar to Buzzsumo, however, Followerwonk offers a little more in the way of geographical accuracy. You can target specific areas throughout the world, which is rather useful when working on SMEs, or on location specific campaigns.

Searching Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr

Where better to find viral content and influencers than your very own newsfeed, timeline or homepage. It is very easy to navigate and very easy to find out what potential customers and targets are thinking by checking the comments sections.

Open Site Explorer & Majestic

Moving away from the social side of things, using both Moz’s Open Site Explorer and Majestic in combination allows you to check out the backlinks of not only the domain you’re working with, but also your competitors.

Simply type the keywords you’re trying to rank for in Google to find the main competitors and plonk them into Majestic and Open Site Explorer (the reason for doing this, is that each tool looks at different parts of the web and may crop up different results).

From here, you can find a fair few opportunities to increase the link building and outreach potential.

Outdated content opportunities

Basically what this entails is searching for outdated content within a niche. The aim of this would be to update the piece, add more current and relevant information, then begin to outreach it. It’s been a great way to generate some content during the time of a slight mental block!

An added bonus to this is the instant outreach list you can generate, simply by looking at who linked/shared the previous piece.

I use the outdated content finder over at Greenlane SEO.

Blogcatalog

This is a site I’ve just recently discovered, so don’t think I’ve used it quite to the best of its abilities, however I added it to the list as think it has potential to be a great tool.

As the name suggests, it’s a catalogue of blogs ranging from art, beauty, how to, tech, opinions and so on.

Delving into the bloggers tab highlights a “Blogger Cities” section, where again much like followerwonk, you can target specific geographies within a niche.

Google Search Operators

The final section of this post is looking at a couple of my more frequently used Operators for Google.

-Site:
Example: -site:Blueclawsearch.co.uk+“Blueclaw”

This is great for finding potential link opportunities. I use this to search for any mentions of the site on other websites. If there is a mention without a link, I’ll ping the webmaster a polite message and ask them to put a link up, as this will help readers interested in our site to find what they’re looking for.

in:news
Example: tech blogger in:news

This is a great way to find information about a particular niche. If you happen to strike lucky, you might even find a quote from niche bloggers or a list of bloggers who have recently been in the news.

Link:
Example: Link:Blueclawsearch.co.uk

Another way to check backlinks. It offers another variation of opensite explorer or Majestic. It doesn’t offer as many results as the aforementioned, however it may bring up a few new results.

Google blogsearch

There are a few sceptics about this function, and I can see why, as it will often throw news stories and irrelevant blogs into the mix. However, anything that adds in a few results about a particular niche can’t do any harm. It often highlights a few bloggers or content ideas I haven’t seen before, and the search tool with the custom time range is rather useful.

As mentioned at the beginning of this post, this is in no way a comprehensive list, but just a few tools and hacks I’ve found that have helped me.
You’ll find your own way of doing things, but most importantly, it is best to find what fits best and what you’re comfortable with doing.