How To Create A Linkbuilding Hitlist

A lot of times at the beginning of a project we have no idea who the target online audience of the website should be. Sadly the client usually doesn’t either, but they almost always know who their competitors are. If we know who the competition is we can find out what has worked for them and create a hit list of bloggers and websites to target in the campaign.

Who Is Linking To My Competitors, But Not Me?

By knowing who the top competitors are we can use the Majestic Clique Hunter tool to find what websites are linking to the competition the most and are not yet linking to our site. This gives us a list of websites who we know link to a lot of content in our industry and so are likely to also link to our website. This “Hit List” is a great place to start a campaign.

The 6 Step Process To Create A Linkbuilding Hitlist

1. Go To Majestic Clique Hunter (Direct Link)

2. Put In Your Website & Top Competitors

Be sure to include your own website & up to 9 competitors with a paid account.

They have a free option but you can only compare yourself to 1 other site.

3. Export The Results

Everything is easier in Excel 🙂

4. Filter for by links that are not linking to your domain ( backlinks_YourDomain )

We included our own domain so that we can filter out websites that are already linking to our domain. This will give us the remaining websites who link to our competitors but not us yet.

5. Filter by Number of Matches

The number of matches is the amount of times that the domain links to a competitor. Again the idea is that the more matches they have to competitors the more likely they are to actually link to you.

As you can see in the screen shot there are several website that link upto 4 of my competitors but not me.

6. Filter by Citation Flow & Trust Flow

The next filter is to organize the websites by quality. Majestic has it’s own scoring system called Citation Flow & Trust Flow.

Citation Flow = The amount of links to the domain

Trust Flow = The quality of the links to the domain

The higher the flow number the better but just watch out for websites with really high Citation Flow and really low Trust Flow.

I Have My Linkbuilding Hitlist, Now What?

After following the steps you now have a Hitlist of websites that you can strive to work with. If you want to see a copy of the example I used you can check out this spreadsheet. Once you have the Hitlist here is what you should do next:

1. Checkout the websites to determine which you would like to target
2. See what kind of content would work well for there audience
3. Start pitching sites on the Hitlist, I use Buzzstream to speed up the process
4. Enjoy getting quality links with less effort

How Do You Create A Linkbuilding Hitlist?

I’m always looking for ways to improve my skills. I was sharing this Majestic process with Sean who asked me to share it here. Would be great to hear what other ideas his brilliant readers have. Just leave them in the comments and I’ll get back to you.