Link prospecting

UPDATE: There is a complete list of all of the operators in this article from my boiiiii Joshua

Common link prospecting queries

1. 1. MDKW market defining keywords
      1. Head terms We discussed in last video, no point going into it again
      2. ■ Kayak ■ kayaking ■ paddling
      3. ■ Kayak blog ■ Kayaking resources ■ Places to kayak intitle:list
   2. CDKW customer defining keywords
      1. Aimed more to finding your target audience
      2. ■ Kayaker ■ Paddler ■ Playboater
      3. ■ Playboater blog ■ Kayaker resources ■ Paddler vacation intitle:list
   3. PCKW product/category keywords
      1. Help you find things that may have gone undiscovered, target specific types of kayakers
      2. ■ Sea kayak ■ Sit on top kayak ■ Playboat ■ Creekboat ■ Inflatable kayak ■ Fishing kayak ■ waveski
   4. ITLs industry thought leaders
      1. Help you uncover opportunities, interviews of these people could be done for you etc
      2. The bog dogs ■ John Kimantas ■ Tyler Bradt ■ Harvey Golden
      3. Also search amazon for authors and forums that they probably participate in
      4. ■ [ITL] interview ■ intitle:“[ITL]” ■ [ITL] forum
   5. CCN’s competing company names
      1. Good to find out how bloggers etc treat companies like yours, what links do they get, how, why
      2. ■ [CCN] review ■ [CCN] forum  ■ [CCN] interview ■ [CCN] “guest article or post”
   6. GKWs geographic keywords
      1. It makes sense to dominate your local area first, be on the news, local media etc
      2. ■ State/province ■ Region ■ City ■ Neighborhood ■ ZIP code
      3. ■ [GKW] events ■ [GKW] blog ■ [GKW] kayak blog ■ [GKW] directory ■ [GKW] reviews
   7. RVKWs related vertical keywords
      1. Adjacent vertical, i call them bridge but its the same thing
      2. ■ Canoes ■ Rafting ■ Biking ■ Hiking ■ Boat Building 
      3. ■ [RVKW] blog list ■ [RVKW] news ■ [RVKW] forum ■ [RVKW] “guest post” ■ [RVKW] “roundup” ■ “[RVKW] resources” ■ [RVKW]

Our job in this area is primarily to filter out the shit, we can do that by forcing Google to show us what we want in the first 2/3 pages, anything beyond that is mostly useless.

Here is how to combat this issue:

1. Research phrases
2. Advanced operators
3. Tactic-specific footprints

An example is this, pause the video and try these 2 operators now, see the difference:

“crm guest post”  

CRM intitle:“guest post.”

Some overlap but mostly a bunch of new domains just by changing the query

Anatomy of a productive link prospecting query

We will continue the CRM example

1. Research phase
   1. Spend time building huge lists of synonyms
   2. You will uncover bridge areas, which are fine so long as you create content specifically for their vertical
   3. Customer relationship management “Customer relationship management”
   4. ■ CRM ■ customer relationship management ■ “customer relationship management” ■ ~crm ■ call center ■ “call center” ■ social crm ■ “social crm” ■ small business crm  ■ “small business” crm ■ business crm
2. Tactic specific footprints
   1. Footprints are things are specifically used regularly in particular page types, to find footprints just look for ⅚ pages that meet your criteria and look for commonly used phrases
   2. Guest posts for example use ■ guest post ■ “guest post” ■ “about the author” ■ “write for us” ■ “blog for us” ■ “guest blog for us” ■ “guest blogger” ■ guest blogger ■ guest contributor ■ “guest contributor” ■ “this is a guest post”
3. Advanced search operators
   1. My favourite and the absolute best way to find targets, I’ll make a video specifically on these at some point, think of them as filters, a way of speaking googles language and asking them extremely specifically what to show you, including particular file types
   2. List of operators at /link-prospecting
   3. Pour one out for dead homies ~ + daterange: link: inanchor: allinanchor:

Queries in action

Eric gave us a list of the exact queries he would use to run a guest posting campaign for a CRM site, you can find them on the page, from these queries Eric Eric gained 200 queries to run and scrpaed the top 10 results for each query, leaving him leaving an initial list of 581 domains on the surface digging down this is likely thousands of opportunitites

Research Phrases

■ CRM ■ customer relationship management ■ “customer relationship management” ■ ~crm ■ call center ■ “call center” ■ social crm ■ “social crm” ■ small business crm ■ “small business” crm ■ business crm

Operators and Footprints

■ guest post ■ “guest post” ■ “about the author” ■ “write for us” ■ “blog for us” ■ “guest blog for us” ■ “guest blogger” ■ guest blogger ■ guest contributor ■ “guest contributor” ■ “this is a guest post” ■ intitle:contributor ■ inurl:contributor ■ intitle:guest ■ inurl:guest ■ intitle:“guest post” ■ inurl:“guest post” ■ intitle:“write for us” ■ inurl:“write for us”

The tilde has since been retired so negates the rest of this chapter in Erics book but he talks about:

• Tilde Enables Synonym Discovery for Big Head Terms
• Tildes Work in Conjunction With Intitle and Inurl Operators
• Combine Tilde with Negative Operator for Interesting Lateral Leaps
• Tilde Impact on Domain Diversity Within Guest-Posting Prospect Queries

This operator list comes from Moz

Transcript:

– Yo, yo, yo! Link prospecting day, chapter seven. Sorry if I look like I’m eating. I’ve just finished one of these, Nurtrigrain, blueberry flavour, amazing! And pretty healthy too apparently. I’m also rocking the, if you can see that, black jaguar, white tiger #savethetigers. You gotta check out the tigers. They’re fucking amazing. We spoke about MDKWs market defining keywords in yesterday’s video. So, go back and check that out. These are essentially the head terms. The big, really broad keywords. That start you on the path to the rest of them. Examples of these are, we’re gonna use an example of a site that sells kayaks. That’s what Eric came up with. So, we’re gonna roll with it. These are gonna be head terms, sort of, you know check out our last video for more info on this. Examples of these are kayak, kayaking, and paddling. You can see much more of this all in the accompanying blog post. I’ve got the exact ones that I would use and stuff. So, if you need the exact examples of queries that have become up with. You can check that url out. It’s danray.me/link-prospecting that’s gonna contain the actual specific queries Eric used in these examples. We’re also gonna look at CDKWs. Let me just shut this door. We’re gonna look at CDKWs. These are customer defining keywords. These are sort of aimed at more finding your actual audience. We’re gonna, like they’re more a, sort of the longer tail things. The things that once people start typing these in, they’re gonna buy once they find you. Examples of these are kayaker, paddler, and play-boater. These are ways to describe the customers that you’re gonna, that you’re targeting. The next section is PCKWs. I don’t really like these little abbreviations. But product category keywords. These are ways to find undiscovered ideas. And they target specific types of kayakers. For example, sea kayak, sit-on-top kayak, play-boat, creek-boat, inflatable kayak. These things are good because they give you specific target markets. But you are going to have to produce some very, very specific content to attract those people. Next up is ITLs. Industry thought leaders, so, you find out whose being interviewed within your industry. You know, it uncovers places for you to be interviewed and stuff like that. Good examples of here, the big dogs are John Kimantas, Tyle, don’t know how to say this, how do you put a t after d? Tyle Bradt, don’t know! Harvey Golden. You also then need to search Amazon, because these mother fuckers write books. People who are thought leaders tend to write books. They don’t always deserve a book. But, it’s a thing these days. People write books. Next up, we’re looking at CCNs. These are competing company names. So, essentially this is just to see how other companies within your industry, your competition are treated by the media. Sort of, how many links they’re getting. What they’re doing, why they’re doing it. And how they’re doing it. To get links, and to get attention. You’ll uncover opportunities because anything that your competitors do, you can then do as well, all right? GKWs, these are geographic keywords, it just makes sense to dominate locally. So, you might as well be listed in your local media, on the news, etc. And the good examples of this, are your city or town, your zip or postcode in your country. Very, very simple ones. The next is RVKWs. So, this is related vertical keywords. These are adjacent, or vertical bridges. I call them bridges, because it’s sort of like if you can imagine here’s your industry, and here’s the next industry to you. If you can build a logical bridge over to it. To target their audience with what, with stuff that you have. You know sort of related. You can do that. Good examples for this, are canoes, rafting, biking, hiking, and boat building. If you want my versions of these things. I’ve got a shit load of them. Mainly it’s finding guest posts, and resource page links. At this url danrayme./free-training, the specific examples of the ones that Eric came up with for these specific types. Are this one danray.me/link-prospecting. I’ll be going over to a new part of the office that you’ve not seen yet. Okay, so, essentially our job here is to filter out the shit, right? We’re trying to look at search results, filter out the stuff that doesn’t, not that necessarily that it’s shit, but it’s not relevant to us. So, we’re gonna force Google to show us exactly what we need. You tend to want this in the first one or two pages. Because everything below that is really shit. You can do this in three ways. One, the research phrases. Two, the advanced operators. And three, tactics specific footprints. I know I’ve got it in the wrong order here. But it doesn’t matter. As an example of this, we could show you two different sets of results. For, essentially looking for the same thing. Eric uses the CRM, so customer relationship management. And it tends to be a software. But, he uses that as an example here. If you type in this exact term. So, you put the quotation marks. CRM guest post. You’ll find some guest posts. If you then type in this, which is CRM in title and then guest post, and then we’ll look at the results, and see that they are both very, very different. There’s going to be some overlap but essentially you’re getting two separate lists. You can then add these new domains to your target lists. The research phase is just essentially finding synonyms. You’ll sort of uncover bridge content. Or bridge ideas. So, an example of this, is the words customer relationship management both with quotation marks, and without quotation marks. Tactics specific footprints. So, we use these regularly in, is a thing that I use regularly within specific pages. So, if you want to search a list of CRM sites. They will all use similar language. And sort of, if you want to find all of the specific sites made on a certain, like a WordPress theme. You can find a footprint that’s used within that theme. That, you know, Google will tell you a list of it. Where are we? Yeah, if you check five to six pages of, so you need to find five examples of the thing that you want. And then sort of look for common phrases used, excuse me, look for common phrases used within that. Advanced search operators, so, these are my favourite thing, I love just fucking around with them. And just experimenting. I’ll make a specific vid about that. But essentially this is you speaking Google’s language. Your making them show you, exactly what you want. You can sort of specify a file type, you can specify exactly which words you want to see. There’s a whole list of them. I’ve included one from Moz. At this url so danray.me/link-prospecting. I’ve linked to them, but I’ve also just included it on the page too. There are a huge amount of dead operators. One sec. Pouring one out, for our dead hommies. ‘Cause some of these things were fantastic fucking servants for us. As you may have guessed already one of them is, I don’t know how to say it, but Tilde, T-I-L-D-E, however you fucking say that. Eric put a whole section on it, which I’ve obviously cut out. He talked about, these are just the named, the chapters of his book. So, Tilde enables synonym discovery for big head terms. Tilde’s work in conjunction with in title and in url operators. You can combine Tilde with negative operative for interesting lateral leaps. And Tilde impact on domain diversity. Within guest posting prospects queries. So, you can see how deep he gets into it. Obviously, we can’t use them now. So, there is no point in going into it. But a couple of the, my favourite discontinued ones, let’s say. Are obviously, the Tilde, the Tilde looks like this. There’s also the plus. A good friend of mine. Link, which was a great friend of mine. You used to be able to just type link, and then the website. And then it would bring you all of the links that link to it. Oh, in anchor, and you can see, you can see sort of why these things were discontinued. And all in anchor. So, you can see why these things were discontinued because it gave SEOs a sort of inclination as to what Google were looking for. And you could see exactly what links websites had. This would just essentially put you on super power. So, you could find out every single synonym. You could, and create endless lists of search queries. So, I can kind of see it. But, you know, they were my boys. So, I didn’t want to see them go. Let’s talk about something I don’t have on the white board. So, Eric also in his book which, you should probably buy, if you want the exact things. He gave a list of all of this that I’ve just spoken about in this video. He gives a list of all of the queries that he came up with you, using these exact instructions. And it’s essentially a road map. And he found there are some stats. Okay, after combining these three things. He came up with a list of 200 queries. Which, give or take is probably about right. He scraped the top 10 results. So, just the first page of results for each query. So, and you end up with 581 domains. And that’s just surface level. These are just for guest posts too. So, you know, if you do this for every single link type that we discussed in the previous videos, you’re gonna have a fuck load of results. And you’re gonna get a shit load of links. If you approach them properly, and you have something worthy of being linked to. Those videos are also in the past. I think that’s about it. I’ve given a list of all of this shit at the url. You should probably check that out. It’s probably one of the most the most necessary accompaniments to the video, because this is very surface level. But if you buy Eric’s book. Go and check out this url. Then buy Eric’s book, you’ll have a pretty good strategy going forward. I’ll catch you tomorrow. Which should be an exciting one.