Link Building Prospecting and Outreach Tracking Spreadsheet
Link building is an essential part of SEO, but it can be a time-consuming and challenging process.
One of the keys to successful link building is effective prospecting and outreach tracking. Without a system in place to track your outreach efforts, it becomes difficult to know which prospects you’ve contacted, which ones have responded, and which ones you need to follow up with.
That’s where my link building tracking spreadsheet comes in. It’s a great alternative to costly software If your niche is not too competitive or you want to focus on quality over quantity.
This is the spreadsheet I use and give to my clients. Available to you for free…
Here are the goal of each column:
Status: This is a dropdown to select the status of the link building process.
Link type: What kind of backlink opportunity it is. You can add or remove options in the Data tab.
Owner: The name of the person in charge of outreaching. This is helpful when there are multiple person outreaching.
Duplicate: This automatically checks if the domain name is in the list in column F. It’s helpful when prospecting from different competitors or sources.
Existing referring domain: This automatically checks if you already have a backlink on that domain. For this to work, you need to export your site “Referring domains” in Ahrefs or other tools, copy the list of domains (without https:// or www), and paste it in column A of the “Existing referring domains” tab.
Page: This is where you paste the URLs of the site with a backlink opportunity. When going through competitors’ backlinks, I paste the page where the competitor has his backlink. Once my backlink is acquired, I replace it with our site’s backlink.
DR: For the Ahrefs domain rating. You can also use the domain authority from Moz.
Domain traffic: Domain traffic according to Ahrefs estimates.
TF: The trust flow metric from Majestic.
CF: The citation flow metric from Majestic.
Price: The price for the backlink if any
Contact email or sign-up URL: Email of the contact person. I use forward slash when there is more than one email to try.
Contact Name: Name of the person to contact. I use forward slash when there is more than one contact to try.
1st/2nd/3rd/4th contact date: The date of each email sent.
Note: Any important or related information. If it’s a guest post, I usually paste the title there.
Source: Where the backlink opportunity was found.
Root domain: This is added automatically to compare and find duplicate domain entries.
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Happy link building!