Author Stephan Spencer talks "The Science of SEO" and Tools For Link Acquisition

This is a clip of Stephan’s interview about "The Science of SEO" and Tools For Link Acquisition in the Search Engine Journal.

Hi, I'm John Rampton with Search Engine Journal, here with Stephen Spencer from ScienceofSEO.com. How's it going?

It's going great.

Now you have a book, The Science of SEO, what don't you know?

Alright, well, I've got three books out. ScienceofSEO.com is not actually a book; it's a website and a training website. But The Art of SEO, which I'm a co-author of, is coming out in a third edition early next year. Social Ecommerce just came out—that's a new book, another O'Reilly book, and Google Power Search is from a couple of years ago.

Excellent. Alright. I'm just going to jump right into it. You have written several posts about tools. What tools can I use for better link acquisition?  

Right, so one of my favorite tools for link acquisition and link outreach is a tool called Pitchbox. And what it allows me to do, I'm prospecting for,  authoritative sites for influencers. So, it helps me find good prospects based on cloud scores and domain authority and that sort of thing.

Then, it builds the list. It has a CRM system. So then, I'm going through and prioritizing out of the contacts. It scrapes the who information from the domain, goes through the website, scrapes information on the contact details and so forth.

So I can prioritize who I want to contact first. Then, after I've identified who I'm going to contact, I will upload my templates. So, for outreach, I'm going to want to send emails, and I need to have a really awesome approach.

Yeah.

Right. So it's not like, "Hi, nice to meet you. Would you like to get married?" That's a little creepy. 

Yeah.

Instead, I want to ask an indirect opener type of question like, "Hey, I know that you've been blogging for a while. I'm new to blogging. And I'd love to attend a conference on blogging. Which one do you recommend? I know you've spoken at some and attended some." That's a really innocuous, entry-level question. And it's easy for them to respond. It's like two seconds. And it doesn't seem like you want something onerous from them.

That's a great way to start a conversation, right? So, one example. And, of course, you want to incorporate things that make it clear that this is an individual outreach, an individual email, not an email blast. Yeah. Right? So you might mention something about one of the recent posts or something you really like about something they've done in the past.

Right? And then you want to have a way to kind of systemize, systematize this so that I'm not just sending out these templated emails. I have somebody kind of outsourced to or delegated to the task of going through these websites and then kind of tweaking and personalizing each individual email, but with a moderation queue so that I can then approve the post or the emails before they go out.

Yeah. Right. Now, how often do you recommend reaching out to them? Is it one email or two emails?

Definitely, more than one because if you do two or three outreaches to the same person, your response rate will increase by at least 60%.

Wow.

Right. But don't go wild.

Don't go wild.

Yeah, I'd say three is a good number. And I'd wait maybe seven or ten days before you send a follow-up email. Nobody wants to get an email from you on day two. Right. They just got the email. Yeah. And then they got busy. They're at a conference or something. And then they get you forwarding it again. Saying, "Hey, I'm just checking on this." Yeah. Like seriously, leave me alone.

Cool. Now, are there any other tools you'd recommend?

Right, so I combine link acquisition tools like Pitchbox—there's also BuzzStream and so forth, but Pitchbox is my favorite—with link analysis tools so that I'm identifying really great authoritative sources and not just doing kind of, yeah, I want to do some deep-dive analysis.

Right, so I'm using tools like Majestic, Open Site Explorer, and Link Research Tools; that's an awesome set of tools there, as well as Ahrefs. So, I combine a bunch of these tools. I'm looking for corroborating evidence that something is.

Yeah, it's always nice to have a couple of different tools to tell you. Because they all pick out something different as well.

Right. And some tools will have just a bevy of different features and so forth. Like Link Research Tools has, I don't know, some dozen different tools within their tool set. So you can identify hubs, you can identify all sorts of different things like distributions of, types of sites, themes of sites, TLDs, all that sort of stuff.

Cool. Well, thank you very much, Stephan. What's the best way to get a hold of you?

Yeah, so you can follow me on Twitter; SSpencer is my username. You can visit my website, StephanSpencer.com to contact me personally. ScienceofSEO.com is my training site. You can also email me, Stephan@StephanSpencer.com.

All right. Well, thank you very much for your time. Again, John Rampton. Search Engine Journal, we'll see you next time.

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