Since the Penguin and Panda Google updates some tools have become obsolete and even dangerous for SEO campaigns. Using Scrapebox or Link Assistant for example creates a risk of a negative impact Google now penalizes marketing automation and spam comments. It is therefore necessary to turn to more specific and also more specialized performance tools; ones that can contact webmasters lying in specific niches. Today we will compare two that can be used at will: InkyBee and Outreachr.
InkyBee
InkyBee is a tool used for creating highly targeted campaigns. The first approach is to look for sites and / or blogs that can match the desired profile, both in terms of popularity, targeting, positioning, etc… before contact.
I used an e-commerce site for lamps and lighting as an example and contacted sites / specialized bloggers. A first search with only two keywords is quite unsuccessful. Once past the initial results, that matched what I expected, there were sites or blogs that had no impact or did not fit with me requirements. InkyBee adds to their statistics daily, directly from the web, to avoid data modification however.
We must refine the searches to obtain conclusive results. InkyBee offers comprehensive enough parameters, such as the choice of words that absolutely must be present, title-based search terms, or words that should be excluded from the search. There’s no need to be an expert in SEO to understand that this corresponds to the basic queries that are used on Google. Besides, I personally prefer to write my own rather than through a tool that, if visually pleasing and more ergonomic, may lack precision. Once you are satisfied with your results, you can save them in a list that you will reuse in future campaigns.
This list is as follows:
A table is obtained with the audience (often the specific DA too), posts per week, page ranking, etc.., It’s very useful for selecting sites and blogs that we will contact going forwards.
InkyBee also measures our relationship with any of these new partner sites, grading your exchanges. If you follow the blogger on Twitter will earn you some points, while a simple retweet wont give you so many…
The goal is to create a fun way to contact the various sites, while observing the evolution of your relationship with different bloggers. The big downside of this method is that it is difficult to measure the relationship with a person via encrypted services – they have no idea how your telephone calls have gone, for example – and whose relevance is not always proven data. So be careful not to place undue reliance on this data, which could mislead someone if you ever hand over the work to a colleague.
Outreachr:
Outreachr essentially offers the same functionality as InkyBee, but Outreachr has more specialized results for abroad (France, Germany, Italy, China …) and thus allow better results for international businesses.
Outreachr is less intuitive than the previous tool, but more complete once you know how to use it. The owner of the tool sends you an email when your register, inviting you to add him on Skype so that he can walk you through the tool via screen sharing. This is very useful, provided you understand a bit of English!
Blog suggestions do not apply this time to the lamps query, but are extended to all matters that may be relevant to lighting: interior decoration, hotels, kitchen fittings, fashion, energy premiums, sometimes more personal blogs affecting various topics, etc… This richness in the selection of blogs improves your SEO capabilities, since the algorithms will see links as “spontaneous”.
After a detailed search, you get over 1300 blogs / sites that are connected directly or indirectly to the world of lighting. Some sites return as duplicates, others are too far from the initial search. In the end it was still provide a diverse range of blogs, you will be able to quickly weed out the irrelevant ones.
This time link popularity of a site is clearly explained. It is a mix of different indices: the Alexa ranking, the Domain Authority, the Citation Flow and Trust Flow. The sum of these indices gives an SEO score out of 10. You must still pay special attention to the Trust Flow and Citation Flow which are guarantees of site quality. If they are very weak or not disclosed, it is better to avoid them, to avoid any negative impact on your campaign.
Outreachr provides access to all the contact details for the sites, which represents a significant saving of time depending on whether you wish to contact the webmaster by email, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or by contact form.
Ultimately, these two marketing tools are similar but with different qualities. InkyBee is free for fourteen days, and you can do three campaigns per month on Outreachr before having to buy the paid version. This perhaps tips the balance for me.
