If you manage link building, you need to find relevant opportunities, qualify them and identify an appropriate way to approach the publisher. OppAlerts publishes this page and sells one of the products on it. No product here does the whole job, and most teams buy two.
Link prospecting involves finding an opportunity, deciding whether to pursue it, and contacting the publisher. Tools differ in which steps they support. Check whether a product covers the steps you need before buying.
Step 1: finding opportunities
There are three common methods, and they produce different lists.
From competitor backlinks. Enter your site and competitor sites, and get sites linking to them but not to you. Semrush, Ahrefs and OppAlerts all offer this. It produces prospects with proven willingness to link in your subject area, and it is limited to placements your competitors already earned.
From a link index at volume. Majestic meters analyzable backlinks at 1 million, 20 million and 100 million rows and positions itself for audit and prospecting across a small group of sites. This suits teams doing their own analysis on exported data.
From opportunity type. Search the OppAlerts Prospect Index by meaning or keyword, then filter by placement type: guest contribution pages, resource lists, expert roundups, podcasts, industry directories, award programs and speaking submissions. Searching by meaning returns relevant pages that never use your wording, which keyword matching misses.
The difference matters because the first method can only find what competitors already have. If no competitor has appeared on a relevant podcast, a backlink gap report will never suggest one.
Ahrefs Brand Radar also advertises tracking web mentions and finding link prospects, so opportunity discovery is not unique to any one product here.
Step 2: qualifying what you found
This step is skipped most often and costs the most when it is. A list of two hundred prospects is worth less than twenty you have reason to believe will respond and matter.
Relevance is the first filter, and searching by meaning rather than by keyword does part of it automatically.
Link standing over time is the second, and it is where most prospecting tools stop. A current authority figure tells you where a site stands today. OppAlerts PageRank history reports monthly link-graph measurements for a host, its www variant and its domain. You can see whether a site has been gaining or losing standing across a series of months. A site declining steadily for two years is a different prospect from one improving, even when today's figures match.
Editorial requirements are the third, and no tool supplies them. A directory that lists three of your competitors may require membership before it will add anyone. A resource page may only accept submissions from cited researchers. Open the page and read what it asks for; the report gives you the gap, not the admission criteria.
Step 3: reaching the publisher
Three different products solve three different failures here.
Published contact routes. OppAlerts Site Info returns the contact pages, email addresses, phone numbers and social profiles a site publishes about itself, as stored when the site was collected. Many publishers state exactly how they want submissions, and following that route needs nothing else. These details are not verified for deliverability.
Verified addresses for named people. Hunter finds addresses at a domain and tests whether they accept mail, metering credits at 50 free and 2,000, 10,000 and 25,000 a month, with verification costing half a credit. Users are unlimited. If your outreach fails because emails bounce, this is the fix.
Sending and managing at volume. Pitchbox meters campaigns run, at 25 a month on its $300 plan ($210 billed yearly) and 1,000 on its $600 plan, with 1,000 and 5,000 prospecting searches. BuzzStream meters contacts stored, from $49 a month for one user and 500 contacts up to $999 or more for 12 or more users and 300,000 or more contacts. Extra users cost $58 and $70.
Which sender is cheaper depends entirely on your pattern, and no vendor points this out. A team holding 80,000 historic contacts and running four campaigns a month is pushed up BuzzStream's plans by the archive while Pitchbox's entry plan covers the sending. A team with 2,000 contacts running thirty campaigns a month is the reverse. Work it out before renewing either.
Journalists rather than site owners. If you are pitching reporters by beat, a media database is the right tool. BuzzSumo PR & Comms at $299 a month includes one, and OppAlerts does not.
What OppAlerts does not do
It sends no email, runs no sequences, tracks no replies and stores no relationship record. It verifies no addresses. It has no journalist database. Anyone whose bottleneck is sending or managing outreach needs a sender alongside it.
Which to shortlist
| Which step is your bottleneck | Shortlist |
|---|---|
| Finding placements competitors have not taken | OppAlerts opportunity-type search |
| Finding where competitors got their links | Semrush, Ahrefs or OppAlerts link gap |
| Link rows at volume for your own analysis | Majestic |
| Prospecting alongside an existing link subscription | Ahrefs Brand Radar |
| Judging whether a site is worth the effort | OppAlerts PageRank history |
| Contact route published by the site | OppAlerts Site Info |
| Addresses that will not bounce | Hunter |
| Sending at volume, few stored contacts | BuzzStream |
| Large contact archive, moderate sending | Pitchbox |
| Pitching journalists by beat | BuzzSumo PR & Comms |
A workable pairing for most teams is one research tool and one sender. Doing the qualifying step properly between them is what decides the reply rate.
Check the tools against each step of your prospecting process. Choose an arrangement that lets your team take a suitable candidate through to a prepared approach.
See how to evaluate a prospect before contacting a publisher, the Prospect Index, or OppAlerts and link prospecting platforms.