Finding ‘easy’ and ‘must have’ links with Clique Hunter (with video) -

Clique Hunter is one of the first tools I use on a new projects. It helps me find both ‘easy’ and ‘must-have’ links right away. In this post I want to take you through a simple example and at the end I’ll share a short video that will you even more ideas in finding early link opportunities.

Here’s how I define easy and must have links:

‘easy links’ come from sites that link to multiple competitors and have obvious submission paths. They’re likely to have some Trust Flow but nothing outstanding. It doesn’t take too much effort to get a link – all you have to do is follow the guidelines so it’s an early win.

‘must have links’ come from sites that again link to multiple competitors. They’re authority sites with a high Trust Flow. They need a very good reason to give you a link – and that will take some effort.

Quick wins

In the early stages of a project, I might want to get some quick wins to keep the client happy – so easy links are the first I’ll look for. I’ll tackle the ‘must have’ links later because of the work involved in winning them.

Easy links

So let’s say, I’m investigating competitors in the gourmet food market. I’ll gather up competitors anything from 5-10. In this case, I’ll use 7 sites:

zabars.com
dartagnan.com
deandeluca.com
 tienda.com
igourmet.com
oliviersandco.com
zingermans.com.

I’ll go to Clique Hunter under the Tools menu:

I’ll enter in the competitors and the results appear like this:

There’s also a nice visualisation available by clicking on ‘Chart’ in the top right corner:

Now, I’ll scan through the results and look for some easy links like this one from Food411.com:

Food411.com links to all 7 of the sites I entered, but it doesn’t have a high Alexa Rank – so it looks like a relatively easy link, so I’ll go to the site to check it out:

It looks like a reasonable site with some good content so I’ll have a quick look at the link profile using the Majestic plugin:

This is the sort of profile I’d associate with an easy link. The site has a handy submission process and as long as I follow their guidelines I should have no problem getting a link:

Must have links

‘Must have’ links are from industry authority sites. They feature all the major players in the industry so you definitely want to be featured there if you want to be taken seriously.

Chow.com is a good example:

Again, Chow.com has a high number of matches from competitors. But with an Alexa Rank of 2,972 it is clearly a well visited site – an authority site within the gourmet food market.

The Majestic plugin quickly confirms this conclusion:

So Chow.com has over 30,000 referring domains and has a Trust Flow of 60. It’s going to take some effort to get a link so I hunt for submission guidelines:

I can see submission guidelines at the bottom of the home page – it will take some work to get a link here but if you’re really serious about quality link building in the gourmet food market, this is a ‘must have’ link.

So there you have it, two important groups of link prospects discovered with just a little bit of work!

Did you find this post helpful? Have you tips on using Clique Hunter? Please leave your suggestions in the comments below.

And now to that video

This post is adapted from one on the examples in video 5 of our 12-part free online video course, ‘How to analyze your competitors: Part 1: Competitors as a group’.

Here’s the full video:

And if you’d like to see more examples like this, you can sign up for our free video course, ‘Get Up to Speed with Majestic’.

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Ken McGaffin

Head of Marketing at Majestic

Finding ‘easy’ and ‘must have’ links with Clique Hunter (with video)

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