If you have even a little experience in link building, then you’ll know there’s a huge amount of admin and leg work required at just about every stage of the process. From your initial keyword led research right the way through to seeing your hard work come to fruition with a powerful publication – there’s a lot of pushing uphill and persistence required to achieve the types of links that make it worthwhile.
Topically relevant, authoritative links are of course worth the effort, but scaling that beyond the odd publication here and there is very difficult. There are ways and means of making certain parts easier, we’re happy to share – and by arming yourself with the right tools for the job, you’ll be able to streamline your processes, automate tasks, and make life infinitely easier for you and your marketing team.
Although these tools won’t actually build links or successfully outreach for you (sorry!), we’re happy to share 8 of our favourite Google Chrome extensions for digital PR and outreach.
Similar Sites – Find linking opportunities
When you’re planning a digital PR campaign, one of the biggest challenges is building a list of authoritative and relevant sites that are going to present you with good link opportunities. Though it’s important to look past the raw metrics and make sure each site is right for you, the actual act of searching manually can be hugely time-consuming.
Similar Sites is a recommendation engine which allows you to find sites that might be a good addition to your campaign, activate the plugin, then quickly scour the internet for sites that show similarities in terms of content, site structure, link equity, and even browsing behaviour.
By using this plugin in your campaign planning phase, you can generate lists of publications that are perfect for your link building campaign in a fraction of the time that it would take using traditional research. Make it part of your link building SOP, and you’ll be able to spend less time researching, and more time generating great content and valuable backlinks. Of course, it’s not the silver bullet that will deliver your entire list – but it is a useful addition in amongst the other avenues of identification.
Grammarly – Improve the quality of your content
As Google’s algorithm has developed over time, it’s become more and more effective at discerning quality content from churned-out, low-effort pieces. As the quality of content is now a central part of how Google weighs backlinks and determines how this will factor into ranking changes, you need to ensure that all the content you create is up to a competitive standard, that all the kinks are ironed out, and that there’s nothing that Google could interpret as a sign of spam.
Grammarly is one of the best Google Chrome extensions you can use to fine-tune every piece of content you publish in a digital PR campaign. From correcting common spelling and grammatical errors to highlighting filler words and awkward phrases and suggesting alternatives, Grammarly will make your content creation immeasurably easier by acting as a proofreader and editor as you write.
Once this extension becomes a standard in your content creation process, you’ll be able to write more pieces in less time, securing more places on high-authority publications, and enjoying an all-around stronger backlink profile.
Ahrefs SEO Toolbar – Assess the quality of linking opportunities
When you’re building a list of linking opportunities for any campaign, one of the most important variables to keep in mind is the authority of publications that might represent a linking opportunity.
There are a range of different Google Chrome extensions you can use for this, but in our opinion, the Ahrefs SEO Toolbar is a cut above the rest.
With this extension installed, you’ll be able to get a detailed overview of any site’s core SEO metrics with one click of the icon, including its Domain Rating, Ahrefs Rank, and URL Rating. When you begin researching linking opportunities with certain standards in mind, this will allow you to evaluate potential referring sites quickly and easily, without having to pour time into manual analysis or hopping in and out of your SEO tool.
With all these data points at your fingertips, you’ll be able to build fleshed-out lists of linking opportunities with greater ease and efficiency, and make finding new opportunities a natural part of your browsing behaviour.
Link Clump – Assess topical relevance of external links
Topical relevance and reliability of their own websites, and the original pieces of content they produce to act as referring pages for their links.
Link Clump is the best browser extension for link builders who like to review the outgoing links of a website manually, and get an idea of the kind of topical relevance a domain can promise for their campaigns.
With this extension installed, you’ll be able to drag a selection box over as many links as you like, then open them as new tabs, new windows, or copy them to your clipboard for use in a planning document. There’s also a handy “Filter Links” feature, which allows you to exclude links that contain specific words or elements.
With these helpful features, you’ll be able to make quick work of gauging the typical relevance of any given domain, and adjust your bar for entry when building a list of sites for your digital PR drives.
NoFollow – Assess the likelihood of building dofollow links
Although not the be all and end all, most link builders agree that dofollow are the best links to be targeting in your campaign. Therefore, it makes sense to check that the target websites in your contact list link out, and if it’ll be nofollowed or not.
NoFollow is one of the simplest, handiest Google Chrome extensions for link builders who are trying to assess the potential in any given domain. Once activated, it will highlight any links that have a rel=”nofollow” attribute attached to them on the page you’re viewing. This will allow you to immediately see the density of nofollow links that’s typical for a post without having to inspect each one in the developer tools window, and make quick, informed decisions on whether or not the publication is right for you.
LinkMiner – Find broken links and get at-a-glance link data
Probably the best browser extension for digital PR campaigns which place a lot of emphasis on broken link building, LinkMiner makes it easy to find broken links on any given webpage, and harvest a range of useful metrics on both links and pages.
Simply activate the extension on whatever content you’re viewing, and it will immediately show you the ratio of functional and broken links hosted on the page, making it easy to assess how fertile a page or domain will be for broken link building, and see the specific status and target of each individual link.
With LinkMiner’s most recent update, you can also use it on Google SERPs in order to bring up a range of helpful insights on the results, such as a page’s domain authority according to Ahrefs and Majestic, and the total likes it has on major social media platforms.
Ad-Blocker – More efficient research
Digital PR campaigns will live or die on your ability to analyse competitor content and keep on top of industry trends, as these are central to researching new content pieces, finding broken links, planning reactive content, and more. Though it may seem like a minor detail, the time it takes for your browser to load up pages can quickly add up to a significant drain on your overall efficiency.
To keep your browsing as speedy and as smooth as possible, we recommend using Ad-Blocker for the research phase of any link building campaign. Though many publications force you to turn off ad blockers to protect their revenue streams, they’re still an exception to the rule, and you’ll be able to switch your blocker on and off easily by pinning it to the extensions bar.
With this handy extension in place, you’ll improve your loading speed vastly, and empower your team to extract the information they need from various pieces of content without stumbling on annoying pop-ups.
OneTab – Organise large numbers of browser tabs into digestible lists
Good digital PR and outreach requires you to visit countless different sites in pursuit of relevant and authoritative content platforms to find the perfect hosts for your backlinks. This often produces browser windows with so many tabs squeezed in together that your cursor can barely click on them!
The OneTab Chrome extension is a simple, yet immensely useful tool for keeping your browsing more organised and efficient, and frees you from having to deal with the crushed tab bars that can slow down the research phase of your link building campaigns.
Just activate the extension, and it will convert all the tabs you have open into a list, which can then be saved or shared amongst your team. If you need to visit the same tabs again, you can access the list and browse them individually, or open them all at once.
With this extension in your link building toolkit, you’ll find it so much easier to organise sites that you’re researching, and steer clear of the chaos that comes with overcrowded browser windows.
Final Thoughts
At Hive19, we use Google Chrome extensions and other industry tools to create highly efficient, streamlined processes, empowering us to deliver the best possible results for our clients. If you’d like to use our expert support to supercharge your link building, get in touch today or find our more in our Outreach hub.
