Free SEO resource
Link building checklist
Free link building checklist with 25 checks for prospecting, outreach and link quality, plus an Excel outreach tracker that logs responses and calculates reply rate.
Twenty-five link building checks in four groups, tickable on this page, plus an Excel outreach tracker that logs prospects, emails sent, responses and live links, and a printable PDF. Prospecting quality is group one because sending a good email to the wrong person is still a wasted email, and most outreach campaigns fail at the prospect list, not at the pitch.
- Best for
- Anyone building links manually who wants a repeatable process instead of random outreach
- Includes
- 25 tickable checks + Excel outreach tracker + printable PDF
- Time to use
- 90 minutes to set up, then ongoing
Free to download and use in your own client work. No email address required.
Link building is the part of SEO people either avoid entirely or do badly at volume. Both are wrong, and both come from the same mistake: treating it as a numbers game instead of a relevance game.
This checklist makes it a process. Not a fast one. A repeatable one.
The checklist
Tick these here (progress saves in your browser), or take the PDF.
Prospecting 6
Qualification 6
Outreach 7
Link quality and monitoring 6
The four groups
Group 1: Prospecting. Finding the right sites to contact. “Right” means relevant to your topic, with real traffic, that already link to content like yours (usually to a competitor). Export your competitors’ backlink profiles from Ahrefs or Majestic, filter to pages in your niche, and those are your prospects. A prospect list built from competitor backlinks is better than any bought database because the sites have already demonstrated willingness to link to content like yours.
Group 2: Qualification. Not every prospect is worth contacting. Check: does the site have real traffic (not just a high DR with no visitors)? Is the contact page real, or is it a form that goes nowhere? Is the site actively maintained, or is the last post from 2022? A quick manual check of ten prospects is worth more than an automated scrape of a thousand.
Group 3: Outreach. The email itself. Short (under 100 words), specific (name the page you want a link on and why it fits), and honest (no “I love your work” when you clearly haven’t read it). One follow-up after five business days. No more than that.
Group 4: Link quality and monitoring. After the link is live: is it dofollow? Is it on a relevant page, not a link dump? Is the anchor text descriptive? Does the linking page still exist three months later? The outreach tracker logs all of this so you can see which prospect types produce lasting links and which produce links that disappear.
The outreach tracker
Preview of the file
Quality over volume is not a platitude here
It is arithmetic. A link from a relevant DR 40 site with real traffic in your niche does more than ten links from DR 10 sites in unrelated niches. And it takes roughly the same amount of effort to send one good email as it does to send one bad one.
The outreach tracker calculates two rates: reply rate (how many people responded at all) and acquisition rate (how many resulted in a live link). Industry benchmarks are roughly 8 to 12% reply rate and 2 to 5% acquisition rate. If your reply rate is below 5%, the problem is your prospect list or your email, and the tracker’s qualification tab helps you work out which.
Do not buy links
Paid links violate Google’s guidelines and create a dependency. If the selling site gets penalised, every site that bought links from it is exposed. If you stop paying, the links disappear. Neither of those problems exists with earned links. The time spent on manual outreach is slower and produces fewer links, and those links are permanent.
Three outreach approaches that work
Broken link building. Find pages that link to a resource that no longer exists (404). Tell the site owner the link is broken and suggest your page as a replacement. This works because you are solving a problem the site owner has (a broken link) rather than asking for a favour.
Resource page outreach. Find pages titled “resources,” “useful links,” or “recommended tools” in your niche. These pages exist specifically to link out. Contact the owner with a brief explanation of why your resource fits their list. The SEO tools directory is this kind of page, and if you have an SEO tool, you can submit it.
Content-driven outreach. Publish something genuinely useful (a study, a tool, a dataset, a template) and email people who have linked to similar things. This is the most work and the highest acquisition rate, because the asset does the persuading.
Link building tools
The SEO tools directory has verified listings for the main link building tools:
- Ahrefs: backlink analysis, competitor link profiles, broken link finder
- Majestic: Trust Flow, Citation Flow, historic backlink index
- BuzzStream: outreach CRM, email tracking, prospect management
- Pitchbox: automated prospecting and outreach at scale
Each listing has the current pricing, limitations, and alternatives, with the date it was last verified.
Where this fits
The competitor backlink analysis that feeds your prospect list comes from the competitor analysis template. The content audit that identifies your most-linked pages (the ones worth building more links to) uses the content audit template. And the monthly reporting of your link profile goes in the SEO report template.