How to Grow Your List of Prospects with Lookalike Prospects
In this blog, we’re going to talk about how to grow your list of prospects with “lookalike prospects.” And the name “lookalike prospects” is inspired by lookalike audiences which is commonly used in online advertising. Now, if you’re unfamiliar with lookalike audiences, ad platforms like Google and face booklet you target people who are similar to an existing audience. For example, people that are like your customers or website visitors.
By targeting these lookalike audiences, digital marketing professional services able to reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they share similar characteristics to your existing customers or website visitors. Now, lookalike prospects in link building are very much the same. You’re trying to find people who are similar to a seed prospect – which is something we covered in the previous blog. But as a refresher, seed prospects are people who link to a page for a specific reason.
Linkable Points
These specific reasons are what I call “linkable points,” which are usually identified by patterns in a competing page’s link profile. Best of all, these linkable points help us define our pitch angles. Now, if this went over your head, then I highly recommend watching blog 2.1. on finding seed prospects so you can get the most value from this blog. Alright so there are 3 tools I use to find lookalike prospects. The first is Ahrefs.
More specifically, Ahrefs Site Explorer, Content Explorer, SEO toolbar, and batch analysis. The second tool is Google and the third is the Scraper Chrome Extension. With that said, let’s go through some examples of finding lookalike prospects based on a seed. And we’ll continue with the examples we discussed in the previous blog. Alright, the first example is for our SEO statistics page.
Analyzed A Competing Page
When we were creating this page, we analyzed a competing page’s anchors report in Ahrefs Site Explorer. And we noticed a pattern that the majority of links to this page were because of a specific stat. Now, when we went to visit these competing pages, we noticed that a lot of the stats that were in the anchors report weren’t even on the page or they were just super outdated. So we had a couple pitch angles to run with. Now, usually when you find these patterns or linkable points in a competitor’s backlink profile, you’ll likely want to get an understanding of the breadth of the opportunity. And this will help you gauge whether it’ll be worth your time and effort to pursue it.
The easiest way to do that is to look for a footprint within the pattern. And a footprint is just a common mark among a dataset. So in this case, the footprint would be the percent sign. Now, with footprint in hand, we can go to the backlinks report and use the filters to narrow in on relevant opportunities. And because our footprint is a percent sign in the anchor or surrounding text of the backlink, I’ll type that into the search box and choose anchors with surrounding text as the search mode.
Unique Websites Link
As you can see, there are around 1,800 pages from unique websites that link to this page because of a specific stat. That’s a pretty nice opportunity in my opinion. Now, we didn’t stop here. We also looked at other anchors profiles for other top ranking pages that had a significant number of referring domains. And we basically just did the exact same thing and found well over 3,000 lookalike prospects to our seed. Alright the next example was when we found an opportunity for our link building guide.
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What we noticed was that a competing page was getting backlinks because they used to have a downloadable eBook in their link building guide. And like the previous example, there was no CTA or mention of a downloadable eBook on the page. Now, the pattern I noticed is that all of the referring pages are on the topic of “top seo eBooks.” So that means our seed prospects are people who have a listicle on the top SEO eBooks.
Difference Of Best Or Top
What we need to search for are titles of pages that include the word “best or top,” which implies a listicle and “seo eBooks,” which implies the main topic. So to find our lookalike prospects, we can use Google search or Ahrefs’ Content Explorer. In Google search, you can type in something like intitle:best intitle:seo intitle:eBook. And we’re left with a few hundred results. Now, you can enable Ahrefs’ SEO toolbar to get both domain and page level metrics on the results. And if you prefer to work in Excel or Sheets, you can export the SERP as needed.
But this job is much easier if you use Ahrefs’ Content Explorer. So I’ll search for “best OR top” within parentheses, and then SEO eBook. Finally, I’ll change the search mode to Title and run the search. And now you can see a few hundred results along with their SEO metrics. And this report is also filterable and exportable too. Now, if you want to further expand your list of lookalike prospects, you can simply change the word “SEO” to something like marketing since link building is a smaller part of the broader marketing category.
LSI Keywords
Now we have well over 1,000 prospects in total for this campaign. Alright, the final seed we talked about was for our page that debunks myths behind so-called “LSI keywords.” Now, we established that our seed prospect is any page that recommends using LSI keywords, because there’s no such thing as LSI keywords. And while there were a few hundred prospects in the link profile we looked at in blog 2.1.
We can easily find a bigger list of lookalike prospects using Content Explorer. So this time, I’m going to search for “use LSI keywords” as a phrase match, which should surface pages where authors are recommending visitors to use so-called LSI keywords. And now we have thousands of prospects who’ve said this phrase on their page. It would just be a matter of vetting these pages and we’ll get into this in the next module.
Now, these are just a few methods that I would use to find lookalike prospects for these hypothetical campaigns. And while there are other ways to generate similar results, I won’t bother going into them because the most important part of this exercise is to understand how seed prospects help to broaden the scope of your campaign with lookalike prospects. Now, there’s one more technique to finding lookalike prospects I want to talk about. And it’s not so much about finding them necessarily, but it’s an efficient technique that I find myself using pretty frequently.
Scraping
That’s scraping. There are going to be times when you’re browsing the web and you notice a potential seed that’s worth exploring. For example, I was looking for ways to build links to our SEO course landing page in Ahrefs Academy. I went through the usual routine of analyzing the backlink profiles of competing pages. Now, this was all well and good, but then I happened to find another low-hanging opportunity that none of our organic search competitors would be able to do. And I discovered it in YouTube analytics.
I realized that our SEO course blogs had gotten over a million views in less than a year. I’m sure someone has linked to these blogs or embedded it in their posts at some point. Meaning, these are warm prospects who I could reach out to and ask to link to our academy instead. Basically, my idea followed a similar concept to unlinked mentions, which usually has a pretty high conversion rate for us. So I ran the blog URL in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, and sure enough, this blog had collected a ton of referring domains.
Site Explorer
I also checked the embed URL for this same blog in Site Explorer. And there were even more referring domains to sort through. So our seed prospect for this hypothetical campaign is anyone linking to one of our SEO course blogs on our YouTube channel. Or anyone that’s embedded the blog on their page. Now, because there’s a total of 15 blogs of this course on our YouTube channel, I needed to get all of the URLs so I can run them through a tool like Ahrefs’ Batch Analysis.
To do that, I used the Chrome Scraper Extension. All you need to do is right click on the information you want to scrape and click “Scrape similar.” From here, I modified the Xpath code a bit and within seconds, we had a full list of URLs ready to batch analyze. Finally, I ran the URLs through Ahrefs’ Batch Analysis, sorted by Referring Domains, and I could instantly see that we had a huge list of lookalike prospects that might be willing to link to our academy page. As you can see, finding lookalike prospects is all about finding a footprint within your seed and following the rabbit hole.
When you have a general scope of the breadth of the campaign, you’re able to get an idea if actually running the campaign will be worth your time and effort. Now, when you’re dealing with thousands of potential link prospects with multiple seeds, it can get quite messy. Plus, sending personalized emails at scale is tough. And that’s where segmenting your link prospects is going to help you stay organized, convert more emails into links and save you a ton of time.