Uses
The stack behind the prospecting, the outreach, and the reporting — including what each one is genuinely for, what it costs, and the ones I stopped paying for.
Nothing here is an affiliate link. I do not take commission from any tool on this page — several of the ones I rate highest I pay full price for.
2 tools
Link index, gap analysis
The single most expensive line on this page and the one I would cut last. It is my source of truth for anything that has to be defended to a client — if Ahrefs and another tool disagree on a referring domain, Ahrefs wins.
Cross-check, keyword data
Kept purely as a second opinion. Two link indexes never agree, and a site that looks clean in one and filthy in the other is worth an hour of manual reading before it gets pitched.
3 tools
Crawls a prospect site
Points at a prospect before I pitch it. What I am looking for is the sponsored-post footprint — a hundred thin posts on unrelated topics, all with an outbound follow link, which no metric will show you.
Second-pass audit
Only comes out for a client's own site, usually at the start of an engagement. Half of what looks like a link problem in month one turns out to be an indexation problem, and this is what tells the two apart.
Ground truth on the client site
Free, and it beats every paid tool on this page for the one thing it does. No third-party index knows what Google actually indexed — this is the only place that number is real.
3 tools
Finds the editor
Finds an address about seventy per cent of the time. The other thirty is reading the masthead and guessing the format, which is slower and works better than any tool has managed.
Sequencing and reply tracking
Runs the sequencing and the follow-ups. Every template is rewritten per site before it sends — the automation is there so nothing gets forgotten, not so nothing gets written.
The target list clients sign off
Unglamorous and unavoidable. The sign-off sheet is the one artefact every engagement runs on, and it has to open for a client with no login and no training — which rules out every purpose-built alternative I have tried.
4 tools
The monthly client dashboard
Free, connects to GA4 and Search Console directly, and the client keeps access when the engagement ends. A report they cannot open in six months is not a report.
Traffic to the target pages
Used narrowly — landing-page sessions on the pages we built links to, and nothing else. Attributing revenue to a single link is a story, not a measurement, and I do not tell it.
Briefs, drafts, editor notes
Where a placement lives between the brief and publication. Nothing clever — its only real job is that a draft and the editor's revision notes sit in the same place two months later.
Client credential handling
Listed because it is a question clients should ask more often. Analytics access arrives in a shared vault and is revoked the week we finish — not sitting in an email thread forever.
Roughly two-thirds of it goes to a single link index. The rest is small, and four of the twelve are free.
$680
Paid personally, not billed through as a line item.
Monthly, all seats
57%
Ahrefs alone. Every alternative I have tested costs more in time.
In one tool
4
Search Console, Analytics, Looker, Sheets. Nothing replaces them.
Free and non-negotiable
The cost is here because it is the cheapest signal you have that someone is doing this full-time. A seat at this level does not survive a side project.
Every one of these would make the numbers on a monthly report go up faster. That is the problem with them.
Send-volume tooling
Tools built to send two thousand pitches a day from rotating domains. They work, briefly. The cost lands on the domain doing the sending, and once editors have filed you as spam there is no version of you they will open again.
Paid placement exchanges
A catalogue of sites with a price against each. Everything listed is sold to everyone, so the neighbourhood you are buying into is every other buyer — and Google has been able to read that footprint for years.
Private blog networks
Expired domains rebuilt to link to clients. The whole model depends on nobody joining the dots, and when it is unpicked it is unpicked all at once — every client on the network at the same time.
Generated placement content
Not a moral position — an operational one. Editors at the sites actually worth having can tell, and one generated draft ends the relationship that took four months to build.
Metric-target selling
"Ten DR50+ links a month." DR is a third-party score that can be manufactured cheaply, so guaranteeing it guarantees the manufacture rather than the placement.
Bulk toxic-link filing
One-click tools that upload a disavow of anything scoring badly. A disavow file is very hard to walk back, and most of what these flag is ordinary noise every profile has.
The parts of the work that never made it into software — which is most of the parts that decide whether an engagement works.
Roughly forty relationships built over six years. No database has this — it is who answered last time, what they turned down, and which month they are impossible to reach.
Whether a publication is real is not a metric. It is the last ten posts, who wrote them, and whether the outbound links look like editorial or inventory. Every tool on the bench misses this, in both directions.
One paragraph, specific to one editor, referencing something they actually published. It takes about eleven minutes and it is the entire difference between a twenty per cent reply rate and a two per cent one.
The site passed the checks, the editor said yes, and something is still off. This is the judgement clients are actually paying for — and the one that never shows up on a report, because the report only lists what went live.
06
Anyone can buy these seats. What the retainer covers is the six years of knowing which prospects to throw away — and that is the part with no monthly price.