Link-building outreach CRM

Audience: Merchant·Plan: starter·Read: 8 min·Updated: 2026-08-03

In 30 seconds

• A real CRM for link building: a six-column kanban board, a filterable pipeline list, bulk stage changes and owner assignment.
• Follow-ups are sequenced automatically on a cadence you set — 3, 7 and 14 days by default — with snooze presets when a prospect asks for time.
• Nothing is ever sent for you. Templates produce copy-to-clipboard or mailto: drafts. Outreach goes out from your own mailbox, under your own name.
• Link-rot monitoring re-checks won links and flips them to lost when they disappear, so your "links earned" number stays honest.
• The board starts empty on purpose — it fills from backlink prospecting or a CSV import, not by itself.

How to use it

1. Get prospects in. Either run backlink prospecting, or import a CSV of domains and contacts.
2. Write your templates with merge tokens, so each outreach is personalised without being retyped.
3. Work the board. Move prospects through the stages as they respond.
4. Let the sequencer schedule follow-ups. You will be told what is due; you decide what to send.
5. Record the win with the actual link URL and anchor, so link-rot monitoring can watch it.

⏱ Ongoing · 💳 Starter+ · 🎯 Turn a prospect list into earned links

An empty board is usually correct

This tab reads a table that only two things write to: backlink prospecting, and your own CSV import. On a store where neither has run, the board, the KPIs and the analytics are all correctly empty. That is not a broken tab — run a prospecting pass or import a list.

The pipeline

Stage	Bucket	Meaning
Identified	Open	A prospect exists; nobody has contacted them
Contacted	Open	First outreach sent
Follow-up	Open	Awaiting a reply; follow-ups scheduled
Accepted	Open	They agreed to link
Published	Won	The link is live
Declined	Lost	They said no

Some rows arrive from the campaign bridge, where an approved prospect has been turned into an automated campaign. Those rows show an "in campaign" badge and their non-terminal stage buttons are disabled, with the reason shown — moving them by hand breaks the bridge's own bookkeeping and can produce a duplicate campaign. You can still record the terminal outcome (won or declined), because that is your real decision to make.

Board and list

The board is for working: six columns, drag through the stages, click a card for the full detail drawer.

The list is for managing at scale: filter by stage, owner, prospect type and overdue status; sort; paginate; select rows for a bulk stage change or bulk assignment. Filters and export share one definition, so Export CSV always returns exactly the rows on screen — not a different set built from different parameters.

"Overdue" requires both a follow-up date in the past and an open stage, so a won prospect carrying a stale follow-up date is not listed as overdue while its own badge says it is not.

Saved views are available on this tab and use the same saved-view system as the rest of the SEO suite, so a view saved here belongs to you consistently regardless of which surface you saved it from.

Templates and merge tokens

Templates support merge tokens that fill from the prospect row:

Token	Fills with
{{contact}}	The contact's name
{{domain}}	The prospect's domain
{{page}}	Their page you are referencing
{{ourPage}}	The page of yours you want linked
{{anchor}}	Your suggested anchor text

Templates never send email

There is no automated sending path, by design. Cold outreach sent from platform infrastructure damages deliverability for every merchant on it, and link outreach is one of the few messages that genuinely has to come from a person. Templates render to your clipboard or open a mailto: draft.

Deleting a template archives it rather than destroying it, and creating a new template with the same name revives the archived one instead of refusing with "already exists" about a row you cannot see.

Suppression

A do-not-contact list holds domains and addresses that must never be contacted again. Suppression is checked on CSV import — suppressed rows are skipped and reported — and enforced on the board.

Follow-up sequencing and the digest

When you record an outreach, the next follow-up is scheduled automatically on your configured cadence (3, 7 and 14 days by default). Snooze presets of 3, 7, 14 and 30 days are available when a prospect asks you to come back later.

A follow-up digest emails the outstanding queue to your notification address. It runs on a schedule, self-deduplicates to at most weekly, and can be triggered manually. When you trigger it manually you always get a result — "sent", "nothing was due", or a transport failure with the reason. A silent button is not a result.

Link-rot monitoring

Won links are re-verified on a schedule. When a link that was live disappears, the row flips to lost and the date is recorded.

This is what keeps the "links earned" number honest. Link building without verification reports every link you ever won as if it still exists; in practice a meaningful share of guest posts, resource pages and roundups quietly disappear within a year.

Verification fetches the linking page over the public internet with the same SSRF protections used elsewhere in the suite.

Analytics

View	Answers
Funnel	Where prospects stall between identified and published
Win and reply rate by prospect type	Which categories are worth your time
Link health	How many won links are still live
SLA / stale list	Prospects nobody has touched in too long
Average time to reply	How long to wait before following up

Governance

Reading the pipeline needs the backlinks read permission; every mutation needs the outreach management permission and writes an audit entry with the acting user. Read-only team members cannot move a card.

CSV export records the real user as the actor, and the export response carries the row count so a truncated download is visible rather than silent.

Plan tiers

Capability	Free	Starter	Pro	Agency	Enterprise
Board, pipeline list, detail drawer	—	✓	✓	✓	✓
Templates with merge tokens	—	✓	✓	✓	✓
CSV import and export	—	✓	✓	✓	✓
Do-not-contact suppression	—	✓	✓	✓	✓
Follow-up sequencing + snooze	—	✓	✓	✓	✓
Ownership + bulk assignment	—	✓	✓	✓	✓
Link-rot monitoring	—	✓	✓	✓	✓
Follow-up digest email	—	✓	✓	✓	✓
Analytics (funnel, win rates, SLA)	—	—	✓	✓	✓

Best practices

• Record the link URL when you win. Without it there is nothing for link-rot monitoring to check, and the win silently becomes unverifiable.
• Set the cadence to match your niche. Three touches over two weeks works for most; publishers and universities move far slower.
• Use suppression rather than memory. A second cold email to someone who already said no is how a domain ends up blocking you.
• Read win rate by prospect type before scaling. Most stores discover one category converts several times better than the rest.
• Do not bulk-advance stages to tidy the board. The stage is your record of what actually happened; the analytics are built on it.

See also

• Backlink intelligence — where prospects come from
• Competitor intelligence — competitor backlink gaps as a prospect source
• Internal links — the links you control outright
• Digest and alerts — how SEO notifications are delivered