I spend most of my time in the trenches doing link building. I’ve recently been looking around at tools available to improve my processes and scale up my efforts. So I spent this week poking around Raven internet marketing tools.
I think I used my first “Raven” tool back in 2004, back when Raven was Sitening and they were developing tools like validation checkers. Being from Nashville myself, it’s cool seeing what they’ve put together.
Instead of giving an overview of just features, I want to share some tactical ways Raven can be used in a link building campaign.
#1 Workflow
Easily one of the best features of Raven is their tool integration, which can help you maintain a reliable workflow. Instead of patching together data and storing it in multiple formats, Raven provides a system for keeping all your data centralized.
So much of link building is about scale. Anything that can minimize the time you spend on the accounting of link building will open up your time for high win activities. Their toolbar allows you to easily manage information without having to tab over to a spreadsheet or other application. Efficiency FTW.
#2 Team Management
When working with a team of link builders, project management is important. Successful SEO is about getting $#!^ done. You don’t want team members doubling up on efforts or having miscommunication result in the loss of link building opportunities. Raven allows multiple team members to use the tool, leave notes, and search the work of others.
#3 Manage Contacts
There are many reasons I need to contact people for a link building project. Maybe I’m negotiating a guest blogging opportunity from a site like My Blog Guest, or I’ve targeted several niche blogs to pitch an infographic, or maybe, gasp, I need to negotiate a link purchse.
When scaling link building, or working with a team, it becomes difficult to manage all of these contacts efficiently. Raven works to solve this with their Contact Manger, which, like everything else, directly integrates with their other tools.
#4 Finding Contact Information
This flows naturally from the last point. Before you can form a relationship with a site, you have to get in touch with them. Raven provides a tool to make this easier: their find contacts tool. As Jon mentioned in the launch post, this is a new feature and has some limitations. I suspect it to get better in time.
If you’re struggling to get in touch with webmasters, this is one more tool to help you get the information you need. Skill in hunting down contact information can result in major wins for your link building campaign. I recently had a client’s content get coverage on a major site, but they didn’t link to us. It took about 5 minutes of hunting to find the author’s email, and a few email exchanges later, I scored my client the link. This link is now sitting on a 50 PA page on a 85 DA site. For that particular site, the Raven find contact tool does return their information. A quick Google search for the name brings up their Twitter, which leads to their email.
Raven also integrates with KnowEm, which I mentioned in my tips for link builders post as a way to hunt down a webmaster’s social media accounts..
#5 Manage A Persona
I’m usually not doing outreach from my personal email, but through an account on behalf of a client. There may also be more than one person involved in the outreach efforts. For this, Raven has provided a Persona Manager, which allows you to track information about this persona. You could also use this to help manage all your attractive girl Twitter accounts, which we all know have a much higher success rate than male profiles. 
#6 Competitive Link Analysis
Competitive link analysis is a significant part of what I do as a link builder. I may be breaking down how a site is ranking in a particular SERPS or mining their back links for prospective link sources. Competitive link analysis can also out some interesting SEO strategies, which was the subject of my post on Mormon SEO.
Raven’s backlink explorer pulls link data from MajesticSEO and sorts by ACRank. Although I’m a big fanboy of SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer, it’s useful to have additional link data. I’m less accustom to using ACRank as a metric, but Raven does allow exporting.
I love link data exports. You can do cool things like sticking them into Google Custom Search Engines for searching. I can also throw this into the SEOmoz API and pull in all their metrics.
#7 Mining Prospect
Raven provides a couple tools to help you find prospective link sources. Their Backlink Explorer allows you to hunt through other’s backlinks. The Site Finder helps you find link hubs as well. And since the tools are all integrated, prospecting can flow right into engagement via the Contact Manager and the progress tracked through the Link Manager.
A lot more
This is no where near an exhaustive list of Raven’s usage. I recommend doing a search on their site for “Tip Tuesday” for lots of guides on using their tools.
Overall, I’m happy with Raven as a tool to manage link building campaigns and the workflow associated with the process. I think it’s worth giving it some time to check out. They’ll even let you try it for free.
Learn More:
If you’d like to learn more about link building, we’re hosting two Linkbuilding Seminars in London and New Orleans this year. A whole seminar just on link building.
Oh looky there, find contacts… I hadn’t noticed that feature yet for some reason. Thanks!
Pingback: SearchCap: The Day In Search, January 13, 2011
I always enjoy your tips Justin. Have you ever used BuzzStream for link building? Wondering what Raven might offer that that tool doesn’t?
I know my major want with BuzzStream was auto updating new links received from all my saved link partner contacts. But task wise it was something that was a little tricky for them to carry out without any kinks. With BuzzStream to find new links (to my client website) I would have to have their applet scan each link partner site individually. Can Raven detect new links to your target site from your saved contacts automatically?
I used their tools a lot, very powerful.
I have just tried Raven after using SEOMoz, and I have to say that it’s better integrated than SEOMoz. SEOMoz is getting there with their new Pro Dashboard, but Raven was definitely first to the table. Thanks Amanda, I’ll give BuzzStream a try!
@Amanda
I haven’t used BuzzStream yet, but someone here has an account they’re going to let me look at. I can’t comment on it yet.
I’m not exactly sure how Raven does their link checking, but I’ll ping Jon to see if he has an answer.
@SugarFreeMedia
I’ve never considered Raven & SEOmoz as direct competition. They do have some cross over, but their tools seems to have different uses. SEOmoz has a crawler and a link index, and many of their tools are designed to leverage that. Raven on the other hand seems to focus on integration of 3rd party tools and management of internet marketing.
I don’t feel one tool replaces the other, but rather compliment each other.
SEOmoz’s integration is getting better with the Web App / Pro Dashboard. I think the difference too comes from how the two tool sets developed over time.
@Amanda, the problem with alerting you to a new link from one of your contacts, without knowing which page it’s going to appear on, is that you would have to routinely crawl the entire site. That’s an expensive process to do. Another option would be to query a search engine for a link from the site, but that’s not very reliable.
For that reason, we’ve focused on checking for a link on the page you’ve specified in a link record and/or looking for referral traffic from Google Analytics. We currently, on a daily basis, create new link records based on your top referrers in GA.
Our link manager also has what we call “link status”. We allow custom link statuses, but there are four system defaults that are directly connected to our link monitor. They are Queued, Requested, Active, and Inactive. If a link record has any one of those states, our link monitor will check the page related to the record on a regular basis. If there’s any change in the status, our system will alert you. For example, if the link monitor detects that a Requested link is now Active, it will automatically change the status to Active, and will email you an alert.
The link monitor also checks for changes in link text, link destination URL, nofollow (added or removed), and also significant changes in mozRank. In October, we rewrote the entire link monitor system and plan to add more features to it soon. Those updates will include choosing how often links are checked, specifying custom thresholds, and the option to monitor the number of links on a page.
@SugarFreeMedia thanks for the compliment!
Similar to what @Justin said, there may be some overlap, but we currently view SEOmoz as an integration partner, in that we currently pay for and integrate their OSE API into Raven. They also do a lot of things we don’t, including their very well respected educational programs and seminars.
@Jon thanks for the response! This actually helps me alot because I just spoke with someone this morning about Raven vs. my use of BuzzStream. I know my request is a high order. I was actually just hoping for the ability to run the site crawling job when I log into the tool. Sort of have it working in the background as I’m contacting link partner/ prospecting new ones. But it sounds like you’ve found a pretty good solution to this problem.
Because BuzzStream was still working on this request I’ve been using the referring source report to find link updates. I’ll forward this info. on to the linkbuilder that I spoke to this morning.
Love Raven tools, I have just spent the last hour checking it out. The workflow and integration are first class. It would be great to see some sort of hook up with seomoz tools. That would be a killer app
I’ve been testing out the new “Find Contacts” feature in RavenTools and it is seriously awesome. I can’t help but feel like before I started using RavenTools I was using the equivalent of caveman SEO tools and now with Raven I am finally walking upright!
FYI – you seem to have will’s direct line on the screenshot
Pingback: Weekly Search & Social News: 01/18/2011 | Search Engine Journal
Heh. It’s not that good. That’s the office number…
Hi Justin,
thank you for your relevant post ! My question is simple
, in your opinion, in 1 (or two..) word(s) : Which of these tools seems to you the most complete :
Raven Tools, Conductor’s Searchlight, Brightedge, SearchMetrics, RankAbove, DIYSEO and/or GinzaMetrics. Hubspot, and of course SEOMOZ Pro Tool (I already use it..)
Thanks for your response
David
@David
So, just my opinion.
SEOmoz – Use this the most. <3
Raven Tool – Haven’t used a lot, but least one of our SEOs here uses it frequently.
Hubspot – I used when I had an in-house position. It’s a good tool, but does a little of a lot. Also had concerns with my content getting locked in. Moving from Hubspot to WordPress was a pain.
DIYSEO – I’ve used it once.
Others – Haven’t used them, but others at Distilled might.