How do I find local blogs and publications to approach?

Inside a project, open Act → Link building → Local publishers. While it is switched off for your workspace it shows Beta with Ask for early access.

Where the list comes from

Find local publishers looks through data we already hold for the project. It makes no paid search and reads no new website:

• the top ten results your rank checks stored, by search, place and date;
• SERP analysis you ran for your own tracked searches in your places;
• the websites that link to your competitors in the latest link gap ("links to 3 of your 5 competitors");
• Web watch: pages that name your business without a link, or link to you;
• ReFame sources a person marked relevant for your own business (never another client's);
• local blogs and publications our team approved in the link sources catalogue for your country and town.

Only blogs, news sites, community sites and publications become candidates. Social networks, marketplaces, big directories, your competitors and your own sites never do.

The fit score

Each candidate has a score from 0 to 100, made of seven parts you can open one by one, each with the evidence that set it:

• Local: your town in its address or pages, a local search it ranks in, or the same country.
• Relevant to the business: your tracked searches it ranks for, and your topics in its pages.
• Links to competitors: how many of your measured competitors it links to.
• Publishing recently: the date of its newest article, read from its news feed.
• Quality: the link data's rank and spam score, or the Publisher Network's trust score for a member site. A spammy site scores nothing here and says why.
• Shows in your searches: how many of your tracked searches it is in the top ten for.
• Already mentions you: pages that name your business without a link, the easiest ones to ask.

A part with no evidence scores nothing and says "not known": nothing is guessed. The score helps you decide where to start. It is not a promise of rankings or traffic.

Reading their sites

Read their sites reads each candidate's home page and news feed politely: one page at a time at each site's own pace, within its robots.txt and our opt-out list, public addresses only. It notes whether the site is live, the date of its newest article, a contact page and an e-mail address the site publishes on its own domain. A site that asks robots not to read it, or shows a bot check, is "could not read", never "gone". Sites are read again after a while (monthly by default).

What you can do with a candidate

Open a row to see the score, the evidence and the pages we saw:

• Shortlist or Dismiss it (with a reason); dismissed sites stay dismissed when you look again.
• Add to outreach: it joins the project's earned outreach list with the evidence. A site in a paid marketplace campaign is refused: earned and paid links are kept apart.
• Track in Prospect finder: where Prospect finder is part of your plan, it joins the publisher pipeline, with its campaigns and legal sign-off.
• Invite to the Publisher Network: a private link for that site, shown once, which you send yourself.

Nothing is sent from this screen. A site another workspace on the platform approached recently waits a while before it can be added (90 days by default); you are never told who it was.

Every platform

The list works for any website: WordPress, Laravel, Shopify, Wix or a site built by hand. It reads stored data and public pages only, so nothing needs to be installed on your site.