If you have a business that depends or benefits significantly on online visits – which is true for most businesses today – then SEO is perhaps the most important marketing function. Good rankings on Google depend on two things: links and content. PageRank, the algorithm on which Google Search is based and built on since its inception, depends wholly and solely on the number and value of backlinks your site has. In other words, the quality and quantity of links reign supreme in your quest for search engine rankings. Those who get superior links in great numbers are bound to rank above their peers for a set of queries relevant to their content. Here’s the thing: Google strongly discourages the practice of artificial link building (which is pretty much all forms of link building) in an effort to prevent the gaming of its ranking algorithm. However, Google’s word isn’t law – it’s just a “guideline” on how to play nice with them. It doesn’t stop smart link builders and SEOs from attempting to earn valuable, authoritative links for their clients that can bring in more visibility, engagement and ultimately, sales. How can you replicate the strategies of the world’s top SEOs and link builders? Are there any tools or software that can help you automate, speed up, vet, and manage your link building process? You bet. It’s called Serpzilla. In this Serpzilla review, you’ll learn everything you need to know about this game-changing SEO tool and how it can help you optimize your link building efforts. Let’s get started. [Serpzilla & 99signals Exclusive Offer] For every $20 you spend at Serpzilla, you’ll get a bonus of $10, which you can then use to buy links. Click here to grab this offer.
What is Serpzilla?
Serpzilla is a white-hat link building automation tool that aims to help SEOs find contextual, relevant, and valuable links for the sites they’re promoting.
What is Serpzilla?Getting Started with SerpzillaLink Building AutomationLink Placement and MonitoringA Special Word on Serpzilla Rank (SR)Automate Your Link Buying StrategySerpzilla PricingSerpzilla Review: Final Verdict
Serpzilla also does something no other tool can – scale the link building process. It does this by addressing some common challenges SEOs face:
Finding high-authority, high-traffic sites with contextual content from which to get the link Checking critical parameters such as page authority, traffic sources, session length, spam score, the neighborhood of the website, and its likelihood to be penalized or devalued Getting ROI by avoiding paying too much for the links Making sure the link is not removed from the site for a long time.
SEOs frequently stumble on real-world obstacles while getting these high quality links – especially when negotiating with webmasters about the placement, content, duration, price, and nature of the links. How many times have you paid an “SEO Expert” on Fiverr for a link on a blog only to find out it has been replaced by one belonging to your competitor a few weeks down the line? More than you care to remember, right? SEOs are always on the lookout to build links in new ways, while maximizing the scale and ROI of existing methods such as blogger outreach, broken link building, guest blogging, PBNs, digital PR, and so on. This means they are in dire need of software that works as a CRM for the link profile – one that enables real-time link monitoring, quick link building, and maintaining relationships with webmasters. The only answer on the horizon is Serpzilla.
Let’s see how Serpzilla helps you get high-quality Google-friendly links from the hundreds of millions of pages in its database.
Getting Started with Serpzilla
Now that you have an understanding of what Serpzilla is capable of, let’s get down to the brass tacks. Here’s a straightforward walkthrough to help you get started with Serpzilla:
You can’t miss the “Sign Up” button on the home page. Press it – go on!
After you enter your contact details, you see the dashboard where all your projects are eventually shown. At first, it is empty:
Before you can build any links, the first thing to do would be to set up your legal entity and enter your budget for the campaign. Click the small gray “Balance” at the top-left above “My projects.”
Serpzilla will take you through a simple wizard that lets you set up payments through your individual or business account. Whether you’re a solopreneur, affiliate blogger, or agency employee, Serpzilla has an option for you. At the end of this process, you’ll be able to set rules on how to add, withdraw, and use money for all your link building projects.
Once you’ve added some balance to your account, you’re ready to create a project.
We never start a link building campaign without a goal, do we? Whether you want visibility, traffic, or rankings, Serpzilla can suggest links accordingly. Enter your goals and the site you want to promote here. (Don’t worry if you’re caught on the wrong foot here. You can always change your goals later from the Settings if your priorities change.)
The next screen asks you to add the URLs and the associated anchor texts one after the other. Examples are given.
Once you finish adding all URLs, you’re taken back to the main dashboard where you see the project along with all the pages you added. For each URL, you can see the budget, number of keywords, number of content pieces used, and number of links built. You can also track the traffic from the links you built by adding a Serpzilla counter (pixel).
Click on a link that you’d like to start with. Serpzilla finds you a list of sites that are relevant to your URL and gives you two options: rent links with a monthly budget or buy links with a one-time payment. The set of sites for both options is different. You can make an instant decision on whether a link from the site is worth it or not based on page authority metrics (DA and DR) that you see from various tools such as Ahrefs and Moz.
That’s not all. The level of targeting control you get is amazing. On the right side, you’ll see various filters where you can input specific site parameters with respect to quality, authority, metrics from other tools as well as Serpzilla, topics relevant to the link you want, the top level domain (which can help with local and international SEO if you use it smartly), and of course, the price range you want for each link. Once you tweak all the targeting, budget, keywords, and site-specific settings to your liking, all you have to do is sit back and watch Serpzilla weave its link building magic. Now that you have a fair idea of how to configure Serpzilla and rev up its engine, let’s look at the advantages it offers over conventional link building programs.
Link Building Automation
The explosion of martech has led to every facet of marketing being automated. Why should link building be left behind? The usual process for paid link building is long and drawn out: Serpzilla can automate most of these tasks for you, dramatically speeding up the process. A small piece of Serpzilla code goes on the websites that are part of the network, and a links.db file is synchronized and downloaded every hour to their servers. But for you, the link building work ends when you press the “Buy” button. Once all links you choose are live, the service will notify you, along with any special requirements that need attention. Stats show that over 90% of link building requests are fulfilled without any manual intervention, resulting in a great reduction in labor costs and productivity. Further, it’s not just the links that need to be checked regularly – you also need to be sure the site you chose retains its quality and metrics that you originally chose it for. Serpzilla tracks various authority and trust metrics associated with the page and website, such as Moz’s Domain Authority (DA), Ahrefs’ Domain Rating (DR) as well as Trust Flow and Citation Flow that were first developed by Majestic. Apart from that, Serpzilla has its own Serpzilla Rank (SR), which we’ll talk about in a minute. Sign up for Serpzilla now
Link Placement and Monitoring
Many times, you send a report to a client while feeling proud of yourself for meeting your monthly link building targets. And when the client checks your spreadsheet, they find half a dozen links have disappeared, sending your trustworthiness and reputation down the drain. Has this happened to you? (I know the answer.) Link monitoring is a service that is already built into Serpzilla. The product ensures that both rented and purchased links last the full duration of the agreement. Serpzilla’s bot crawls your links four times a day from a private network of geographically dispersed proxy servers. If it doesn’t find the link or if it can’t connect to the website, it returns an ERROR status and the link isn’t paid for. That’s not all. For any given target site, if the bot finds that more than 5% of all links to Serpzilla clients return an ERROR, the site is deactivated until the webmaster publishes the link. This means Serpzilla blocks all further association and link insertion with that site and the webmaster has no option but to fix the issue if they want to continue earning from sponsored links. Such built-in verification and vetting processes build trust both ways – link builders can be sure the money they’re paying gets them a reliable, valuable and long-term link while publications get full value out of their content.
A Special Word on Serpzilla Rank (SR)
The SEO world is full of metrics that attempt to measure the authority of a website, the power of a single link, the trustworthiness and accuracy of content, the indexability of a page, and so on. Arguably the most significant of them all is Google’s PageRank, which determines the likelihood that a page will rank for a given query based on the backlinks it has got. Serpzilla Rank (SR) attempts to reverse engineer propensity of a page to influence rankings – not just based on its backlinks, but about 100 different parameters including:
The quality and topical relevance of the content on the site, similar to Google’s EAT, including both machine and human analysis ACINT counter – an ML-powered evaluation of users’ behavior on the site and presumption of their interests and intent based on their actions Integration with third-party SEO data providers such as Moz, Ahrefs, etc.
The self-learning algorithm at the heart of Serpzilla is unparalleled in terms of scale. It is based on the historical SEO metrics of over one billion pages from a staggering 120,000 sites. SR can be used as an alternative to the mainstream SEO tools’ site authority scores. Even while there are very few indicators, SR can provide a very accurate estimate of the worth of a link from a given page. Studies have shown it can help you save up to 30% of your link budget by selecting the right target sites.
Automate Your Link Buying Strategy
What is your link building strategy? How do you pace your link acquisition? Do you build different kinds of links in different numbers for clients according to their budget? Chances are, once you decide the prices for links, you follow a set strategy as per whatever the budget allows. You don’t speed it up or slow it down or pause it until exactly the right time, do you? Serpzilla allows experienced link builders to set up a flexible strategy by selecting targets of varying authority and relevance and pacing their link acquisition to perfection. The secret to an effective link building strategy is its editorial value. You need to make sure every link you get is topically relevant and contributing to the intrinsic value of your page. Links come in a variety of formats. But the best backlinks you can get are from within content – the meat of the page. Building in-content links is all about creating a snippet of text that fits nicely within an existing piece of content along with a link to your site. Guest posts are perhaps the best example of this method. The only way to scale this type of link building is by automating your outreach efforts. So, Serpzilla gives you the option to get contextual links from guest posts as well as existing content on valuable media publications. These can be further subdivided into categories, depending on what kind of content it is and the purpose of the content. For example, you can write an article on an industry blog and link back to one of your service pages from that article. Or, a webmaster (or even a user) can write a review of your product or service on their blog. Or, the content you publish on your blog can be syndicated to other publications, earning you more links as the source of the content. Serpzilla also has its own “format” of high-quality links – Serpzilla backlinks. These are the most contextual links you can get, regardless of the source page. They work much like native advertising in that you get the option of on-page placement – whether you want the link from the content, sidebar, footer, etc. Links from these blocks (prime real estate) are usually “rental” links that you can get using Serpzilla’s niche edits. Of course an SEO specialist can manually find pages and text that match their keywords and insert links directly into the text, giving it more thematic relevance.
Once you know the value of different types of links, you can truly appreciate how Serpzilla allows variation in the type and mode of link building. For example, you could get two guest posts from mainstream publications one month and 10 niche links from listing sites in your industry the month after that for the same price. This way, you acquire the requisite link mass and link juice while maintaining your budget. The price, quality, site metric, topic, and regional filters we saw earlier can help you do this with great accuracy.
Finally, you can top up your link building strategy by putting them in a tiered system. Tiered link-building is a tactic that’s used to boost the value of your page by creating layers of backlinks from least valuable to most valuable.
This way, you can avoid algorithmic or manual penalties flowing in due to backlinks from spammy, generic, or irrelevant sites as well as those with thin content.
Serpzilla Pricing
Serpzilla is a marketplace with free pricing. Webmasters set their own prices for links on their sites, guided by their wishes and common sense. Meanwhile, customers select the links to buy, for which they consider the cost to be reasonable. Due to the pricing tools and open competition, prices are balanced and varied. They can vary from 1 cent to several thousand dollars per link. To learn more about Serpzilla’s pricing structure, visit the pricing page.
Serpzilla Review: Final Verdict
Building rank-boosting and long-lasting links is truly hard, requiring smarts of genius proportions. Serpzilla is a powerful link building platform that lets you follow the strategy of your choice by using its huge database to maximum effect. Links are the currency of the web. Despite Google’s assertions to the contrary, link building remains the fastest and most effective way to rank your pages. In fact, in Serpzilla’s soon-to-be-published study for the Indian market, they found that competition is high and new sites in most niches require hundreds of links to rank high in the SERPs. Serpzilla can prove to be a godsend here – it can drastically reduce man hours (and associated costs) while building links at a steady pace. It is perhaps the only tool in the market that helps you scale your link building efforts at a minimum budget. Go try it and slay the competition! Sign up for Serpzilla now [Serpzilla & 99signals Exclusive Offer] For every $20 you spend at Serpzilla, you’ll get a bonus of $10, which you can then use to buy links. Click here to grab this offer.
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