# Module 3.1: How to Vet and Validate Link Prospects

Hey, it's Sam Oh and welcome to&nbsp;the third
module which is all about vetting and validating
link prospects.
Now,&nbsp;straightup, this stage is kind of boring.
You're basically taking your huge list of
unfiltered prospects and checking them
for a couple of things.
In short, you want to make&nbsp;sure that
a) they're actually links you want;
and b) that your link pitches will be relevant.
Now, before we can get into tips on doing it fast,
let's get on the same page of how&nbsp;you do it slowly,
step by step.
So, when you're vetting prospects using
the&nbsp;methods I taught in the last module,
there are 3 steps you can do.
I like to look at them in levels&nbsp;depending
on the size of the prospect list.
Level 1 is to narrow down your list
of prospects by SEO metrics.
Two common metrics people often use are
Domain&nbsp;Rating and domain-level website traffic.
Domain Rating basically tells us whether a
site has followed links across their domain.
And this is important to some people
because if a website has low authority,
then chances are, you won't get much PageRank
by&nbsp;getting a link from a page on their site.
Now, DR is far from perfect because
a) it's a third-party metric;
and b) PR flows at the page level, so I personally
don't put too much weight on this metric.
As for total website traffic, it&nbsp;gives us a hint
whether the site&nbsp;is likely in good standing
with Google.
For example, it's unlikely that you'll see
a DR 90 site with 0 website traffic unless
they've been hit by Google.
In my opinion, it makes sense to use filter
when you're working with hundreds or potentially
thousands of link prospects.
And while you may&nbsp;filter out a handful of
decent prospects, you'll&nbsp;likely remove more
low quality prospects than good ones.
So the time savings is worth it.
Now, trusting these metrics
alone would be a mistake.
This leads us nicely into level 2, which
is to ensure that prospects' pages are
relevant to the page you'll be pitching.
Now, in this stage, you can just scan the titles
of your prospects pages which should give us
hints into what the page is about.
For example, if we were building&nbsp;links to
our SEO stats page based on the people
linking this competing&nbsp;URL, you'll see from
the titles of referring pages that they're all
pretty relevant.
This one's on SEO interview questions and answers.
This one's on the best digital marketing&nbsp;channels.
Then there's this one on ranking on
the first page of Google and so on.
But as you continue to go down the list,
you might question whether this one on
the&nbsp;"best online shopping sites in
Singapore"&nbsp;is worth reaching out to.
The page itself doesn't seem super relevant to
me,&nbsp;but the domain is mediaonemarketing.com.
So it sounds like a marketing agency to me&nbsp;which
is relevant to SEO and our page on SEO stats.
So I'd personally keep it in our list&nbsp;at this
point, but it wouldn't exactly be a high
priority prospect in my opinion.
As for a page like this which is on lead&nbsp;gen
competitive advantages for pest control,
I'd just exclude it.
I'd also exclude pages in other languages
because my content would be in English
and so would my outreach pitch.
Alright, onto level 3, which is to validate
that your pitch angle is relevant.
Now, because our prospecting method
revolves around finding seed prospects
based on a linkable point, that means we
need to check each prospect's page to make
sure they're still mentioning that point.
For example, in our SEO stats campaign, I exported
all backlinks that mention "93" in the anchor and
surrounding text.
And I did this because the&nbsp;organic
competitor's page doesn't mention
the stat, meaning all links pointing to the page
because of the 93% stat are now irrelevant.
This also means, we need to validate that the
prospects still mention this stat on the page,
because if they're not, then our personalized
email saying, "hey you're mentioning this
93% stat" just wouldn't make sense.
So in this case, vetting the page would&nbsp;
actually require us to visit these URLs
and do a find on the page for "93."
Now, while it only takes around 30 seconds
to verify that a page still mentions the stat,
if you have 1,000 pages to inspect, then
that's&nbsp;500 minutes or over 8 hours of work.
Plus, it's a super monotonous task
that's prone&nbsp;to human error.
But the good news is that you can&nbsp;do it
more accurately in under 5 minutes by
using Screaming Frog's custom search feature.
To set it up, click on Configuration, then
hover over Custom, and choose Search.
Now, I'll name our custom search to "93%,"
make sure the condition is "Contains" and
then type "93" in the search box.
Now I'll choose Page Text from
the&nbsp;dropdown and we're all set to go.
Now, all I have to do is run the 875
URLs&nbsp;in list mode and run the crawl.
From here, you can go to the custom search
tab, choose your filter in the dropdown,
and you'll see a list of all URLs
that match your custom search.
So in our case, 779 URLs&nbsp;of the 875 that
we crawled,&nbsp;mention our linkable point.
Meaning, 96 pages&nbsp;either didn't match the
footprint or returned&nbsp;a non-200 response code.
So that saved us around 48 minutes
of precious vetting time.
Now, it's not always possible
to vet at&nbsp;scale like this.
And that usually depends on
the complexity of your linkable point.
For example, we found some lookalike
prospects in Content Explorer by searching
for "use lsi keywords" as our query.
And our hope was to find pages that recommend
using so-called "LSI&nbsp;keywords" because again,
they don't exist.
Now, as for our pitch, we might try to gently
educate prospects on so-called "LSI keywords"
and offer suggestions to update their content
with more accurate information – where our
guide could potentially be an additional resource.
Now, just because a page says "use LSI
keywords," it doesn't mean they're all
recommending to use them.
In fact, this page has the phrase,&nbsp;"use LSI
keywords" on it, but the context of the mention
is "Does Google use them?"
And in this section, they quote John
Mueller saying that they're not a thing.
Unfortunately for complex linkable points like
this, where footprints can have various contexts,
the only way to vet these prospects is manually.
And I'll talk about hiring good vetters
in our last module on team building.
Now, after you've finished your page vetting
process, you'll need to start finding the right
people to send your email pitches to.
And personally, I consider this
a part of the vetting process
because there's research involved to validate
whether the prospect is a good one or not.
So in the next lesson, I'll share my experiences
on contacting people with different titles – i.e.
author, editor, generic emails etc, and I'll share
some stats on who the best person to contact
with your link pitch is.
I'll see you there.