Find backlinks of your competitors you can replicate easily

LinkMiner is an easy-to-use backlink checker tool focusing on backlinks that matter. The tool is designed to evaluate backlink data by providing different metrics, embedded website previews, backlinks categories and features to filter and save the most interesting links.

Kevin William David interviewed Maros Kortis, Digital Marketing Professional at LinkMiner to know more.

Hi Maros, So tell us about LinkMiner?

LinkMiner is the freshest addition to the Mangools SEO tools package. After releasing a rank tracking tool last summer, our aim was to develop a tool that would not only cover another important task of search engine optimization but will also boost the synergy of our package.

And that’s how we started working on a backlink analysis tool in Q4 2017. Our users were asking for it as well. We pay a lot of attention to feedback, we shape our tools based on it so there was basically no doubt what will be our next product.

Tell me more about why you are building this?

Probably everyone who does SEO knows that link building is one of the most time-consuming tasks. The backlink analysis means browsing through a lot of data and the process of earning researched backlinks doesn’t depend completely on you.

That’s why we wanted to make the analysis more productive and the act of replicating backlinks of competitors less difficult. This was our top priority during the whole development of LinkMiner.

We released the first public version as a New Year’s gift at the beginning of January 2018 after beta testing in December. We are still collecting feedback and already have a couple of improvement ideas.

How is Linkminer different from what already exists in the market?

The main goal of LinkMiner is to help its users to find competitors’ backlinks that are easy to replicate thanks to incorporating a bunch of useful features:

• New metric
• Categories
• Embedded website preview with anchor placement
• Favorites list

We have developed a new metric called the Link Strength to calculate the power of backlinks. It’s based on SEO metrics, Alexa Rank and social signals.

Besides quick and advanced filters our aim was to categorize backlinks such as blogs, forums or Q&A websites. Knowing the category lets you immediately identify how hard it is to earn that backlink.

I personally don’t like opening each result in a new browser tab. Unfortunately, it’s a standard on the market. So we have split the main LinkMiner’s dashboard into two columns and added an embedded website preview with highlighted anchor placement. That means users can see behind metrics to evaluate the potential of backlinks.

Backlink analysis usually ends with data exports. Our plan was to create a tool that will enable our users to do the whole process in it. That’s how the Favorites list has been created. It’s basically a list in which users can save selected results.

We are not trying to compete with Ahrefs or SEMrush when it comes to generating our own data. We don’t crawl the internet in order to gain backlinks. The main data sources of LinkMiner are Majestic’s backlink indexes.

There are many other tools such as Linkody, OSE by Moz, or Monitor Backlinks.

Who uses Linkminer? What types of roles do your customers have at their companies?

There are many types of customers using LinkMiner as a part of our tools package. They are bloggers, SEO specialists, business owners, digital marketing and SEO agencies or even beginners learning how SEO works.

Some of the biggest companies using Mangools SEO tools are Skyscanner, Adidas, RetailMeNot or Alexa.

How are your customers using Linkminer? Could you share a few different use cases?

The typical use case is when a user wants to analyze their competitor in order to find the most valuable backlinks. That’s what the tool is primarily designed for. The added value of LinkMiner is that it helps to find results that are easy to replicate thanks to the above-mentioned features.

Have there been unique use cases for Linkminer that you hadn’t thought of or expected?

Though backlink analysis tools are designed for spying on competitors, many users tend to try them by analyzing their own domain. They did this in other tools in the past so they want to compare the results. It’s natural. The thing is that almost every tool offers its own metrics based on different data.

The term “replicate backlinks” is nothing new, however, from the so far received feedback we realized users aren’t used to it that much directly in tools.

Other than that, I don’t think there any unique use cases. We just need to put more emphasis on the fact that LinkMiner covers a bit more than the old-fashioned backlink analysis.

Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?

I think it’s the whole mindset I mentioned in the earlier SERPWatcher interview. We do care about the product, its features, UX and design.

Then it’s all about our mission to make SEO reachable for everyone from very beginners to true professionals thanks to user-friendly interface.

What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?

First of all, it was all about deciding which data sources we will use. There are 3 or 4 major backlink data providers.

Another challenge was the embedded website preview panel in the right part of LinkMiner’s dashboard. For example, there was an issue we couldn’t display “http” websites because our sites are “https”. There was a lot of stuff we had to keep in mind and fix accordingly as the tool fetches and then displays thousands of websites.

Yet, it can still happen we aren’t able to display some because its server is down, the SSL certificate has expired, or other situations we simply can’t influence.

What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added? Are there any that have been particularly impactful for you?

Currently, we are thinking about how to make the best of backlink indexes of our data provider.

Before we end, What are the top products that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them?

When it comes to the whole company, we run our business on Amazon Web Services. We do use Google Analytics Suite, Webmaster Tools and other tools for analytics.

LinkMiner itself is based on AWS as well and its main source for backlink data is Majestic.

Originally published at siftery.com.