OpenSEO Link Prospecting
Goal
Find realistic pages, sites, and authors that might reference the user's page, product, study, guide, or tool. Use OpenSEO for prospect discovery, then use available web/search/browser tools for contact discovery.
Required inputs
- User domain or target URL
- Linkable asset, page, product, study, tool, or topic
- Optional competitors
- Optional market/location/language
OpenSEO MCP tools
- : find ranking articles, listicles, resource pages, comparisons, and topical publishers.
- : inspect competitor domain or page backlink/referring-domain patterns.
- : qualify important prospect domains.
- : understand what a prospect or competitor ranks for when topical fit matters.
- and : use for local SEO link prospecting when nearby businesses, local competitors, or Maps/category signals can reveal partnership targets.
- : expand prospecting queries.
Contact discovery tools
After OpenSEO identifies good prospects, use available non-OpenSEO browsing or search tools for public contact discovery. Depending on the client, this may be web search, page fetches, browser automation, or a search API.
Look for:
- Author byline pages
- Contact pages
- Editorial guidelines
- About/team pages
- LinkedIn, X, Bluesky, or other professional profiles
- Newsletter or publication masthead pages
- Public email addresses in page HTML or visible page text
- Structured data such as , , , or
Only record contact details that were actually found. Include the source URL for any email, profile, or contact form.
Prospecting query patterns
Build queries from the asset/topic:
<competitor> alternatives
Use
in batches for the most relevant patterns. Send at most 10 queries per call.
Workflow
- Clarify the linkable asset and the reason someone would reference it.
- Build 5-10 prospecting queries by default.
- Call for those queries.
- If competitors are provided, call for the strongest competitor domains or pages first. Continue without backlink evidence if it is unavailable.
- For local SEO, use and around priority locations to identify nearby competitors, categories, and local SERP evidence before searching for local chambers, associations, campus resources, community pages, and directories.
- Filter prospects:
- Keep topical relevance and editorial pages.
- Prioritize articles, directories, resource pages, comparisons, statistics pages, templates, and curated lists.
- Deprioritize homepages, login pages, thin affiliate pages, spam, unrelated forums, and direct competitors unless a comparison angle is valid.
- For each good prospect, define the outreach angle:
- Broken/missing resource
- Better current data
- Useful tool/template
- Alternative or comparison inclusion
- Expert quote or supporting reference
- For the strongest prospects, visit or search the prospect site to find the best contact path.
- Draft outreach messages. If contact details were found, include the source. If not, list the next best contact-discovery path.
Output format
Start with:
- Best outreach angle
- Highest-priority prospect type
- Any data limitations
Then include:
| Prospect URL | Site/domain | Source | Relevance | Suggested angle | Contact path | Priority |
|---|
Then provide 2-3 reusable outreach drafts:
- Resource/list inclusion
- Article update/reference suggestion
- Competitor alternative/comparison angle
Guardrails
- Do not invent email addresses, social handles, or contact names.
- Do not say OpenSEO found contact details unless an OpenSEO tool returned them. Attribute contact discovery to the web/search/browser source used.
- If contact details are not available after a reasonable search, recommend specific discovery steps such as checking the author page, contact page, LinkedIn, X, or a reputable contact-enrichment tool.
- Avoid spammy mass outreach. Personalize by page and reason.
- Flag prospects that are direct competitors or likely paid placements.