I'm so surprised that guest posting is ranked higher than reactive PR! In my opinion, Reactive PR is one of the most beneficial tactics for link building. Chasing brand mentions also feels like an underutilised technique, especially when partnered with outreaching a creative campaign. I personally have had a lot of success converting mentions to links from campaigns and is a technique I use daily.

Resource page link building, while not the hottest tactic, should be higher than it is. When researched and produced well these pages can provide huge value to users and gain links with absolutely zero outreach. Stats pages for example, when targeted to writers/journalists in a niche, can bring in 50-100 relevant links each year, which many content marketing campaigns would love to get. If you update these each year, it's an easy way to keep some passive links coming in.

I am so happy that the humble guest post is used by 46% of respondents. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s one of my favourite link building tactics. However, there are a lot of ways to get it wrong. To keep yourself on the right side of the tracks, ask yourself this question before you pitch: will this piece of content be good for the web? The point is to identify whether your guest post will be genuinely useful and for a relevant audience, or if it will poison the web with another poor quality article that’s only 400 words long with links to sales pages awkwardly jammed in.

It’s also a relief to see that so many people are link building through a variety of tactics, which all have their own merits and purposes. It can be easy to be swept up in the glamour of digital PR and assume that ideating creative assets and pitching reactive lifestyle pieces are where you have to be to make it in the outreach game. In my opinion, digital PR is one umbrella tactic, which can be activated in several ways. If your aim is to build links, particularly to support your SEO strategy, don’t be afraid to get inventive!

Backlinks that help the domain should be chosen carefully, not all content works and not every competitor makes the right decisions. Many backlinks cost a lot of money but do not help in the ranking. It is important to research carefully beforehand.

From my perspective as a journalist, I do wish reactive PR was higher on the list below. Though I understand it's a tricky method for agencies to monetise, there are a handful of agencies who absolutely nail reactive PR and I've linked to their client's websites multiple times across various publications I've worked on.

There's always a demand for experts to comment on everything from doctors and pharmacists for healthcare stories, to psychologists for sex and relationship stories and lawyers for stories about driving fines and driving law changes. And, it would be great to see more PRs executing this well with speedy quote turnarounds and insightful responses from their clients – rather than generic comments.

Why are nearly 50% of respondents still spending time and resources on guest posting? In a 2020 Search Engine Journal article, "Google's John Mueller stated on Twitter that Google not only frowns on guest posting for links but has been devaluing them for the past several years. He also said that Google has years of data for training algorithms to catch and devalue guest post links so that they don't help a site rank better."

Guest posting sometimes can be seen in a negative light as in the past some people went overboard and it became spammy. It is good to see it is still effective if done well of course. If you are sharing quality content to a targeted/engaged audience, people will want to read and link back to that source.

I am beyond happy to see the predominant form of link building is through content marketing. When done correctly, no other link building technique can compare. This forces us to develop content strategies which focus both on meeting the intent of our searchers and writing higher quality content that is unique enough to earn links and brand citations from reputable resources.

Surprised to see guest posting so high on the list. Especially considering that most reported that link building is done in-house.

I'm so happy to see this stat. Ahrefs has been my ride-or-die for link building. I do think a lot of their features are under-used. For instance, the content explorer is an absolute goldmine. I use it to dig up diamonds from Pinterest, and I use non-topical words (like "how many") to reverse engineer linkable assets.

I wonder what percentage of these answers also relate to the budget available and if "in-house, Agency or Freelance", logic alone suggests you are less likely to have access to some of the higher cost tools or a larger array of these tools if you're a freelancer for instance.

A further part of me wonders if the marketing of the tools themselves plays a part here too - some of the tools at the tail end are maybe less well known or less marketed (not as well funded) than some of the bigger, more popular tools. Is reputation playing a part here?

I love how many great tools we have in the industry to help us be better at our jobs - and I'd have to wholeheartedly agree that Ahrefs is one of my absolute faves. From competitor stalking and link tracking to even a spot of keyword research, it's a staple in my digital PR toolbox.

Beyond this, I'd have to say Buzzstream is one of the most important pieces of software that I use in my day-to-day work, and ResponseSource is becoming increasingly more fruitful as more and more of our client base delve into the wonderful world of reactive PR and newsjacking.

It basically looks like Ahrefs has managed to become the market standard. I wonder if this trend will be boosted even more by negative PR around SEMrush.

It’s important to remember that these are still just tools — don't rely on them too much, and do your own research. If the industry is new to you, ask people who work in it, ask customers, etc. to find out what they really read and which websites play an important role.

HARO is great for American contacts and can open doors for longer-term relationships if your content is high-quality.

I have however requested experts through the platform myself many times before and the quality of respondents is often not great. This does mean a decent PR pitch with a relevant expert and well-crafted comment should stand out though! Don't be put off by the competition.

Ahrefs is my favourite tool to understand a website's link profile and its competitors. Also, it's a great tool to visualize the type of links they are getting and the strategy they have behind them.

Having used both Ahrefs and Semrush, as well as a lot of the other tools listed below, it's not too surprising to see Ahrefs at the top.

For link building, it is such a versatile and easy to use tool. During any day of link building for me, I can research what content types are getting my competitors good links, whether any of my content has been a hit for links and, of course, I can monitor links coming into the site almost on a real-time basis.

Ahrefs will forever be my favourite tool for link building. It’s particularly savvy for the more tactical forms of link building, such as link reclamation, unlinked mentions, broken link building, stealing competitor backlinks, pursuing link gaps – the list is (pretty much) endless.

This isn't surprising. Ahrefs does a great job of organizing link data for competitors. It's the best tool available for many of the top link building tactics mentioned.

In this case, I would have replied Pitchbox, as it's essential for running multiple projects. But it also pulls in Ahrefs data ;)

I'm a big fan of Ahrefs and would definitely sit within the 50% who would pick this tool if they could only use one.

For me, it's the number of insights you can access and analyse using one single tool!

Ahrefs doesn't just play a key part in our backlink audits and competitor link gap analysis at Aira. The Keywords Explorer provides great inspiration for themes for content marketing, the content explorer is really helpful for trending topics and prospecting, and site explorer helps to identify if publications actually link out too, so we can be more efficient with our time, and avoid reaching out to sites to convert brand mentions when they don't link out.

I honestly can't think of a day where I haven't used Ahrefs. It's a fantastic tool to help keep track of broken links and links gained, as well as a way to create campaigns around search metrics. It's interesting to see that majestic is so far down on the list too, as it can offer similar results to Ahrefs but also you can complete a competitor backlink gap analysis with this tool meaning we can find out which sites can add the most value when building links.

In my opinion, the disavow file is not used correctly most of the time. When we depend on the SEO tools to pull the so-called "bad links" and disavow them all together, it might harm the domain than help.

Also, Google keeps saying that disavowing is not important and they know what is a good link and what is a bad link. Now, it is no surprise that the responders have split opinion.