We built a project manager into SpyFu to help you organize your search marketing research into one spot. When you start collecting backlink ideas, we’ll add value by finding helpful contact information for that page (or site). Here’s how it works.

Most of the data we show on SpyFu comes from Google. However, we’ve been stretching out — adding contact information so you can get in touch with the people behind the websites you’ve found. By having reliable contact information, you can connect with potential partners more easily. Ask for links or work on larger content projects.

We’re in the business of helping you improve your SEO results. That takes commitment to creating quality content as well as on-page and off-page practices. One of those practices is developing relationships so that people will link to your site. (Shorthand version: backlinks)

There are plenty of tools to grade, track and audit backlinks. We’ve tried to help you single out the best opportunities to help you rank. Every time you get a new backlink idea while working in SpyFu*, add it to your personal project manager. That lets you keep track of any notes and tasks that go into getting a link from that site, and what’s more, we’ll load website data for you and start hunting down contacts.

We added a button to make this smooth sailing for you.

 A quick note before we move on: the project manager is super-intuitive. With that “add” button, you can store the links you find without having any projects underway. However, if you do want to see more about organizing your work and creating projects to hold all of your ideas, we have a refresher. 

Inside the project manager, your projects include sub-categories for websites, links, and contacts. Any links that you added get organized two ways. We list them as individual links and we sort them as any common websites.

www.spyfuexample.com/this-is-my-rad-page

www.spyfuexample.com/do-people-even-say-rad-anymore

Those are independent links, so if you saved both, we would show them as

The link overview and the website overview will both load contact suggestions for you to approve. We’ve hunted down social media accounts and emails so you have a few different ways of reaching out — increasing your chances of breaking through to them.

Once you “ok” a contact, it gets its own overview page inside the project manager to help you coordinate all the details about reaching out to them (past and future actions).

Take a look…

Just like the website and link overviews, the contact overview lets you set ratings, stay on top of its status, and gauge how powerful this contact is through updates you can record on the page.

Give yourself reminders of where things stand with this person. Your drop down options help you keep track of where you left off and what happens next. It’s valuable in helping you make progress in your outreach. Keep shooting for the next step.

Create tags that help you remember important details that aren’t listed on the page.

Since your tags stay at the top of the overview, they act as good notes about the contact that never get lost. Think “Pacific Time Zone” or “prefers email.” You create the tags, so you can be as specific as you’d like.

This is your call. Once you find a strong contact, give it a 3 star rating. Or settle with fewer stars when they aren’t responsive or can’t give you the link. Whatever you choose, the stars can help you prioritize your work.

We combined metrics that we thought were a good sign of how much reach a person (or business/organization) has through their channels. A high SpyFluence rating identifies those who are likely to help content spread.

This is a third-party rating of how much influence a person has via social media. It’s recognized amongst social media power users as a general measurement of someone’s online influence, so we included it for reference.

Any time we can track down a related social media account — individual or company — we give you the contact as another option. We automatically suggest the best connections we can find, but if you want to add your own details, you can include it here.

if you pick up a better email address to use or come across their Facebook page, you can add any new details here that we might have missed. Just like with your notes, it stays tied to your eyes only, and you will have this new contact info in the same spot as you have others.

Create notes, tasks, and contact events. As you load these, we’ll create date stamped notes of your activity to help you keep track of what you’ve done and what you have left to tackle.

Remember, this is 100% yours. There are no rules to follow inside the project manager, and the tasks/ratings/notes are optional. Everything here is made to support your workflow. We’ve just tried to provide the tools that might help your productivity.  

Notes: General descriptions or points to remember.

Example: “She manages two blogs”

Tasks: This lets you set a due date for any “to do” items in your list.  

Example: “Send a handwritten note thanking her for the introduction she made.”

Contact History: You will appreciate having these notes to reference. Remember, you make better connections when they happen in small steps. Keep track of notable conversations you had, resources you recommended, or the smallest details that don’t have a digital trail (like when you leave a voicemail).

Example: “Recommended an article in the Twitter Chat”

This serves as a reminder of why you’re tracking this contact in the first place. It is a list of sites they might be able to help connect you with.

We’ve included the contact’s own description of themselves (from Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, etc.) so you can get an idea of the personality they use on the web and the type of content you can expect them to share.

Not to be confused with the related websites and links at the bottom of the overview, this section lets you add any websites you’d like to connect to this contact. It’s a way of helping you organize your notes separate from any auto-loading sites and links.

Organize any phone contacts into this section so they’re always available alongside your notes.

*What about the asterisk from the beginning of the article? Earlier I mentioned that you can add ideas that you get while working in SpyFu. That’s true even if the ideas didn’t come from our site. If you’re collecting ideas for potential link partners you can load them into the project manager and get the same benefits you get from native-found links:

Read more here about how we add value to your research.