The Problem

Jeff Oxford owns an eCommerce SEO company called 180 Marketing, and he has used and is still subscribing to some expensive SEO tools.

Although there are lots of capable SEO tools out there, Jeff saw an opportunity in the market for a link building SEO tool that could be used by non-SEO professionals.

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Project Goals

There were two primary goals for the project.

1

The first goal was to create a link building tool for Jeff’s team at 180 Marketing to use.

2

The second goal was to polish it well enough so we can sell the tool as a SaaS application.

API Integrations

One of the most significant challenges of building Link Hunter was the API integrations. Link Hunter integrates with a lot of APIs to present potentials websites to users; we had to consider user experience as we were building the integrations.

Scaling Linkhunter

Link Hunter pulls hundreds of websites on each campaign. These means from the start we had to squeeze every SQL optimization we can. We had to figure out early which tasks we can put no a Redis job so that every action a user takes is instantaneous.

Outcome

Link Hunter is one of the tools used at 180 Marketing, and it has now paying customers per subscription in order to use the DIY link building tool for eCommerce sites.

You can find out more about how Jeff Oxford built Linkhunter with his interview with Spencer Haws of Niche Pursuits.