It’s safe to say that Kerboo has a lot of promise.

This backlink analysis tool does more than just peek at your links.

It zooms in and shows you every last detail you need to know about.

Kerboo’s goal is to help you understand, protect and promote your digital profile in one platform.

You’ll get to know the backlinks you already have, do link prospecting to uncover new backlink opportunities and quickly audit entire site link profiles, as well as create and send linkbuilding outreach emails.

Beyond backlinks, this platform offers a suite of tools to uncover weak spots in your digital presence.

All of this is quite tempting if you’re in the SEO and linkbuilding game. At a glance, Kerboo looks pretty promising.

It promises to makes your life a heck of a lot easier—I bet you’re already interested if you spend a lot of time conducting outreach campaigns or a managing an ongoing reputation management campaign.

I was interested too, so I decided to investigate, for your sake and for mine.

I was unable to try the software for myself, as the company does a considerable amount of vetting before opening up their gates, but I did get to check things out pretty thoroughly via webinar.

Let’s have a look around.

A Firsthand Review of Kerboo

How to Get Started with Kerboo

Kerboo’s whole purpose is to help brands improve visibility, mainly in organic search. It does this in a variety of ways, and can accomodate different types of customer needs.

The site works on either an agency or a brand basis.

Each Kerboo profile represents a brand. An agency account is naturally able to manage a multitude of brands within their profile. With that in mind, the first step is creating the right profile for your needs.

You’ll first link up all the relevant digital marketing accounts you have access to already. The webinar example mentioned adding Moz, Majestic, Ahrefs, Google Analytics and more. All the usual suspects.

Once you’ve linked up the relevant accounts, the software goes ahead and pulls in your data, so you’ve got a streamlined snapshot of how your brand looks from a variety of perspectives. That alone is very useful.

From there, you’ll get what’s called an aggregated link score. There are two parts to the link score feature.

For one, you’ll look at LinkRisk—a feature which looks at all backlinks and gives them a score from 1 to 1000. As per my host, Paul: One is fantastic, 1000 is just horrible.

Paul says most websites have an average score of a 500 or 600—pretty neutral. The interface makes this seem like you’re getting a credit score or something.

Say you’ve received a score like the image below—a 636. While it could be better, knowing where you stand is the first step toward making the changes needed to improve your organic profile.

Backlink Analysis with Kerboo

After receiving your initial score, you’ll want to dive into your backlink analysis to find the particular links dragging you down. The platform uses the link profile as a basis for starting your “workflow.”

Like any good reputation monitoring tool, Kerboo helps users identify broken and bad links before they start to cause trouble.

You’ll get a list of backlinks, much like you do in the Monitor Backlinks tool. Within the profile feature, you can select which links you’d like to approve, as well as which you’d like to monitor or disavow.

As with other link monitoring tools, you’ll have a starting point to see which areas need work, and from there, develop a strategy for data collection and outreach.

What makes Kerboo special, however, is, you can click on these links and look at the website that featured your link—no need to leave the platform.

Here, you can have a look and decide whether you’d like to keep, remove, disavow or monitor this particular link.

The convenience of having everything in one place means you can stay on top of negative SEO and build relationships with the good guys.

Site Hunting with Kerboo

Site hunting, within the Kerboo context, is a means of gathering background information on prospects of all kinds (media, leads, influencers) before moving into the outreach stage of your campaign.

In this section of the suite, there are 50+ filters you can use to find your exact target audience. For example, if you’re in the business of selling a software tool for small businesses—you can set specific parameters that help you ID folks that benefit from your solution.

Filter by niche to find e-commerce businesses making X amount per year, or hone in on sites that fall within a specific niche—clothing companies, let’s say. As you can see in the photo below, the advanced search tools allow you to search by inputting things like title, description or location.

From there, you can sort the results and build a prospect list full of hot leads. And what’s more is, Kerboo will populate your list with the contact details associated with those websites.

The other part of this site hunting process, as per the Kerboo site is, “understanding the people” behind your prospect list. You can look at their social accounts, straight from the platform—which may help you understand how to better communicate with them when you do reach out.

You’re not going to talk to everyone the same way, and seeing profiles breathes some life into what would be a name and a phone number in a traditional CRM (customer resource manager).

CRM and Outreach

The CRM and Outreach feature is one of the more unique aspects of the platform. You can easily import your contacts (okay, pretty basic), and from there, add a website, social profiles and kind of scope people out before the initial outreach begins.

You can use this feature a couple of different ways. For one, you can track the trajectory from prospect to customer—you know, just like a regular CRM. The difference being, you can dig up all kinds of brand monitoring intel that will enhance your sales strategy.

For example, you can pull up a prospect’s site from the platform and list off your potential solutions. No more conducting background research from a variety of channels and attempting to organize them elsewhere.

The second part, of course, is good old influencer marketing. Scope out the social channels and see how many followers your targets have. As we mentioned above, the site discovery stage involves building lists of sites and people to connect with.

In the outreach phase, you can build outreach projects and record tasks, tags and responses as you move from the prospecting phase to closing the sale. As in other CRMs, you have the ability to sync the CRM up to your email and share prospect info with other teammates.

Additionally, you have the opportunity to view each prospect from a “global view.” Meaning, Kerboo keeps track of every time you’ve connected via social media, every task you’ve completed and so on.

API

Kerboo’s API allows users to integrate the platform’s data into your own systems, and vice versa. Google Analytics, for example, can plug right into the platform so you can view web traffic stats.

As mentioned earlier, you can add Moz, Majestic and whatever else you’re signed up for already.

The API helps you automate certain workflows, as well. For example, you can input a single line of code tells the program to export to a specific location every time you run an audit.

The point here is to consolidate as many tools as possible to save you time—some teams may be able to spend the bulk of their day inside the program. The webinar didn’t cover this too much, so I can’t speak for the ease of use here.

The Pros and Cons of the Expansive Kerboo Tool

On the one hand, I’m impressed with the whole central hub aspect of the tool. It’s awesome that you can open up the platform and look at the metrics I outlined above.

You’ll get a ton of data—you can browse influencer websites, check backlinks and view Majestic and Ahrefs data from the platform. You can also do a little social stalking if you’re so inclined.

Still, there are a few downsides to Kerboo. There aren’t a ton of testimonials or reviews, which is surprising given all the promised utility. Additionally, the makers of the tool do not provide a free trial. Instead, you must book a demo to try it yourself.

The alternative, as mentioned, is watching a short webinar, which serves to walk you through the basic features of the tool and how you might use them.

Generally, this is fine, but it’s hard to get a feel for a tool without clicking around, unsupervised for a while. It might have all these great features, but we still don’t know if the platform is clunky or comes with a steep learning curve.

And finally—the pricing is pretty high. At the entry level, we’re looking at close to $300 USD on a monthly basis. It would be difficult to justify spending this much unless you’ve got a larger team and a decent marketing budget.

Conclusion

Kerboo offers a ton of info. So, obviously, that’s a pretty big plus. But starting at 250 euros (about 290 USD) per month, it’s a bit spendy for those lone wolf marketers out there.

If you’re on a smaller budget, I could see choosing to use a combination of social listening tools, like Mention and Google Alerts, and backlink monitoring tools, like Monitor Backlinks.

I could see this being a good option for agencies who need to keep tabs on potential influencers and track prospects and brand mentions too. But, again, Kerboo charges a lot for social listening and a CRM, and there are cheaper options out there.

Digital marketers working for an agency or a larger brand could benefit big time from this suite of tools as well. The fact that everything is all in one place is a big time saver for the marketing generalist who needs to juggle posting content, building relationships and uncovering link opportunities.

And, while I was lucky to make it into the intro webinar at the last minute, I kind of felt like there was a missed opportunity to use the tool myself.

Seeing someone roll through the platform was okay, but kind of like watching someone else drive or play a video game—read: not especially satisfying.