How SEO agency uses Hunter to generate leads and build backlinks

Meet 95 Projects

95 Projects is a search marketing agency built to support brands with high average order values.

Led by its Founder, Austin Coker, 95 Projects works with ecommerce, B2B, and SaaS,  companies generating $2–30 million a year where a single sale justifies serious SEO investment.

Running a high-output search marketing agency means two things run in parallel: outbound campaigns to win new clients, and link building campaigns for existing ones. 

Both depend on finding the right email address. That's where Hunter became a constant in Austin's workflow.

The challenge

Austin's client acquisition approach is deliberately multi-channel. 

He builds out full SEO strategies on LinkedIn for target prospects - showing owners and founders exactly what they're missing and what their competitors are doing - then looks to reach those same people across email too. 

The aim is that when a lead sees your name on LinkedIn and in their inbox, it stops reading like just another outreach email. But that only works if the email lands in the inbox.

"As soon as I think they see your name on email and then they see your name on LinkedIn, that's when I feel like someone realizes, oh, this isn't just another email that I get 300 times a day."

Austin Coker, Founder, 95 Projects

On the link building side, the challenge is similar but more granular. 

Outreach goes to individual webmasters and content editors - not a company's general inbox, which is usually a placeholder that goes nowhere. 

Finding the right person behind a domain requires digging into the site itself. 

Sending to unverified addresses doesn't just waste effort; it actively damages the sender reputation that the whole outreach program depends on.

The solution

Hunter sits at the centre of both work streams. 

For new client prospecting, Austin uses it to complete his multi-channel sequences after the LinkedIn touchpoint - finding the email address that turns a single-channel interaction into the pattern that makes prospects pay attention. 

For link building, his team uses Hunter's Domain Search to identify who actually manages the sites they're targeting.

• For sales outreach, Hunter provides the email layer that completes Austin's multi-channel stack. Once a prospect has been identified and contacted on LinkedIn, Hunter’s Email Finder provides the email address that lets 95 Projects show up on a second channel - changing how the outreach is perceived.
• For link building, Austin's team goes to a target website, finds the generic contact address, and then uses Hunter's Domain Search to identify who else is associated with the domain. Editors, managers, and contributors surface in ways that a contact page never would. Some blog targets list editors directly - when that happens, Hunter confirms the address and the outreach goes straight there.
• Every email is put through Hunter’s Email Verifier. The risk of skipping this is too great: bad sends hurt deliverability, lose opportunities, and can mean paying again for a placement that was missed the first time around. Hunter's verification step costs almost nothing relative to what a bounced outreach campaign costs.

To Austin, Hunter is second nature at this point - the thing he reaches for automatically when he needs to find or verify a contact, without having to delegate it or slow down.

The results

For 95 Projects, having verified data limits the risk of a missed backlink opportunity which might mean paying again, losing the placement entirely, or having the link go to a competitor. 

A bounced email in a high-volume outreach campaign takes the sender domain with it. Against either of those outcomes, the cost of using Hunter to verify first is essentially zero.

"Finding contact information and being able to verify that in the end, knowing who you're going to email the first time is worth, I mean, 100x more than even messing up once. Because one thing, it will hurt your email. You won't get the backlink on time. You might end up having to pay more for the opportunity." 

Austin Coker, Founder, 95 Projects

The team-level saving is also real. When Austin doesn't need to route a contact lookup through a backlink manager and then to an outreach person, he can just do it himself in seconds. A task that used to require coordination across multiple people now takes a moment.

The takeaway

For a search marketing agency running outreach on two fronts - winning clients and building links for them - the ability to find and verify email addresses quickly is foundational.

Hunter handles both without requiring Austin to change how he works or adopt a new process; it fits into the sequences he's already built.

Hunter's place in the stack is clear: it's the layer that makes email-based outreach work reliably. Without it, you're guessing at addresses, risking your sender reputation, and routing simple tasks through multiple people. 

With it, the whole outreach operation runs faster, cleaner, and with a lot less going wrong. As Austin says:

"If you're not using Hunter, you’re not saving your team’s time."