Wondering how you can make your SEO strategy more effective and add greater credibility to your website? Look no further because this article has that covered!
Link building is one of the most crucial sub-tactics of SEO strategy that will boost your website traffic. Search algorithms determine that you have ‘authority’ in your business sector when other websites link to yours. With higher authority, your search rankings are likely to get better.
Moreover, when you link to other sites within your posts, it boosts your authority since it signals to algorithms that you’ve done comprehensive research on the topic you’re discussing.
Here’s the catch. When a website with greater credibility, like a notable blog with a high search ranking, links to your site, it gives you more authority than an internal link or one from a website with less credibility.
On the flip side, linking to a page or blog post to a website with little to no search authority might plummet your ranking because those are sources that algorithms don’t consider credible.
Whether you're looking for great tools to help with the link-building process or you're looking for a company to outsource them on your behalf, we have you covered!
Here's an overview of 24 link-building tools that can help you improve your SEO and brand authority:
Types of link building tools
Since link building takes place in steps, one particular SEO tool may or may not be enough to cover all of them. Here are 5 kinds of link building tools:
1. Link analysis and prospecting tools: Link analysis allows you to assess how you and your competitors are performing and find out the best local link building tactics. Also, when you analyze competitors’ link profiles, it leads you to prospects.
2. Outreach tools: After analyzing your competitors and gaining some link-building prospects, you need to reach out to them. You can use outreach tools to find contact details, get in touch with prospects, and build the right relationships while leveraging corporate incentives to enhance engagement and motivation. To this end, you can undertake guest posting/guest blogging, email campaigns, and the entire spectrum of digital PR. If you outreach through emails remember implementing email verification is crucial to ensure the accuracy and effectiveness of your outreach strategies.
3. Rank tracking and reporting tools: Now is the time to track how your link-building and outreach efforts have fared. You need SaaS reporting tools to see if your efforts have improved your domain authority.
4. Content or Keyword explorer tools: You then need to carry on with boosting your authority. You can achieve this through effective content marketing that will do well on the SERPs.
5. Browser or Chrome extension tools: These extension tools will help you save some valuable time. Along with Chrome extensions, you can also do a quick Vivaldi vs Brave comparison, as they offer unique features and performance advantages, so evaluating their strengths and weaknesses can help you make an informed choice.
Now that we’ve covered the basics of link building, let’s look at the ultimate curated collection of 21 link-building tools. You can then select the one that best fits your SEO strategy.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a link-building tool built for SEO pros. It houses the world’s biggest backlink index. Ahrefs Site Explorer is a backlink checking tool that allows you to analyze competitors to find link-building opportunities.
When you don’t have a particular page in mind for link building, you can use the Best by Links report for any competing domain. This report is great for finding options for ‘linkable assets’. Moreover, you can use a ‘404 not found’ filter to identify any dead pages with backlinks.
Ahrefs Keywords Explorer lets you search for target keywords and get the SERP Overview. It gives you the number of links any top-ranking pages have.
The ‘Link Intersect’ feature tells you which websites have linked to your competitors but not you. These sites could turn out to be good prospects as they have linked to more than one of your competitors.
Ahrefs has a suite of other features, such as a keyword research tool, Rank Tracker, Content Explorer, Ahrefs Alerts, and SEO Site Audits. Content Explorer helps you find opportunities for link building, such as guest posting on a blog.
Ahrefs offers trial runs for the Lite and Standard plans only for 7 days at $7.
Moz
Moz is an SEO software suite that helps you increase your visibility, rankings, and traffic. Moz Pro is an all-in-one SEO toolset that gives access to features, such as backlink analysis, rank tracking, keyword research, and site audits.
Moz Pro’s flagship feature is the Moz Link Explorer. You can enter a competitor’s specific URL or domain into it and see all their backlinks.
The MozBar is a great free tool that provides extensions for link builders. It lets you find a plethora of link metrics when you surf the web.
MozBar’s metrics include domain authority and page authority. You can analyze the metrics in real-time by using the overlay option. The highlighter tool lets you mark up a page’s internal and external links and its keywords.
You can access the best features of Moz with Moz Pro. Moz offers a 30-day free trial with full access to Moz Pro. It has three pricing plans: Moz Pro, Moz Local, and STAT. However, the prices have not been publicly disclosed.
SureOak
SureOak is an SEO marketing agency that supports your SEO strategy by customizing its features to your needs. Its link-building features include custom link building, digital PR, and EDU link building.
The 4 most important metrics they assess are:
- Domain Authority
- Trust Flow
- Page Authority
- Real traffic.
SureOak helps you design a customized link-building strategy. It also lets you perform competitor analysis to find new link-building opportunities and expand your domain authority.
Its EDU link building/Scholarship lin building strategy allows you to drive more organic traffic to your site and gain a competitive advantage.
SureOak has not revealed its pricing plans on its website.
SEMrush
SEMrush provides a compressive set of SEO tools. It offers 5 link-building tools for competitor analysis, link acquisition, auditing, bulk link building, and analytics.
The SEMrush Backlink Gap Tool enables you to compare your link profile to your competitors’ and identify new link-building opportunities. You can add up to 4 competitors and find opportunities depending on the domains that link to sites that are not yours.
You can use the SEMrush link building tool to manage your outreach campaign, from acquiring quality backlinks to sending customized emails.
Apart from link building, SEMrush offers other features like keyword research, rank tracking, content marketing, social media management, analytics, market analysis, content optimization, paid advertising, and more. Read Semrush review to find out how it helps you build authentic backlinks and boost search engine rankings
SEMrush has the following pricing plans:
Hunter
Hunter is an all-in-one outreach tool that helps you find and verify email addresses, create personalized email sequences, build lead lists, and measure the performance of your email campaigns. A handy Chrome extension and Sheets Add-On enable you to use all the functionalities in the spreadsheets at scale.
The biggest time saver is their Bulk Tasks. Simply import a .csv file with your prospect list, and find and verify emails with a single click.
Hunter’s free plan comes with 25 searches and 50 verifications per month. Additionally, you can use their Campaigns functionality to create personalized emails and automate sequences for free.
BuzzStream
BuzzStream is an outreach platform that has been built particularly to support your link-building and digital PR efforts. It provides certain link-building features that will let you track your link-building strategy.
You can send personalized outreach emails for link building and enhance your placement rate while saving time. Moreover, you can manage your link-building projects, track your campaign’s progress, set reminders for follow-ups, and share results with team members.
BuzzStream’s A/B testing feature provides elaborate insights. The platform also helps you manage your email campaigns and integrate prospect research.
BuzzStream has the following pricing plan:
The free trial is available for the Starter, Growth, and Professional plans and lasts 14 days.
Backlink SEO
Backlink SEO is a great link-building tool that helps you easily build and monitor all your backlinks and automate your backlink outreach.
You can organize and track your backlink strategy to check the effectiveness of your SEO efforts.
The platform notifies you if your links change, drop overnight, or get added to a no-follow tag. It gives you notes to easily find out the source of the links, who to contact, and how to solve a backlink issue.
You can also get a detailed overview of your backlink profile and easily find quality backlinks through the platform’s domain enrichment that provides PA, DA, CF, TF, Moz Rank, and more.
Backlink SEO also offers in-depth competitor insights for link analysis and prospecting. Besides tracking your own backlinks, it allows you to research your competitors, their domain rankings, link profiles, and other metric data.
Respona
Respona is one of the link-building tools that provide an all-in-one outreach platform. It lets you search by content rather than people to obtain links from any relevant site.
Respona uses AI personalization to promote your digital PR and link-building efforts. This helps you embark on automated email campaigns that let you send personalized pitches.
The Backlink Checker checks how many backlinks there are on the top of all results. Its SEO Metrics feature provides essential metrics like domain authority for your link-building opportunities.
Moreover, Respona integrates with Ahrefs, Moz, Semrush, HARO, plus more. Respona’s Standard plan totals at $95/month or $1,140/year.
Majestic SEO
Majestic SEO is a link-building tool that is credited with the biggest link index database.
It gives you useful metrics and graphs of the sites you want to audit. Trust Flow is one of these metrics similar to Moz’s Domain Authority and Ahrefs’ Domain Rating. It helps you understand a website’s backlink status.
The Bulk Backlink Checker lets you analyze backlink numbers as high as 400 URLs or 1,000,000 URLs from an uploaded file.
Backlinko’s test run found Majestic in the fourth position under the category of link-building tools that found the highest number of inbound links.
Majestic SEO’s Lite plan starts at £39.99/month for 1 user and the Pro plan starts at £79.99/month for 1 user. The API plan is available for 5 users, starting at £319.99/month.
Raven
Raven is a link-building tool that provides SEO tools for link building, research, and reporting.
Its backlink related features include:
- Competitor domain research
- Backlink checker
- Marketing reports
- Link spy.
For some of the features, the platform references some metrics such as Trust Flow, DR, or DA from other link-building tools like Moz, Ahrefs, or Majestic.
The following image shows Raven’s pricing plans:
Linkody
Linkody is a backlink tracker for your domains or your clients. It’s particularly useful for link monitoring and processing.
The platform helps you with:
- Getting insights on competitors’ link building services and strategies
- Tracking lost and new links
- Analyzing your backlink’s profile
- Identifying and disavowing bad links
- Managing all your domains and links in one place easily
Linkody curates metrics from other tools that make reporting flexible and help you better understand your website’s backlink status. These metrics include Majestic’s Citation Flow and Moz Rank.
Furthermore, Linkody lets you get connected to more data sources like Ahrefs and Google Analytics.
Linkody is not as costly as other link-building tools. Its pricing starts at €13.90/month.
Ontolo
Ontolo helps you find prospects for link building, SEO, e-commerce, sales, content, advertising, and more. It provides great solutions for link prospecting and enables you to conduct prospect analysis to find the best prospects for outreach.
Ontolo has a huge database of URLs and backlinks like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Majestic.
Ontolo’s pricing plan starts at $97/month. All in all, Ontolo is a pretty decent tool to find link prospects for your company or for freelancers with a few clients.
URL Profiler
URL Profiler is a link prospecting tool that enables you to get SEO metrics from multiple tools for thousands of URLs.
All you need to do is copy and paste some URLs on the right and select the relevant boxes on the left to get the necessary data points and SEO metrics.
URL Profiler integrates with Ahrefs, Moz, Semrush, and more.
The tool provides a free trial for 14 days. The Solo, Pro, and Agency plans charge $19.95/month, $25.95/month, and $64.95, respectively, billed annually.
Right Inbox
Right Inbox is an ideal tool for outreach in link building. It’s a Gmail extension that will upgrade your emails by helping you:
- Track emails: Find out who is opening your emails and who isn’t
- Use email templates: Tailor your outreach emails to different prospects for link requesting
- Send email sequences: Based on whether your last email was opened, send follow-up emails to prospects
- Get reminders: You won’t lose track of any of your important emails.
Right Inbox has a flexible pricing plan. You can use some very useful features under the free plan but with limited access. Team plans get a $1/user discount compared to the standard price for individual users.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is an SEO spider website crawler. It offers a wide range of services for link building, SEO, social media marketing, digital PR, analytics, conversion rate optimization, among others.
Its SEO team will help you identify target audiences in your industry, define your link-building goals, and develop a link-building strategy to attract them via content, outreach, and PR.
The crawl limit is up to 500 URLs under the free plan. It’s unlimited under the paid plan, depending on the allocated storage and memory. The paid plan charges £149/year per license (licenses expire after a year).
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a very effective content explorer tool that helps you know the ranking of content. It allows you to find the most prominent articles on certain topics, gives expert insights into content reach, and helps you enhance your content strategy.
BuzzSumo helps you create the best content to facilitate your link-building efforts. It offers essential backlink tools, such as backlink monitoring. It also provides a keyword tool and highlights the best-performing content types and keywords.
The platform also offers a Chrome extension.
BuzzSumo’s free plan is limited to 10 searches per month. You can try the Pro, Plus, and Large plans for free for 30 days. Otherwise, they charge $79/month, $139/month, and $239/month, respectively, every year.
Disavow
Disavow is an SEO tool that specializes in the 360-degree optimization and positioning of your site. It’s effective for link processing.
Disavow’s link-building efforts aim to improve your site’s search engine rankings for certain strategic keywords. Some of its features include link building, competitor analysis, auditing, and reporting.
It’s a free tool that lets you clean or compile a file to upload on Google Search Console. Disavowing a string of URLs that link to your site helps you maintain your reputation and performance by protecting you from malicious sites.
Google Alerts
You will find other websites doing the same job as Google Alerts, the most popular one being Ahrefs Alerts. The differences between the two are that Google Alerts is totally free and hosts the largest index in the world to give more results.
Google Alerts is a great tool for your link prospecting efforts.
You only have to insert a search question to trigger your alert. You will obtain some results for that specific advanced query.
If these results are relevant, you can ask them to include your site in their content. You can easily obtain some dofollow links along with relevant anchor texts back to your site or resources.
Once you have created an alert, you can decide how and when to avail yourself of these opportunities.
Pitchbox
Pitchbox is a great link prospecting and outreach tool, especially for agency owners, as it concentrates heavily on automation. It’s ideal for dealing with many clients. It helps you save a lot of time by automating your entire drip campaign over the upcoming weeks/months after the initial setup.
The platform also helps to discover prospects, carry out advanced searches, and get a list of competitor backlinks. You can perform analytics and report for ROI-focused link building. Additionally, Pitchbox has a built-in CRM for link builders, outreach professionals, and PRs.
Since the automation exponentially increases the probability of a fatal error, the platform is best suited for experts in link outreach.
Pitchbox has not publicly disclosed its pricing plans.
Postaga
Postaga is an effective tool for scaling your link-building outreach campaigns. It provides a database full of relevant backlinks, promotions, and shares.
It uses AI-powered tools to send automated email sequences and even research and connect to influencers. The platform contains personalization features, so you don’t have to worry about your emails getting boring.
The Postaga CRM helps you manage your outreach efforts and track results to continually enhance them.
Postaga offers a 14-day free trial. The Pro plan costs $99/month for up to 2,00 contacts, whereas, the Agency plan charges $299/month for up to 15,000 contacts.
Hunter
Hunter is an outreach tool. It lets you easily get the contact information of the individuals connected to the site you visited. You can also save all the contact information to a list. Its Mail Tracker allows you to better understand the effectiveness of your campaign.
You can easily add Hunter as a Chrome/Sheets or a Firefox extension.
Hunter’s free plan is restricted to 25 searches a month. You can access the premium features from the Starter plan onwards.
LinkMiner
LinkMiner is an ideal tool for beginners that gives you a fast and easy way to identify and eliminate broken links. It’s available for Firefox and Chrome.
It’s a pretty straightforward tool for checking for broken links. It also helps you pull link building metrics like the total number of external links on viewed pages. Plus, it lets you access features such as competitor search, keywords search, and SERP lookups.
LinkMiner offers a 10-day free trial. After that, the Basic plan starts at $29.90/month, billed annually.
DA PA Checker
DA PA Checker is an online freemium tool that can help you analyze the Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) of different websites. Using this tool can be helpful in evaluating these important Moz factors of a website before you reach them out for backlinks (or even provide them with yours.)
The tool is free to use, however, it also provides users with a premium version that comes with the following features:
This premium version can help you access a wide range of websites. It can also come in handy if you want to generate a comparison report of different sites by checking 100 URLs at a time. DA PA Checker allows users to purchase this premium version.
Here’s the pricing of this tool if you are interested in checking out its premium features:
Checking a site’s DA and PA can help you determine its authenticity. If you’re looking for a tool that can give you authentic statistics of these two factors, DA PA can be a decent tool for you to use.
Final Thoughts
Now that you are aware of 23 different link-building tools that either provide all-in-one solutions or cover some aspects of link building,
It’s up to you to figure out which tool best supports your business strategy.
Feel free to try out a few tools before you finally pick your fit!
About The Author: Greg Digneo
I love helping people with their marketing. So I created this site to give you tools and information to help you grow your blog, build your audience, and get more sales.
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