Best Link Building Tools

Link building is a fundamental part of search engine optimization. It’s one thing to get traffic to your site, but it’s another thing entirely to make sure they stay there. A strong link structure can help you keep people on your site longer and create a more engaging experience for them.

If you’re new to link building, don’t worry. We’ve made this easy for you by compiling a list of our top tools for link building. Here are the best link building tools

Best Link Building Tools

1. Ahrefs

The world’s largest backlink index.

Ahrefs is a link building software suite designed for SEO pros.

It also has a lot of features that have nothing to do with link building, like:

• A very solid keyword research tool
• “Content Explorer” (similar to BuzzSumo)
• Rank tracking
• Technical SEO site audits

That said:

Even though Ahrefs has A LOT of advanced features, it’s easy for non-technical people (like me) to use.

Pricing: $99-$999 per month

My Favorite Feature: “Link Intersect”

This feature lets you see which sites link to your competitors… but not you.

For example, here’s a report I run at least once a month:

This shows me who’s linking to Ahrefs and Moz… but not me.

Why is this helpful?

If someone links to your competitors, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll link to you.

(After all, they might have a relationship with the person that runs that site.)

But if someone links to TWO of your competitors, you have a much better chance of getting a link from that site.

THE BOTTOM LINE

If you can only invest in one link building tool, it should be Ahrefs.

2. Linkody

A user-friendly backlink tracker.

Linkody is one of the cheapest link building tools on the market.

Despite that, it has a decent link index.

Pricing: $14-$139 per month

My Favorite Feature: “Top Pages”

See the exact pages that get the most links. This is helpful for reverse engineering what’s working for a competing site. Or to double down on what’s working for you.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Is Linkody as good as “the big 3” (Ahrefs, Moz and Majestic)? Nope. But if you’re just starting out with SEO and have a limited budget, Linkody is worth a shot… especially considering that they offer a 30-day free trial.

3. GroupHigh

Find bloggers for outreach campaigns.

If you want people to link to your site, you need to master blogger outreach.

And the first step of any outreach campaign?

Find bloggers in your industry.

Well, GroupHigh claims to have “The World’s Largest Blog Search Engine”.

And after testing it out this week, I’d have to agree.

I did a search for “baking blogs” and found 33,581 relevant blogs:

So that’s GroupHigh’s big selling point: it makes it easy to find bloggers.

(Whether it’s for content promotion… or straight up link building.)

It also has a built-in outreach platform that you can use to send your outreach emails:

Pricing: $179-$499 per month

My Favorite Feature: “Metrics”

Sure, it’s nice to have a giant list of blogs in your niche.

But how do you know which bloggers are worth reaching out to?

Well, that’s where GroupHigh’s metrics come into play.

You can sort and filter bloggers based on Domain Authority, social media followers, audience size… and lots more.

Very cool.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Although GroupHigh isn’t designed for link building, I know lots of SEO agencies that use it to run their link building campaigns. And I can see why: it’s got a giant database of blogs… and a built-in “Blogger CRM” that you can use to send link building focused outreach emails.

4. BuzzStream

Scale your link building campaigns.

BuzzStream is an outreach platform that helps you stay organized with email outreach.

In other words:

Instead of spreadsheets and random Gmail inboxes, you can use BuzzStream to track conversations and manage campaigns effectively across multiple projects.

(Which makes it especially helpful for teams and agencies.)

Here’s how it works:

First, you either find websites using their built-in “Discovery” tool…

…or upload a list of sites in your niche that you want to reach out to:

Then, use BuzzStream to find their contact info.

(I’m using the handy Buzzmarker Chrome extension to find contact information here. This is arguably the best feature of the entire platform.)

Finally, connect your email with BuzzStream. This lets you reach out to people from within the platform.

You can even dig deep into reporting to see the status of every email (and follow-up) that you’ve sent:

Pricing: $24-$999 per month

My Favorite Feature: Custom Fields

I view custom fields as the bread and butter of BuzzStream. They let you organize and customize campaigns in any way you want.

Let me show you an example.

One of the very few required custom fields is Relationship Stage. This basically means: “what is our current status with that person?”.

Here’s an example of some of the stages I use.

Let me break these down for you.

• Not Yet Researched – we’ve saved the prospect as qualified, but haven’t prepped for outreach (i.e. found contact info, wrote the email, etc.).
• Prepped for Outreach – this is specifically for those we’ve prepped for outreach, but have a contact form URL (not their actual email address). We save them here until an appropriate time of day & week to submit the form (since this can’t be automated / queued up for a future time).
• Not Started – people we’ve prepped for outreach, and have an email queued up for a future time. When it gets sent, the prospect automatically moves into Attempting to Reach.
• Attempting to Reach – we’ve sent at least 1 email, but haven’t heard back.
• In Talks – we’ve heard back, but we haven’t drawn a conclusion.
• Waiting for Result – we’ve sent our link/post/pitch over for review, but haven’t drawn a conclusion.
• Agreed to Link – they’ve verbally agreed to do what we want them to do, i.e. post our link, accept our post, write about our client’s asset, etc.
• Link Accepted – the link is live! Booyah.
• Rejected – they shot down our request.

There are others, but the above makes up the vast majority. But the cool thing is, you can customize all of the above.

For example, you can create a new set of fields for a guest posting or influencer marketing campaign.

So: why are custom fields so helpful?

• Filtering / Division – if you’re looking for a specific segment of prospects, filtering by that custom field allows us to easily find them. In the same way, this division of organization helps for process management.
• Template fields – a custom field value can be used in an outreach template
• Data analysis – you can add data points as a field (for example, the site’s Domain Authority or whether or not they’ve linked to a competitor)

BuzzStream has a lot of other cool features that I didn’t have room to cover here. If you want to learn more I recommend reading my BuzzStream review.

THE BOTTOM LINE

BuzzStream is one of my favorite link building tools. If you do a lot of outreach or work with a team of link builders, it can save you a ton of time and energy.

5. JustReachOut

Find and pitch reporters and journalists.

As you probably know, PR is one of the most powerful link building strategies on the planet.

When done right, PR can land you high-quality links from HUGE authority news sites (like Forbes, the New York Times, and Tech Crunch).

The problem is:

Most outreach platforms are designed to help you find bloggers… not journalists.

That’s where JustReachOut comes in.

It has a sizable (and up-to-date) database of journalists…

… and a CRM that you can use to manage your outreach within the platform.

Pricing: $99-$699 per month

My Favorite Feature: Source Search

JustOutReach lets you search for source requests from HARO, ProfNet and Twitter.

That way, you can pitch journalists that actually WANT to feature you in their story.

backlink tools for seo

Ahrefs
Ahrefs holds one of the largest backlink indexes in the whole world.

Besides managing backlinks, Ahrefs is designed to perform most of the activities an SEO Pro needs to do daily, although it is pretty easy to use for non-Pros. But specifically in the backlink area, Ahrefs provides a lot of tools to do backlink research.

For example, one of these tools, called “Link Intersect,” lets you discover sites that link to your competitors but not to you. This is very useful information because if a site links to more than one of your competitors, there’s a good chance that it could add a link to your site.

geekflare-ahrefs
Ahrefs offers a free version that lets you monitor ten backlinks and two domains per request. If you are willing to pay $ 82 a month, you’ll get a comprehensive analysis of your backlink profile, including image backlinks, dofollow/nofollow, anchor text, etc. Such information could prove invaluable in case you get a penalty from Google because it gives you figures about the anchor text ratio on your site.

The information provided by Ahrefs not only helps you with your link-building activities. It also shows lost backlinks and new backlinks to your site, so you can thank the webmaster or return the favor with a reciprocal link. For the lost links, you will be informed about the reason for the loss, so you won’t need to guess why it happened. The Ahrefs dashboard also shows suspicious links that you can disavow to avoid penalties.

Semrush
Within the Semrush, you can find the Backlink Analysis tool, a powerful aid for getting functional data about backlinks from any domain. With its huge database of 26,5 trillion backlinks, Semrush offers a lot of revealing charts showing new & lost backlinks, authority ranks of all referrals, the evolution of backlink generating processes, and much more.

Semrush-Backlink-Analysis
With the Backlink Audit tool, you can integrate your Search Console data and avoid being penalized by Penguin. You can also discover and delete toxic backlinks and send them to Google’s disavow tool, keeping your backlink profile clean thanks to automatic and periodic tracking.

Besides backlink analysis, Semrush offers a full set of SEO tools you can use for free, for an unlimited time, but with limited functionality. This includes keyword research, monetizing analysis, traffic analysis, SERP position tracking, CPC mapping, and many more.

Moz
Moz Pro is a complete suite of professional SEO tools, in which Moz Link Explorer is one of the main utilities. It is especially useful to do reverse engineering on your competitors’ backlinks. To see its magic at work, you just have to enter a competitor’s domain or a specific URL, and Moz will show you all of its backlinks. For each backlink, you could see some metrics, such as a domain authority index, the number of linking domains, a spam score, and a list of the top links.

Moz-Link-Explorer
Its pricing plans range from $ 99 to $ 599 per month, depending on how many features and how “pro” you want to be in your SEO activities.

One of Link Explorer’s distinctive features is Anchor Text Analysis, which shows the most common anchor text in a website’s backlink profile. Many would ask what the use of this feature is, and the answer is that it helps to detect black hat linking techniques: if there’s a lot of exact match anchor text, it could be a sign of fraudulent tactics.

Although Moz’s database is not as big as Ahrefs’, its subscription fee includes several other tools besides Link Explorer, which could be worth paying for.

Majestic
Majestic SEO offers this tool as a Chrome App, bringing backlink analysis directly to your browser. It’s a fast way to verify the strength of any page according to its backlink information. The Trust Flow and Citation Flow scores appear immediately on the URL bar for any page you visit, together with summarized information about URLs and domains linking to the page.

Majestic-Backlink-Analyzer
Although you can subscribe for a fee to get all the features, the Chrome App offers some bits of data for free, which includes link profile charts and link counts at the URL, subdomains, and root levels. Subscribers get more details about the links, including lists of the ten strongest backlinks and of the ten strongest anchor texts. They can also dig deeper into link analysis, accessing the tools directly from the App.

SEO Spyglass
A new contender entered the SEO arena recently, and the leaders of the pack should pay attention to it.

SEO SpyGlass is part of SEO PowerSuite, a set of tools awarded with lots of positive reviews. Unlike most SEO tools, this one is an application you install on your computer, whether it be a Mac, a Windows, or a Linux machine. You can use its basic functionality for free as long as you like, or you can pay $ 299 per year for a professional license, which offers such goodies as unlimited backlink monitoring, task scheduling and basic reporting functions, or $ 699 per year for an enterprise license, which unleashes all of PowerSuite’s functionality.

SEO-Spyglass
SEO Spyglass reportedly has the biggest link database of all known tools. You can also add your own links, importing them directly from Google Analytics and Google Search Console. The tool identifies potentially harmful links to avoid being penalized by Penguin 4.0 (the most recent version of Google’s search engine). It calculates the risks involved in a penalty, taking into account the same factors used by Google. If it finds a threat, you can neutralize it with a few clicks, using SpyGlass-exclusive disavow file generator — you don’t have to worry about doing it right on your own.

Some SpyGlass users say that the tool allowed them to duplicate their organic traffic only by following its SEO advice. They even say that the return of investment (ROI) of the Enterprise version was less than a month, so if you are serious about your SEO strategy, you might want to try it out.

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