Best Link Building Tools

Building links can be the core of any business’ SEO efforts, and that means that having a good link building strategy can be vital. However, it is not just the strategy that matters – for many businesses and companies, proper link building requires a carefully-chosen arsenal of link building tools.

While link building is easily one of the most important parts of SEO, it is not easy. Constructing link building campaigns from scratch can be a daunting task, especially if you are new to SEO yourself.

This difficulty can make an otherwise simple link building opportunity much harder to acquire since you are not always able to build links quickly and reliably. The more complex things become, the harder it gets to maintain your search presence.

Having the right link building tool on hand can make a huge difference in securing high-quality link building opportunities. But which link building tools are actually worth using? Here, in no particular order, are some of the best link building tools used by professionals across countless different industries.

How to Choose the Best Link Building Tool for Your Situation

For many business owners, the prospect of using third-party software can be a worrying one. It is not easy to let your link building strategy hinge upon somebody else’s software or put important data onto a cloud system as part of the link building process.

However, most decently popular SEO tools are popular for a reason, and the same goes for link building.

Some are meant to help with broken link building and refining your link profile, while others are for culling unwanted referring domains and performing link analysis – but all of them are useful.

Below are some of the tools that you may want to consider for your link building process, no matter what niche your business operates in. But before that, it is important to understand how you can pick out useful tools when there are so many to choose from.

What Suits Your Link Building Campaigns?

Always consider your own needs first. From outreach campaigns to link building efforts that focus on maximizing referring domains, no two businesses will handle their SEO in the exact same way.

Things like link analysis tools are often quite vague and can work in every situation, as can tools for link tracking or finding good target keyword options.

However, tools that are meant to optimize the content on a blog post would only work if you have a blog that is connected to your SEO efforts.

Think about what your business would actually need, then use that as the basis for the tools that you choose.

Why Should Link Builders Use Software?

Proper software can have a huge impact on your link building options. While some of them are going to identify broken links, others will help you manage outreach campaigns or give you Google alerts if your brand is mentioned online.

Some core reasons to use third-party software for SEO as a whole include:

Flexibility

SEO tools can often compensate for areas of SEO that your business is struggling with, allowing you to focus on things that need to be done manually (such as building new web pages) while the busywork is done by the software.

This can be important in smaller companies, where each employee focusing on outreach is an employee who is not focusing on more urgent matters.

Variety

Most tools have their own particular ways of dealing with specific things, using unique systems that have some key benefits over others.

This means that you can often look at what a tool actually offers compared to others that do the same thing. A lot of SEO work is considered to be standard practice, so you can usually expect a lot of tools that focus on the same things.

For example, there are countless tools out there for simplifying outreach campaigns, meaning that you can look through dozens of them to find the one that fills your needs best.

Metrics

Software can gather and interpret metrics data a lot faster than a human can, often across a range of metrics.

This includes metrics like Domain Authority, which was invented purely to fill a need. Domain Authority and Page Authority were created by Moz specifically for their tools, providing a niche but accurate understanding of how useful a link would actually be.

Having access to more metrics – even those that are mostly just used as a comparison point – can always help if you are trying to pick out a particular piece of information.

Management

A lot of SEO tools are designed to help you manage something. Even if you have a good handle on your SEO work already, better management options can never hurt and can often future-proof your SEO strategies against potential flaws.

Many of these tools are also compatible with one another, either through direct connection or by moving data from one to the other. This can allow you to build up a custom set of software that compensates for any weaknesses in your current SEO plan.

Management can be the thing that throws a lot of SEO strategies off, so simplifying things with the right software can often give your business the push it needs to see greater success.

Automation

Partially or fully automating specific tasks through software can be surprisingly useful, especially in a smaller business.

Not only does well-chosen software allow employees to focus on more important tasks, but it can remove as many chances for human error to cause problems. Even beyond that, a lot of these tools allow you to save money in the long term.

While not many businesses try to automate the majority of their SEO work, there is nothing wrong with using these tools to streamline things.

BuzzStream

BuzzStream is an excellent choice for improving your link building outreach efforts. Operating as a customer-management relationship platform, it simplifies the process of finding new link building prospects and keeping them properly recorded for future use.

One of the biggest advantages BuzzStream provides for your link building campaign is the straightforward nature of how it works. It is not a complex tool meant for very specific outreach campaign types but a link building management system.

BuzzStream allows you to segment your link building prospects, organize entire link building outreach campaigns, and keep your team synchronized to ensure that no link-building efforts overlap.

This can be invaluable for a range of reasons. Not only can you tell which prospects you have already contacted, but you can see who has rejected previous requests or which employees have reached out to particular site owners.

Not only does this save a lot of time and prevent you from wasting your effort, but it can work in basically any industry and for any kind of link growth campaign. At around $24 per month for the basic plan after the 14-day free trial, it is an easy piece of software to include as a core part of your business.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a general content marketing platform that works very well alongside link building tools, allowing you to perform important content analysis work and research into potential link prospects.

Not only can the discovery and research tools work very well for uncovering useful content ideas, but you can also identify influencers and websites that may be great for link placements. This can help you open your business up to even more link outreach options.

The Brand Mentions tool is a core part of the platform, monitoring the internet to find situations where your business is mentioned. This is a simple but powerful tool for finding sites that have referenced your business, giving you some favorable places to add links.

While it does not have the same outreach features as a dedicated outreach platform, BuzzSumo works extremely well within its own niche. When used alongside other software, it can become a core part of how you uncover new link opportunities and ways to boost your SEO.

At almost $99 a month, BuzzSumo can be costly for a new business but can scale up to work well for companies of literally any size.

Link Hunter

As the name might suggest, Link Hunter is all about finding backlinks quickly. Mostly meant for individual users and small businesses, Link Hunter combines an easy-to-use design and great functionality to provide something basic but very effective.

While it is obviously meant for a smaller scale than many other tools, Link Hunter can still be an excellent dedicated link building tool.

The platform can automatically find hundreds of websites related to specific niches you input, letting you see a huge range of link building opportunities with almost no delay.

From there, you are able to break down each site’s authority, as well as preview each site within Link Hunter to avoid viruses or excessive amounts of open tabs.

You can even email the site’s owner through the platform itself since Link Hunter automatically finds the contact email for that site.

If email is not an option, then Link Hunter will instead let you fill out a contact form if one is available.

At $49 per month, Link Hunter can be a great option if you need some of the best link building tools on the market.

While more expensive than some other link building tools, it is a great and straightforward way of finding new link prospects on your own terms.

SE Ranking

SE Ranking operates as an all-in-one platform for SEO, providing a range of built-in link building tools and SEO features can that can make it a core part of any link building campaign.

For backlink work, you can use tools like the Backlink Checker to analyze the link profile of a competitor or break down the SEO metrics behind particular sites that you want to target.

This kind of information can be incredibly useful for finding new link building opportunities, making SE Ranking ideal for link analysis.

The backlink gap tool allows you to identify your weaknesses compared to competitors, while the link prospecting options help you identify new link sources that your rivals may have overlooked.

You can even track your existing backlinks to get updated on any changes, including those that break your older links or cause drops in SEO potential.

Beyond that, you have a range of other link building tools and SEO options, all of which can help with your general SEO performance.

A flexible pricing plan means that SE Ranking can quickly become one of the best link building tools in most businesses’ arsenals, especially with a 14-day free trial to let you learn the platform.

Hunter

Hunter is a tool designed specifically to find contact information, scanning websites to track down email addresses in seconds. Emails are automatically verified and checked to make sure that they are actually current and correct, making incorrect contact details very rare.

While it might be one of the simpler tools on this list, Hunter is perfect for any SEO strategy where you need to contact a lot of different site owners over a long period of time.

Being able to scour their sites for contact info so quickly can dramatically cut down the amount of manual searching you have to do.

The Hunter browser extension goes a step further, allowing you to pick out email addresses automatically as you look over your prospects.

With a free plan of up to 25 searches per month, Hunter can be a great free link building tool for smaller businesses. If you need more, the paid plans start at around $49 monthly.

Snov.io

Snov.io is a CRM platform that over 130,000 companies have used in the past, including a range of major organizations that are still at the top of their field today.

While it was originally built for sales teams, it doubles as a great set of link building tools.

The included sales tools offer things like email finders for identifying content information, website data collection options, and even a LinkedIn prospector to find the LinkedIn account of a business owner.

The email verifier also really helps, letting you verify and validate each contact before you send an email. This is meant to reduce bounce rates, but it can also help you identify the right link to use for contacting them.

One of the more notable features is the Email Warm Ups option, which tries to help you build better emails. This is meant to prevent any mass-produced prospecting emails from being lost in spam or junk folders.

If you are planning link building outreach campaigns, then this is one of the best link building tools you can choose for keeping your communication clear.

The email drip system can even automate further outreach, creating personalized follow-ups for each email.

With a limited free plan and various paid plan options, Snov.io can be an excellent link building tool for various forms of link campaigns.

Mailfloss

Mailfloss is another tool meant for validating email addresses, with a major focus on removing invalid or no-longer-used emails to ensure that you are not emailing the wrong people and places.

Bouncing emails can impact your deliverability rate, something that tends to help keep your emails out of users’ spam folders.

Optimizing your emails with a tool like this can help you approach outreach more effectively and reduce the chance of having your emails buried in junk mail.

At only $17 per month (not counting the 7-day free trial), it is easy to integrate Mailfloss into your existing link building tool collection.

While it focuses on a single specific task, it does that task very well, offering some extra protection from accidental email bounces.

Brand24

Brand24 is a monitoring tool for various social media platforms. Rather than managing your own social platforms, it allows you 24-hour coverage of when and where your brand name is mentioned, picking up brand mentions across almost any platform online.

From news stories and podcasts to social posts and YouTube videos, this link building tool is meant to point out sites where you have been mentioned favorably, letting you find guest post opportunities or places to insert a paid link of your own.

Brand24 also doubles as a tool for tracking the public’s sentiments about your brand, letting you quickly review any potential positive or negative trends that might be appearing due to something your brand has done.

At $49 annually, Brand24 is very affordable for basically any business that wants it, and the free trial makes it easy to learn how the platform works before you commit to a year of using it.

Mangools

Mangools is a beginner SEO tool kit that is meant to help with your early link building efforts. The platform itself provides various link building tool options to help businesses kickstart their SEO, offering a nice suite of starter tools that all businesses can benefit from.

While meant for newcomers, Mangools is not trimmed down and simplified. A lot of the tools within the platform can become great options for a business of any size, with things such as LinkMiner helping with prospecting while SiteProfiler analyses potential link placement options.

The SERPChecker is one of the more comprehensive tools included in the toolkit, analyzing search result pages to find any relevant target keywords.

This is mostly used to pick out high-authority sites and identify potential avenues for further outreach.

After the 10-day free trial, you can get Mangools for around $29 per month – far cheaper than a lot of the tools within the same niche.

Linkody

Linkody is a simplified backlink tracker that provides an easy way to look at your existing backlinks, helping you identify potential areas of improvement while also keeping an eye on your existing links.

Tracking backlinks can be very important, and many link builders underestimate how major a small change can be.

Even one small alteration to a keyword can be enough to tank the link’s overall value, and many site owners will change things without thinking about this.

Beyond that, Linkody is also useful if you want to analyze link profiles properly against a range of key metrics or if you need to find and deal with links that are damaging your SEO.

This all comes alongside a range of other useful features, all of which can be important for link building campaigns at a range of scales.

Linkody might seem simple at first, but it provides a great range of tools and a good variety of ways to use the information that you gather.

Priced at less than $12 per month and coming with a 30-day free trial, Linkody is an extremely cheap link building tool that still manages to provide the same benefits as some far more expensive options.

Majestic SEO

Majestic SEO is an incredibly popular tool, using a specialized link intelligence database that crawls the internet for maps of useful linking options.

While the free plan only offers so many features, Majestic is able to provide a massive amount of page and link data that you can use to pick out opportunities for high-quality links.

Beyond that, the Trust Flow and Citation Flow system ensures that you get a full breakdown of a site’s quality before you even contact them.

Not only does this make Majestic great for finding high-quality backlinks on high-quality sites, but it also allows you to seek out link options in areas that you would otherwise never have considered.

Majestic’s greatest strength is the sheer amount of data it can provide, making it a staple of many professional SEO efforts.

With multiple different pricing options to suit each situation, it can be a great source of important metrics and valuable link-related data.

Available for around $42 per month, Majestic is a tool that can benefit businesses most when they are struggling to improve their own link profile or need a way to separate low-quality links from high-quality prospects.

Respona

Respona is a Google-integrated outreach platform designed to help users launch their own email campaigns.

While this is not specific to link building and can be used for basically any reason, Respona itself has a lot of potential as a link building tool.

This integration with other platforms (from Google to a range of major link building tools like Semrush) allows Respona to pull metrics from major sources and streamline your overall prospecting.

Not only that, but the email finder can quickly strip out contact information for you to use as needed.

The structure of Respona makes it easy to automatically identify, pursue and monitor different outreach campaign options without using the same copy-and-pasted emails every time.

It even provides email health reports, letting you see whether or not your emails are ending up in spam folders.

Respona offers a 7-day free trial, starting out at around $99 per month for the entire suite of tools. There are also custom plans available for specific situations, giving users some more flexibility overall.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is one of the most well-known tools on the market, offering a suite of useful and surprisingly versatile tools – from keyword research and rank tracking options to specialized tools for supporting link building.

As a completely free addition to your link building tool selection, most link builders will run across it at some point, especially given the range of features that it can provide.

For example, the broken backlink checker allows you to detect broken links (both inbound and outbound) on your site.

This not only lets you fix broken links going to other sites but also shows you which broken links to your own site need fixing or correcting.

You can also use the broken backlink checker on other people’s sites, letting you find link building opportunities on sites that your competitors have forgotten.

This makes it both an “offensive” and “defensive” SEO tool, making it a great addition to whatever your current SEO plans are.

This checker can also run monthly, weekly, or daily craws to check your site, and you can export the data to a CSV file for easy future use.

While you do not get access to all of the results with the free plan, it can still be good enough for link builders at very small or new online businesses.

The cheapest non-free plan is about $99 a month, scaling up as you add more features. Taking a yearly plan will provide you with two free months.

Sitechecker

Sitechecker offers two major tools that are worth considering if you are looking into link building campaigns: the Backlinks Generator and the Backlink Analysis tool.

These allow you to monitor both the number and the quality of backlinks coming to any given site, including competitors.

The Backlinks Generator automatically builds up backlinks from analyzer sites, allowing you to jump-start link building campaigns with a flood of well-chosen backlinks.

This tool even tells you the expected impact it will have on your position in search rankings, something not many other tools do.

The Backlink Analysis option allows for in-depth analysis of backlinks across different periods of time.

This can include competitors’ link building strategies, allowing you to find the best method for your particular situation in the context of other businesses that are trying to take your spot.

The simple interface of this tool means that you can easily get a breakdown of various important URLs, many of which offer either link building prospects or other significant meanings to your business.

Overall, this makes Sitechecker perfect for putting together a strategy based on hard data rather than just guesses.

Starting at $49 per month for the cheapest plan (or less annually), you can take advantage of the 7-day free trial to get a headstart on your SEO.

MozBar

MozBar is a Chrome extension (a completely free extension, no less) that is meant entirely for backlink research and gathering important metrics related to your link choices.

As an extension, it can be left on for as long as you need it, automatically checking each page you visit.

The free version is limited but provides you with some important metrics like Domain Authority and Page Authority – metrics that are meant to measure the impact a site can have on search results as a whole.

The top bar gives you a measurement of both metrics (separately) from 0 to 100, letting you see the total value of the site at a glance. How you use this information depends on your link building strategy, but having an extra measuring stick never hurts.

MozBar also contains a Link Explorer too that can break down the analytics involved in link research, helping you understand what you would need to outrank any competing sites.

The free version of MozBar is good for small-scale use but offers limited features. If you want extra information, there is a 30-day free trial, followed by a minimum cost of $99 per month (or more for higher tiers).

Whitespark

Whitespark is a citation finder (meaning citations like mentions of your name, address, and so on) that allows you to track the places that your site has been mentioned, letting you identify potential new link building prospects.

This citation finder is most useful for tracking down directories that allow you to submit a site to them.

These can be a small but useful part of a link building strategy, and Whitespark tries to make it easier through an automated checking system.

While Whitespark is another tool that focuses mostly on a single goal, it can still be a great way to identify websites that are talking about your site or brand. From there, you can develop a link building strategy that secures them as a backlink.

The free Whitespark only allows you to create one campaign, with three searches daily and restricted citation sources.

The lowest tier at around $39 per month opens up that number significantly, giving you a 20-searches-per-day limit and 5 campaigns.

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is a keyword research suggestion tool that provides you with a heavy amount of keyword suggestions, as well as relevant metrics like cost-per-click and search volume.

While simple in terms of how the tool works, Ubersuggest is a great place to gather important keyword research data quickly.

Not only can it provide you with important keyword suggestions for link prospecting, but it can be used over and over again as needed.

The backlink checker also helps with doing quick backlink analysis, saving you from having to manage things like broken link building entirely by yourself.

While it might be quite a limited link building tool compared to some software suites, Ubersuggest does a few simple jobs incredibly well.

Available for about $29 after a one-week free trial, Ubersuggest has additional tiers that can scale up to meet larger businesses and/or companies with multiple websites.

However, even the cheapest version can be incredibly reliable, working well as a basic tool in your SEO arsenal.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts offers an easy way to track brand mentions, notifying you whenever your business is mentioned on a website that Google has crawled.

Since it is tied directly to Google, you can expect fast checking and response times rather than being limited by the platform’s own systems.

As one of the many free link building tools offered by Google, this can be a great option for building links with new platforms. When combined with other outreach tools, you can perform link outreach incredibly easily and track when sites link to or reference your brand.

Disavow Link Tool

Another simple Google tool, the Disavow Link Tool, lets you tell Google to ignore particular links that you are getting back to your site.

This could be low-quality links from link farms and spam sites, lost links that point to the wrong page, or anything else that might be damaging your SEO.

When site owners acquire links, many do not realize that they have some control over actually choosing to keep that link. This tool is an easy way to do this.

If you audit your links, you may want to clean some poor-quality backlinks out of your link profile. This tool enables you to tell Google that particular links “don’t count,” preventing you from suffering penalties that you would otherwise struggle to get rid of.

Again, this is completely free, although it can take a while to apply the changes. You need to send your list of disavowed links as a .txt file, so it can seem confusing the first time you use it.

SEO Spyglass

SEO Spyglass, which comes from the SEO PowerSuite, is a backlink tool that dives into a range of backlink attributes to sort them cleanly and efficiently.

This includes a range of link context details and backlink profile information, from simple things like dofollow/nofollow to the individual strength of specific links. As a bulk analysis tool, it can also be used to compare different linking domains as needed.

If you care a lot about your link profile or want to maximize the impact that a few more links will have on your SEO, then this kind of tool can be a great option.

Not only does SEO Spyglass give you a lot of data to work with, but also contextual information based on their attributes.

Like many other research tools, SEO Spyglass can’t fix your SEO all on its own. However, when used alongside the right tools, it can be perfect for managing SEO metrics and understanding your performance better.

The free version of SEO Spyglass allows a limit of 1,100 links per website, with Professional bumping this up to 250,000. For most businesses, free should be enough – if not, you can get Professional for $99 per year or Enterprise for $199 per year.

URL Profiler

URL Profiler is a simple tool that is designed to break down a range of link metrics, as well as give you a single platform to explore your backlink profile in more detail. As a fairly simple tool, it is best used as a straightforward way of understanding your current link effectiveness.

The link metrics you gather can be turned into reports via URL Profiler’s report generation features, allowing you to quickly compare specific sets of data while also pinpointing weak points in your SEO and link building attempts.

You can also connect the platform to a range of other tools, such as Majestic SEO and Ahrefs, to ensure that you get a proper backlink profile quickly.

Available for as little as $30 per month, URL Profiler also has Pro and Agency tiers that scale up its services as an SEO tool. However, for regular businesses, the normal tier should be enough for quite a while.

LinkResearchTools

LinkResearchTools provide a suite of different tools for managing SEO and building links: creating backlink reports, performing link audits, and even finding more links through the link profiles of your competitors.

The platform uses a unique metric, Link Detox Risk, which is used to identify links that may have a toxic or risky element to them.

This allows you to keep your backlink profile clean more effectively, ignoring any links that could pose a problem to your SEO.

This also contains the Link Simulator, used for judging how useful a link would actually be, and Link Recovery, which can generate redirect instructions for lost links automatically.

A paid trial of around $17 for 7 days provides easy access to the basic tool, although the cheapest plan after that (Superhero Small) comes in at a total of $499 monthly – making this a tool only for the most serious SEO agencies and large-scale businesses.

Which Link Building Tools Are Best?

There are no “best” tools for link building out there. While some are going to be better than others, it all depends on your needs and the specific way that you want to approach the current campaign or problem.

A lot of the tools listed above work really well alongside other tools, and some can even connect to each other to share data. In many cases, a single link building tool is only part of the whole – not the solution by itself.

In practical terms, the best tools for link building are the ones that suit your business best. This means things like budgetary limits, the focus of the tool itself, how accessible it is, and what kind of information you are expected to provide it with.

Always use common sense when choosing tools for link building and SEO work, and do not let the pressure get to you. A lot of these tools are highly flexible, and you can always choose a different software option if the first does not work as expected.