The 14 Best Link Building Tools to Maximize SEO Efforts

Currently, there are around 1.11 billion websites on the Internet. As a business owner, the tools you use to increase engagement and sales are crucial to maximizing your success.

It's not enough to have a great product and a great website. Potential customers must be able to find your site online via a search engine. That’s tough to do when there are billions of other sites. Even if you’re in a relatively small niche, there could be tens of thousands of competitors.

One of the most effective ways to stand out is to increase the number of quality backlinks that you have to your website.

What is link building, anyway?

Link building is a search engine optimization technique that creates one-way links from one website leading back to yours. However, it’s not as simple as getting any old website to put up links to your site. Quality is of paramount importance here.

What makes a “quality” backlink? Let’s explore the topic a little bit.

For a backlink to be considered “high quality” and to give your site juice so it ranks better in the SERPs, it must meet a few criteria, including:

• It must be from a reputable website. So those fly-by-night sites that offer backlinks for a fee won’t cut it. These need to be genuine and the sites need to be, too.

• The site must have high domain authority in its own right. So, you can’t link to your site from a genuine but low-value site and expect it to make a difference in your standings.

• The site must be relevant. That doesn’t mean that you can only have backlinks to sites within your industry, but it must be relevant to the page and page content being linked to on your site.

• The linking site must be trustworthy in the eyes of both human searchers and search engines.

• The link should be natural and not paid for.

Factors that affect the quality and value of backlinks

Even if you succeed in getting natural backlinks from relevant websites, they may not give you the results that you want. Quite a few factors play into the quality and value of those links, including the following:

• Page rank – The linking site’s page rank is an important consideration.

• Follow/nofollow – The link must be a follow link. No follow links offer much less juice.

• Anchor text – Contextual linking is important for natural backlinks rather than simply having your site’s URL pasted into the body content of the page.

• Positioning– The right positioning on the linking site’s page can give you more (or less) juice.

• Spam my links – Spammy links should be avoided. They’ll ultimately erode your ranking.

• Method of obtaining – How was the link obtained? If manipulative tactics were used, there’s a good chance that the link will actually harm your SEO.

How to get high-quality backlinks 

Given the importance of getting backlinks right the first time, it’s natural to be a little wary about the entire process. We’ve got some helpful tips to ensure you’re able to get high-quality backlinks that boost your visibility in the SERPs and don’t pose a threat to your SEO efforts.

Become a source 

You want natural backlinks and one of the best ways to do that is to become a recognized authority and source of information about a particular topic, niche, or industry. If you can do this, bloggers and even journalists will link back to your site from theirs, giving you plenty of juice and lots of value.

Focus on publishing great content 

Despite the massive evolution the Internet has experienced, content is still king. Google loves content-rich websites, and that applies across industries. E-commerce sites should be just as content-rich as those designed to sell services.

Skyscraper-style content is a great way to start this. You can create informative pillar pages and then break those topics down into smaller pages. The more content-rich your site is, the more likely it is that other authoritative sites will link to yours. For instance, look at how many sites link back to HubSpot’s statistics and ratings pages when they’re published.

Experiment with content formats

When you hear the word “content” about your website, what comes to mind first? Chances are good you think of text. Maybe it’s a product description, an “about us” page, or a blog post. There’s nothing wrong with that and the vast majority of content should be text-based. However, you can experiment with different content formats to see what drives the most backlinks. Some content formats to consider include:

• Videos (short and long-form)

• White papers

• Statistics and other data-led content formats

• Infographics

• Podcasts

• User-generated content (UGC)

Getting listed on relevant resource pages

Resource pages act as important online hubs. They’re usually curated by experts within a specific field and contain information and links to resources those experts find useful and reputable. Getting your site listed on one of these can have serious benefits for your SEO.

Of course, you still need to ensure that these are relevant to your content. To find resource pages, you’ll need to do some legwork, including using search strings like keyword intitle: links and keyword inurl: resources. Just replace“keyword” with your subject/topic.

Use the right link-building tools

There are hundreds of link building tools available for websites. For this list, we'll focus on the tools that provide insight to website administrators, offer affordable plans or free demos, and have a successful track record. All of the link building tools on the list below will help you achieve one or more of the following:

• Improving rankings in search engine results

• Increasing website authority

• Increasing understanding of why your SEO efforts are (or aren't) working

• Providing more organic traffic on your website

Link building is a time-consuming activity and it’s easy to get it wrong. You can reduce the amount of time and the risk of error by using the right link-building tools. Of course, there’s a wide range of tools out there and notall of them are worth your time. We’ve ranked the 14 best link-building tools to help maximize your SEO efforts.

1. SEMrush

SEMrush has several different tools that can provide reliable and helpful research when working to improve your SEO. While SEMrush is well known, it is also one of the most expensive tools on our list. Using their website starts at $129.95/month. Despite the relatively high price tag, many businesses use SEMrush.

Some of the services included with SEMrush include:

• Checking backlink analytics, which can allow you to see incoming links and the domains associated with them

• Determining the authority and location of a referring domain

• Allowing users to compare their link-building strategies with those of their competition

SEMrush allows you to see how your SEO strategies are working compared with your competitors. Within SEMrush, there is a section dedicated specifically to Link Building. This section contains many specific tools that you can use for your business’s identified needs. Some of these tools include:

• Analytics for your backlinks

• An option to audit backlinks

• An analysis of any bulk links you may have

One of the things that SEMrush is known for in the SEO industry is a Toxic Score. This score measures the quality of backlinks to your site. Poorly constructed or untrustworthy spam sites that link to your website can lower your score. If too many websites like these are linking to you, you may have a serious problem on your hands. Google may even remove you from their rankings if things are bad enough. Understanding your Toxic Score can help you monitor all backlinks and make sure that your business is represented in the way you want it to be.

2. Moz Link Explorer

Moz is synonymous with SEO and the Moz Link Explorer is a must-have for any business hoping to expand its link-building efforts. The point of Link Explorer is simple: to provide you with detailed information about websites you might want to link to. If you remember the earlier discussion about how important page rank and domain authority are, then you’ll understand why Link Explorer is such a helpful tool.

However, there’s more here than that. Moz Link Explorer also lets you analyze the sites linking to your top competitors. That gives you a chance to find additional liking opportunities. Best of all, you’re able to dive into those links and discover important metrics like anchor text.

Using Moz Link Explorer is relatively simple. Here’s how in a nutshell:

• Add your competitor’s domain or specific URL to the explorer bar

• Click search

• Explore all their backlinks and compare metrics, including: Domain authority, number of linking domains, and spam score

• Dive into anchor text analysis to see linking domains and followed external links

You can research a lot with this single tool, including:

• Links to any site

• Broken links in your own site

• Spam score of backlinks

• Top-performing content

• New and lost links

To get your hands on Moz Link Explorer, you’ll need to subscribe to Moz Pro. That also gives you access to other critical tools from one of the most established names in the SEO game.

3. Buzzstream

Business owners and website administrators know how important it is to create a buzz around their brand. With Buzzstream's link-building tool, you can monitor the number of clicks on your website, email conversations, mentions on Facebook, comments online, and more.

The user interface is customer-friendly due to the automated reply features. Automatic responses allow you to:

• Group your contacts appropriately

• Create messaging relevant to your business

• Plan and send messages at a specific time or on a certain date

• Automate follow-ups with customers

• Set up reminders for appointments

Buzzstream can also help you find other businesses in your industry and let you know what’s buzzing or working well for them. Buzzstream also features digital marketing tools like content promotion and customer relationship management programs for the ultimate complete package.

Buzzstream is available for a free trial to determine if you think the tool is worth it and the Starter plan is just $24.99 per month. Get people buzzing about your company’s website by checking out the Buzzstream link-building tool.

4. Majestic SEO

Majestic SEO is another link-building tool with a stellar reputation. They do offer a free version, which is useful. However, there are more features with the paid version, and it can be even more valuable to a website administrator. Paid tiers start with the Lite plan, which is $49.99 per month.

Indexes

Majestic SEO uses two basic indexes:

• Historic index. A historic index can allow you to see how your website has performed on search engines over an extended period, even years. This can help you determine if you are trending in the right direction. The Majestic Historic Index contains trillions of URLs.

• Fresh index. The fresh index is the opposite of the historic index. While the historic index gives you important data on your website's SEO effectiveness over a long period, the fresh index instead only monitors the past 120 days. This includes any new places that link to your site have been found or (unfortunately) removed or taken down.

Metrics

Majestic SEO considers an important metric called Trust Flow. Trust Flow indicates the quality of links sending visitors to your website. A higher score would indicate that links to your website are being shared in reputable areas. A lower score may indicate that links to your website are shared on less reliable websites. Either way, this is important information to know.

A second metric Majestic SEO uses is Citation Flow. While Trust Flow measures the quality of the places where your link is shared, Citation Flow simply tracks how many places your link is shared. Majestic SEO specializes in analyzing your links. One of the best features is the Site Explorer Summary, which gives you an in-depth look at how a backlink performs. The Site Explorer Summary offers a whole host of metrics, including:

• Referring domains

• External backlinks

• Indexed URLs

• Trust Flow

• Citation Flow

As mentioned earlier, there is a free version of Majestic SEO. The free version does include both Citation Flow and Trust Flow. Majestic SEO has been around for more than ten years and has a solid reputation in the SEO industry.

5. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is another well-known, established name in the SEO and link-building industry. Ahrefs is known for having an easy-to-use platform. One of their features is called Site Explorer. The Site Explorer tool immediately pulls out a lot of helpful information about your competitor’s keywords, backlinks, and content, among other things.

Ahrefs’ analysis of your competitors can show you:

• Where your competitors are getting their links from

• If any of those websites is a potential partner for you

• Whether your page stacks up favorably against your major competitors

However, this is just one small aspect of Ahrefs.

Tools

Ahrefs also provides a Link Intersect tool, which can show information about your competitors. For example, if a blog links to two or three of your competitors, this provides you an opportunity to discover more content.

However, what Ahrefs is best known for is checking broken links. Using the broken backlink checker tool, you can easily (and quickly) ascertain if you have any links that are not working on your website, including internal and external links. If you have ever used a website and a link does not work, you know that this is a bad look for a business.

Avoid looking unprofessional and having broken links on your website using an Ahrefs tool. Different versions of Ahrefs contain many other specialized tools that make it one of the best link-building tools to maximize your search engine optimization efforts. According to their website, some of the tools that are unique to Ahrefs include:

• Keyword research and search traffic estimations for 10 search engines

• Keywords Explorer, which shows how valuable keywords are and how many clicks they generate

• Daily monitoring of backlink growth or decline

• Analysis of SERP history

Ahrefs starts at $99 per month for the Lite tier, but most businesses will benefit from the Standard plan, which costs $199 per month.

6. Hunter.io

Hunter.io helps website administrators improve outreach. As you likely know, it is important to expand your reach as a business to grow. Some of this work involves contacting other site administrators and requesting that they share links to your website. However, this is not always easy. Hunter.io streamlines the process of getting the correct contact information for a website.

Hunter.io allows users to easily and quickly find any email addresses that are associated with a website or URL. Furthermore, not only does Hunter.io provide these email addresses, but it also verifies that the emails are active and used. This can save you a ton of time as you continue to reach out to expand your business.

One of the great things about Hunter.io is the price. Users can search the website up to 25 times a month with a free account. Paid plans allow users to have up to thousands of searches a month and start at $34 per month. The paid plans also include:

• Domain search exports

• Connections to Gmail and other email accounts

• Priority support

Hunter.io is well-respected within the SEO industry because it helps users get important contact information. The fact that many features are available for free does not hurt, either.

7. BuzzSumo

Building backlinks requires a lot of legwork. Part of that is keeping your ear to the ground for discovery-related purposes. This is where BuzzSumo excels. Like Moz Link Explorer, BuzzSumo helps you uncover and track domains that link to your top competitors. It brings plenty of functionality to the table, too, including:

• Export domains for further analysis

• Set up alerts for new links

• Track your own backlinks and get alerted to new ones

BuzzSumo’s greatest strength is its ability to help you uncover linking opportunities based on competitor analyses. However, there’s a lot more to enjoy depending on the plan you choose (you’ll find several different options).

For instance, if you’re on a budget and only worried about backlinks from competitors, the Basic plan is probably fine. However, if you want to delve into content creation and building links based on your own authority in your industry, then the Content Creation tier might be better. Other tiers include PR & Comms, Suite (best for entire teams), and Enterprise.

Note that all plans come with a 30-day free trial that lets you put BuzzSumo through its paces and learn the ins and outs.

8. Respona

Looking for an all-in-one link-building outreach platform? Consider Respona. The company’s tagline is “build backlinks on autopilot” and that’s just what it does. There’s even a free trial that lets you kick the tires before you decide whether it’s the right platform for your specific needs.

One of the best things about Respona is the sheer number of pre-built campaigns you can use. These range from the skyscraper technique to product reviews, guest posts, podcast outreach, and resource pages (you’ll remember all of these from our earlier discussion). Others include:

• Content syndication

• Link insertion

• Product alternatives

• Listicles

• Competitor mentions

• News and blogger outreach

An interesting feature you’ll have access to with Respona is the automated contact finder. Anyone who has ever tried to contact a business representative through a website to discuss linking knows how impossible that can be. Respona promises to find the right person for each website. Not only does it deliver a name, but also the person’s email address (verified) and LinkedIn profile.

9. Linkody

Linkody helps you evaluate the authority of your website. Linkody also analyzes your backlink profile, which is generally what search engines, like Google, use to determine your website's authority. Linkody is offered for free. With the free tool:

• You can see the top 100 backlinks for any website

• There is no limit to the number of websites you search

If you are interested in the premium features, Linkody also offers its customers a free 30-day trial. The premium features include:

• Identifying backlinks that are not benefiting your website's ranking

• Email alerts that let you know if you have a backlink removed or added

• Receiving data for key metrics, including website ranking, keyword similarity score, anchor text, and more

Using Linkody on your website can help you understand where visitors to your website are coming from. The free backlink tool will allow you to see the top 100 backlinks for your website. Furthermore, Linkody will rank your backlinks based on domain authority. This way, you can see where your best-quality links lie.

Linkody is one of the best link-building tools for staying organized. As you may know, keeping up with multiple SEO or link-building campaigns can be a real headache. Linkody takes the stress out of the SEO equation with a simple platform that consolidates the data. While many of the great features are available for free (at least for now), a monthly subscription starts at $14.90.

10. Whitespark

Ideally, your company will grow and become a national or even international company at some point. In the meantime, it is important to focus on your local area. Whitespark is a link-building tool with this in mind. The tool helps business owners locate local directories. Business owners can reach out to these directories and make sure that they have links. This may include websites such as Yelp or Angi.com. It can increase your website ranking, and your business will show up more often when people are searching locally.

The free version of Whitespark allows its users to search up to three times a day and create a link-building campaign. This is great, of course, but it is also somewhat limited. Paying users receive more tools, such as:

• The ability to do unlimited searches

• Tracking citations

• Being able to conduct multiple campaigns simultaneously

• Local rank tracker

• Reputation builder

• Local citation finder

There are many pricing options for Whitespark but consider trying their free tool first. Then get a custom quote for more specific pricing information if you want more features to maximize your SEO.

11. Mailshake

Mailshake can help you in your outreach efforts. Business owners know how important it is to reach out and get new customers (and backlinks). Mailshake offers several features to their users to help maximize SEO, including templates you can customize for:

• Link-building

• Content promotion

• Guest inquiries

• Public relations pitches

• Other forms of outreach

Mailshake is also easy to use and straightforward. If you struggle with what to say to prospective customers, Mailshake can help you with that. This link-building tool offers many outreach features, such as:

• Automated follow-up emails (on a schedule if desired)

• Opens (how many emails were opened)

• Clicks (links clicked within an email)

• Replies (if and when an email was replied to)

• Personalized messaging

At the end of the day, Mailshake is one of the best link-building tools because of the time it can save you. Overall, Mailshake serves three basic link-building functions.

• Email automation and personalization

• The ability to adjust your emails in real-time. If you make a mistake or a typo in an email, this can be a real lifesaver

• Available templates for various purposes

With great features, such as automated follow-up emails and versatile templates, Mailshake may be the perfect link-building tool that helps you to "shake" things up and get your business moving. It’s $58 per month for the email outreach bundle and $83 per month for the sales engagement bundle.

12. Check My Links

Check My Links is a free Google Extension that does exactly what it says. Once you have targeted a website that you would like to request a backlink from, use Check My Links. This tool will first help you identify whether the website contains any broken links. If it does, Check My Links will take it from there.

Then:

• Check My Links can email the website administrator informing them that a link is broken.

• The email can also suggest your website as a replacement.

• Ideally, the website administrator will be appreciative to hear that one of their links is broken.

• Furthermore, you will have offered a potential solution.

Website administrators may be more likely to include your link since you have just done them a favor. As diligent as these professionals are, there are so many websites. It is easy to allow a broken link to stay on your page for years at a time. Since you have helped them out, they may feel inclined to backlink your page to return the favor.

Check My Links is a free tool that is available as an extension. One of the things that makes Check My Links one of the best link-building tools is the fact that everyone benefits. You are helping other website creators, and they can help you out by sharing a backlink.

13. Link Prospector

The last link-building tool is the Link Prospector. It is automated and has many features. Overall, it is designed to help marketers and business owners find new outreach opportunities.

Some of the features included in this tool are:

• A directories feature helps you identify which directories your website should be linked on. This can indicate which directory may have the greatest results on your SEO ranking and overall business.

• Identifying content promoters can include influencers, bloggers, and more who you can hire (or form a partnership with) for strategic outreach.

• A reviews feature locates customers who have reviewed your company's products and services.

• The Links Pages feature helps identify links that can bring value to your website.

• Identifying reviews of your product or services.

• TLD Filter can help you identify potential websites for your backlink based on their domain. You can search for only websites with ".org" or ".edu" to narrow your search for ideal backlinks even further.

Link Prospector can certainly help you build links and maximize your SEO efforts. However, it is not an inexpensive product. There’s a pay-as-you-go option, and the Consultant tier only costs $47 per month. No matter how you cut it, Link Prospector is an investment in your website and your business for the long term.

14. Pitchbox

Pitchbox is designed to help business owners identify the most important contacts in their specific industry. Then, the tool allows users to contact and maintain communication with these key figures.

Pitchbox differentiates from other link-building tools by specializing in automation. If you are trying to conduct large-scale outreach campaigns, Pitchbox can help. Pitchbox identifies key businesses, websites, and individuals (influencers) who may be relevant to growing your business.

Some of the things that Pitchbox offers include:

• Selection of appropriate templates

• Sequencing emails so that potential customers do not receive the same information over and over

• Scheduling emails by time (and even by time zone if desired)

• Prioritization of contacts

• Automated follow-ups with prospects

• Conversation tracking

As mentioned, Pitchbox helps users identify essential individuals within your industry to help them grow. Throughout the process, Pitchbox can track your approach and what is working. This way, all of your decisions regarding your SEO efforts are based on clear, objective data.

Pitchbox can:

• Evaluate the effectiveness of your current SEO campaigns

• Identify important contacts for you (and get their contact information)

• Help you launch more than one marketing campaign simultaneously

• Identify important resource pages for your specific industry

• Discover broken backlinks

• Locate reviews for your product or service online

• Find recently published blogs using the "Hot Off The Press" feature

The Professional package is $495 per month and the Enterprise package is $1,350 per month. While Pitchbox is generally very well-liked, it can be difficult to customize messaging within the tool.

Smith.ai can help maximize your SEO efforts

With the right link-building tool, you can up your SEO game and boost your online visibility. That will equal a surge in calls and emails. Make sure you have a strategy to handle that influx. At Smith.ai, we offer services and solutions designed just for businesses like yours.

Our 24/7 answering service ensures that you never miss a call, even if it comes in after hours. Our experienced virtual receptionists are highly trained and can answer questions, provide information, forward calls, take messages, and more.  

We also offer additional capabilities, including lead screening and intake, appointment setting, SMS follow-up, and so much more. Our goal is to ensure that you’re able to capitalize on the influx of attention link-building can provide, while still being able to focus on what your business does best.

Get in touch with us today to schedule your no-obligation consultation. Or you can email us directly at hello@smith.ai.