The 14 Best Link Building Tools to Maximize SEO Efforts

Currently, there are around 1.2 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; visitors need to be directed to your site. One of the most effective ways to do that, regardless of the size of your company, is to increase the number of quality backlinks that you have to your website.

Improving your digital marketing increases brand recognition and sales, so we will discuss the 14 best link building tools to maximize your SEO efforts.

Why are link building tools important?

Getting more visitors to your website is just one aspect of growing your business. To turn visitors into customers, you have to provide quality content and value that enriches their lives. Link building tools are vital to companies, freelancers, and small businesses alike due to their ability in:

• Reaching the appropriate audience. Including applicable keywords can help ensure you have the right visitors to your site. Site traffic is great, but if visitors don't become active leads, your potential to make a sale grows stagnant.

• Establishing your website as an industry leader. You must understand why visitors are coming to your website. Which parts of the website are working the best? Which parts need improvement? Link building tools can help refine your website and ensure you get the most out of every page.

• Increasing Google and search engine rankings. Many people will likely find you through a search engine, and link building tools establish your brand with authority in a particular subject. Making sure that these algorithms can sift through millions of pages to find your information helps you see where you stand.

Google ranks websites based on the number of quality backlinks. A website with more backlinks from well-established sources gains a higher standing above its competitors. While you can do a portion of this work manually, it's incredibly inefficient. Your time is sacred as a business owner. A link building and data analytics program will allow you to scale your business and make the most of your hours.

Best link building tool

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

Don't worry if you're still scratching your head and wondering what you're reading. We'll explain as we go along to make sure you get the most out of your SEO. Here are the 14 best link-building tools to maximize SEO efforts for your business.

1. MozBar

MozBar provides a host of options for website administrators. All you have to do is install the extension in your browser via MozBar's website. Then, you can enter a keyword, and the extension analyzes how competitive the keyword is. The more people search for this particular word, the more competitive it is.

MozBar has even developed its own metrics like Page Authority and Domain Authority.

• Page Authority measures how likely a page is to appear in search engine results. If a page is expected to show up when a visitor searches for a keyword, it will have a higher score. A page with low Page Authority is not likely to appear on a search.

• The other metric MozBar developed is called Domain Authority. Domain Authority measures two things: how likely a page is to populate in search results and the strength of an entire site. Domain Authority calculates factors like credibility and demonstrated expertise.

Both of these metrics use a 0 to 100 scale. Like grades in school, you want your website to be as close to 100.

Other Features

Other features included in the MozBar tool are the Link Explorer and backlink analysis features. Link Explorer allows website administrators to analyze how competitors are doing. Using Link Explorer, users can see how and why other websites rank above them. This can allow businesses to see where they're lacking and make some improvements. Backlink analysis can also help you understand what it will take to get your website to the next level and even make the first page of Google results.

Establishing your domain authority is crucial, and MozBar can help maximize your SEO efforts. The program offers a free trial to explore all of these features and decide if this is something you want to continue implementing. Even though a free version of MozBar is available, many of the features listed above aren't included. Consider a trial to determine if MozBar is a worthwhile investment for you and your business.

2. 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 your own messaging that is 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. Get people buzzing about your company’s website by checking out the Buzzstream link-building tool.

3. 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.

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 time 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 of time, the fresh index instead only monitors the past 120 days. This includes any new places that links 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 instead 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.

4. 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

5. Semrush

Semrush has a number of 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 $119.95/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.

6. Hunter.io

Hunter.io helps website administrators improve outreach. As you likely know, it is important to expand your reach as a business in order 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, 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. 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. NinjaOutreach

While we have already talked through many awesome tools on this list, NinjaOutreach is a bit unique from all others. They make their tool do it all. NinjaOutreach contains and combines the following tools all within one platform:

• A tool to help prospect websites to reach out to others
• A tool that helps find email addresses (similar to Hunter.io)
• A tool that allows you to create automated responses or send periodic emails to prospective websites
• A tool to track the effects of SEO efforts

If you are the type of person who prefers all of their data to come from one source, NinjaOutreach may be a good fit for you and your business. You can boost your website rankings in a number of different ways, such as:

• Competitor link building
• Broken link building
• Guest post link building
• Infographic link building

NinjaOutreach has another feature, an automated link building feature. It enables users to schedule outreach email campaigns and maintain relevant data based on previous conversations. If you are looking to maximize all of your SEO efforts with one platform, NinjaOutreach may be your choice.

8. Pitchbo

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 are not receiving 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 you 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.

More Features

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

To get pricing information on Pitchbox, schedule through their website for a demonstration. While Pitchbox is generally very well-liked, it can be difficult to customize messaging within the tool.

9. Link

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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. LinkClump

LinkClump can help keep you from being overwhelmed with clicking and organizing many links. As a business owner, you know checking links is an important way to keep your website running and growing. However, this can be daunting and arduous.

LinkClump allows you to clump the links together using key tools. The tools that LinkClump is best known for are:

• Action. Users can pre-set multiple actions, like opening tabs and windows, copying relevant links, creating bookmarks, etc.
• Smart Selection. This option lets users determine which links are the most relevant for business growth.
• Activation. This activates LinkClump’s link selection box, allowing users to streamline this process.

Another great feature about LinkClump is that it is free and can even be installed as a plug-in on some computers. Give it a shot; it may help you maximize your SEO efforts while keeping your cost low.

11. 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, check their website for more specific pricing information if you want more features to maximize your SEO.

12. 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 make adjustments to 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.

13. 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:

1. Check My Links can email the website administrator informing them that a link is broken.
2. The email can also suggest your website as a replacement.
3. Ideally, the website administrator will be appreciative to hear that one of their links is broken.
4. 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.

14. 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.

Features

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. At $127 monthly, Link Prospector is an investment in your website and your business, long term.

Smith.ai can help maximize your SEO efforts

Regardless of which great tools you choose to use, Smith.ai can help you expand your outreach, improve your website authority, and generally help you navigate the SEO world. While choosing to implement SEO strategies on your own is good, getting help from Smith.ai will benefit your business.

For a business of any size and scope, search engines must work for you. Without them, your customers cannot find you quickly, and if something is too difficult for a customer, they won't follow through with a sale. Smith.ai can aid you through these complex processes and help you get your link building to the next level. 

Once your leads start rolling in, you will need all the help you can get to best serve potential clients. We offer:

• 24/7 Answering Service: Instead of reaching out to customers hours or days later, our virtual phone answering service can give your clients the attention they need right away.

• Lead Screening and Intake: Let us handle screening your leads so you only reach out to those customer most likely to convert. This allows your employees to devote their time to these leads instead of trying to figure out who will convert.

• Appointment Scheduling: You’ll never miss an opportunity to meet with a lead when our virtual receptionists handle all appointment scheduling. Your team can focus on other aspects of your business and improve productivity instead of making outbound calls to set up the appointments themselves.

Turn to our virtual receptionists to learn more about how we can maximize SEO efforts. Reach us through:

• Emailing hello@smith.ai
• Chatting with us live 24/7 on our website
• Booking a 30-minute sales consultation at no cost

Our team gives a 14-day, money-back guarantee, so take advantage of our offers today.