If you’re looking to boost your site in search engine rankings, solid link building tools should form a part of your SEO strategy. While links aren’t the only factor influencing your rankings they certainly play an important part.
While you’re busy running your business or writing for your blog, you may not have time for one of the finer points of technical SEO - monitoring and building those all-important backlinks.
This is where link building tools come in. Automating the process of finding, monitoring and reporting backlinks, top link building tools should be an essential part of your digital marketing toolkit.
Here are 10 of the best link building tools for supercharging your rankings.
If you’re looking to comprehensively monitor your backlinks while spying on your competitors, SEO SpyGlass is a great tool to add to your SEO strategy.
Under the SEO PowerSuite umbrella, it’s super useful for spying on your competitor’s backlinks as well as helping you clean negative backlinks that might result in a frustrating Google Penalty.
SEO SpyGlass will also help you discover backlink building prospects like guest posting opportunities, people who review products or services in your sphere, quality directories and forums that you can join to build awareness of your brand.
Price: A free plan includes all data although exporting or copying data isn’t permitted. A Professional Plan is $299/year while an Enterprise Plan is $699/year.
Best for: Agencies and businesses looking for a link building tool with emphasis put on competitor analysis.
Linkody is one of the cheaper, more user-friendly link building tools available. Simple to use, Linkody will give you a complete picture of your backlink profile.
See how you shape up against the competition with powerful competitor analytics and receive reports on your backlink progress.
The simple dashboard presents backlink data in an easy to understand format and doesn’t distract with other SEO metrics.
It’s best for if you want to know exactly when your backlinks are created, or when an active one goes down.
Price: A basic Webmaster Plan for 2 domains starts at $14.90/month. Plans steadily increase until the Agency XL top plan at $153.90/month. They also offer a free 30-day trial.
Best for: Businesses just starting out with their SEO strategy who might have limited knowledge of SEO and a smaller budget.
cognitveSEO’s Site Explorer tool accurately examines a site’s backlink profile.
Unlike many other link building tools on the market, cognitiveSEO provides up to 5 years worth of historical link research data, so you have an in-depth view of how your site stacks up with its backlinks.
cogntiveSEO updates its data in near real-time, so you can receive updated information on new inbound links, anchor text, active and lost backlinks, as well as dofollow vs. nofollow links.
Their database is loaded with trillions of links too so you can analyse historical backlink data and find growth opportunities for your SEO strategy.
Price: The Site Explorer tool comes as part of a bundle of cognitiveSEO tools including keyword research and content optimisation. A starter plan for individuals is $129.99/month while business plans are customized upon request. There’s a 7-day trial.
Best for: Businesses with some SEO knowledge and a higher budget looking for a complete bundle of SEO tools including backlink analysis.
Monitor Backlinks is made up of a solid backlink checker and a keyword research tool. Use Monitor Backlinks for building backlinks, analysing your competitors and rank tracking. The tool will help give you an accurate summary of which backlinks are boosting your pages and which are pulling down your SEO efforts.
Sourcing its data from Majestic and Moz along with a few other databases, Monitor Backlinks then checks for errors, tidies up the information and aims to present in a more user-friendly format that’s intuitive for users to assess.
Price: A Start Plan is $25.00/month with a top tier 10D4C plan costing $187.42/month. There’s a 30-day free trial as well as a free backlink checker with limitations.
Best for: Businesses looking for an affordable middle ground backlink checker as well as a few other bonus SEO features including keyword research.
With an impressive 22 trillion backlinks, Ahrefs has the second most active web crawler after Google and possesses one of the largest and most accurate databases of active backlinks.
The Site Explorer tool gives you a detailed backlink profile for any site. Discover the websites linking to it, the backlink strength, and the anchor text being used. All of these are valuable insights into your own backlink profile as well as those of your competitors.
Once you understand what your competitors are getting right in their backlink strategy, you can then implement it into your own link building strategy and overtake competing sites in search engine rankings.
Price: Lite Plans are $99/month for 1 user. Plans are priced based on the number of users and projects with a full-blown agency plan costing $999/month.Yearly plans come with discounts.
Best for: Businesses and larger SEO teams who have some experience with SEO and are looking to use one of the industry’s most powerful and comprehensive SEO platforms that comes with a link-building tool.
Buzzstream is designed to help you build high-quality links quickly and effectively. Developing a strong strategy for creating good opportunities for link building can be overwhelming, as well as challenging as search engines evolve and improve their algorithms.
Buzzstream’s main strength is its link building outreach tool, actively sending emails to possible linking prospects which saves you countless hours in sourcing high-quality links for your site.
Their leading link building tool is also fully customizable so you can adjust the features according to your site’s individual needs and requirements.
Price: A Starter Plan is $24/month. Plans steadily increase while a top tier Custom Plan is around $999/month.
Best for: Businesses looking for a complete link building tool to save them time and boost their SEO strategy.
Moz Link Explorer, (previously Open Site Explorer), is a long-term favourite with SEO specialists for its easy to use well-designed user interface and detailed analysis of backlink data.
Using Moz Link Explorer means you’ll gain access to over 40 trillion links, 700 million domains and 7 trillion pages.
Leveraging all this data, learn more about your own backlink profile and those of competing sites to help you identify future opportunities.
Unique and useful features include an ‘anchor text’ tool to show you which are the most widely used anchor texts other websites use when linking to your site.
There’s also integration with Moz’s domain authority concept which is handy if you want to use that as a metric of how well your overall SEO strategy is going.
Price: A Standard Plan is $99/month. Plans range in price up with a Premium Plan geared for agencies and large enterprises costing $599/month. Annual plans offer discounts. Some free link data is available with limitations.
Best for: Agencies and businesses with a larger budget looking for a link building tool that comes with other comprehensive SEO features.
Link Prospector was created to ensure that link building isn’t a time consuming, tedious or inaccurate process.
Its main weapon is organising your site’s outreach opportunities making sure you’re reaching as many sites, bloggers and websites that are relevant to you - the key to social mentions and link opportunities.
Link Prospector has a detailed report function allowing you to enter the types of sites you want to prospect as well as the relevant keyword. You can then view an incredibly thorough list of prospects for your link building strategy.
Price: There is an affordable pay as you go account offering top-up credit for $5 a go. A Consultant Plan is $47/month, an Agency Plan is $127/month while a top tier Enterprise Plan is $497/month.
Best for: Agencies looking for seriously in-depth backlink reports to fuel a thorough backlink strategy.
Raven provides a complete solution for your digital marketing needs, however, their link building tools truly stand out as some of the best on the market.
Instead of focusing on a huge quantity of link building opportunities, Raven instead provides a shorter high-quality list of the most relevant prospects for your site.
Sourcing data from Majestic SEO, it’s not quite as in-depth as say Ahrefs, but it’s well-presented and easy to understand. Their link-building tools also come with other SEO features so you could use Raven as your go-to SEO tool.
Price: A Small Biz Plan is $39/month with plans steadily increasing in capacity and price until the Lead Plan at $399/month.
Best for: Agencies and businesses looking for an all in one SEO tool that gives them sufficient link building tools.
These days, powerful search engine algorithms are adept at detecting spammy or negative backlinks which means one thing for you - not all links are created equal. Unfortunately, it’s not a case of any link is a good link.
High-quality links coming from pages that in Google’s eyes have authority are what you need to boost your rankings. Poor quality links will actually actively harm your rankings.
Google is pretty tough on low-quality links and any other violation of its Webmaster Guidelines.
Link Detox is great for helping you recover from Google Penalties, protecting your site from future Google Penalties as well as preparing you for any future updates to the algorithms.
Price: A Link Detox Smart Plan starts at $249/month with a top tier Link Detox Agency Plan costing $1799/month.
Best for: Businesses looking to efficiently clean up their backlinks to ensure nothing is negatively impacting their rankings.
Building positive backlinks is an essential part of any robust SEO strategy. However, it’s also pretty technical, time-consuming and tedious so it’s best to subscribe to a link building tool that can automate the process for you.
Whether your priority is cleaning up negative backlinks, sourcing prospects, creating an outreach strategy or simply figuring out an internal link strategy, take the time to try these link building tools and find the one which best fits your business’s needs.
You're reading Human-Led SEO; a regular column dedicated to illustrating how a searcher-first approach to SEO enables businesses to generate more revenue in less time from organic search.
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