Best Link Building Tools
When it comes to building links to your website, you want to make sure that you are using the absolute best link building tools out there. But which ones are those?
We’ve asked ourselves the same questions and came up with a very generous list of link building tools. Some of them are free, many are paid, but all of them can help you achieve your link building goals some way or the other.
Best SEO Link Building Tools
Google and Scrapebox
We’ve written a very detailed guide on Scrapebox before so we aren’t really going to go into a lot of info on this right now.
But if you want to use the standard way of acquiring links, meaning by writing for other websites, and you should use a query like ‘guest post’ or ‘write for us’, Scrapebox can be very handy for the task.
The downside is that you do have to use proxies, which can cost a pretty penny, so it might not be the best budget-friendly option in terms of link building tools.
SEMrush Link Building Tool
If you have a SEMrush subscription, there are actually two features, not just one, that can prove their worth in building links. The first is the SEMrush Backlink Gap Tool and the second is the actual SEMrush Link Building Tool.
The second is specifically designed to assist you in discovering and acquiring some of the best backlinks for your specific field. You can add keywords, competitors, select the prospects you are most interested in, and nicely organize your data.
As for the SEMrush Backlink Gap Tool, we’d argue that it’s perhaps the first step that you need to take when perfecting your link building campaign. Like Ahrefs, which we will describe below, this one can be particularly useful for comparing your own site and pages to those of your competitors.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is one of the easiest to use tools that we have showcased here. It’s become even more user-friendly as the engineers at the brand have developed it and make it work better through the years.
You can use the tool’s Site Explorer feature to have a look at your competitors and which websites they have acquired their links from.
You can even categorize your results based on the ‘best pages by backlinks’, which should be helpful if you also want some new ideas for creating content.
Add a 404 filter and you’ll be able to see what pages on your competitors’ sites are now dead so that you can reach out to the sites linking to them and ask them whether they wouldn’t be willing to replace their link with yours.
You can do the same in case you already have a page that you’ve created. Just look at its competing pages and see where they have their links from.
Google Alerts
This is a pretty weird one and while it might not exactly help you build more links to your money-making website, it’s actually pretty neat for keeping track of brand mentions.
Naturally, this might not work for some sites, such as those that heavily rely on affiliate marketing for their income. But if you have an ecommerce website, for example, and you’re gradually building a brand, you can come across websites that might have mentioned your brand name, but might have not included a link.
Although this isn’t particularly useful for link building, you can also use Google Alerts to see why and when your competitors are being mentioned and then maybe you can come up with a strategy to acquire links by replicating their campaign.
Screaming Frog
This is one of the most commonly used tools for fixing technical SEO issues. But it’s actually pretty effective for finding nofollow and dofollow links and it’s relatively easy to use, too. 
Best of all, Screaming Frog can be connected to your Google Search Console and Google Analytics data and it recently works with Ahrefs and Majestic, too.
URL Profiler
This one is a bit more advanced in that if you just want to build links using one tool, you’re probably not going to be tempted to use it. It is more like an aggregator as it pulls data from anything from Mozscape and Alexa to Ahrefs.
You import your URLs, choose your metrics, and then the tool will do its job and show you the exact data you want in a series of rows and columns.
You can export all of the data into a CSV so that you can work on it at the time of your convenience.
Mailshake
Now we’re moving into tools that you will have to use for outreach purposes. Mailshake has been around for a couple of years now and its interface has been improved significantly from its early days.
It works better, it’s user-friendly, and it’s very easy to use. You can import your email addresses from a spreadsheet or type them in manually, then you customize each message as per the recipients, and that’s pretty much everything you have to worry about.
The neat thing about Mailshake is that it keeps control over your sent emails in that it measures how many people have opened them, any clicks, and other data.
Pitchbox
This is another pretty popular outreach tool that lots of SEOs (including Craig Campbell) use these days. From what we were able to tell, it is particularly useful for folks who have agencies and have to focus on automation as much as possible.
The pro is that with this choice, you waste very little time. However, if you make a mistake, chances are that it’s going to get to a lot of email recipients, and then it will be very challenging (if not impossible) to convince those people to accept your pitch.
Read more: Email marketing affiliate programs
Pitchbox is quite intuitive, however, and it even shows you what progress you’ve made with your outreach campaign.
Linkody
If you need a rather basic tool that offers link tracking and backlink analysis, this one should be right up your alley. It is also among the cheapest we have found as it costs less than $15 a month.
The downside is that it does not offer you as much data as some of the more advanced alternatives that we have described in this selection. There’s not too much you can do besides finding some link building opportunities, but even that might be enough at the beginning of your journey.
And if your budget is limited, we think that Linkody is definitely worth considering. A free 30-day trial is available, so why not give it a shot since you aren’t going to spend a cent?
Hunter
Hunter is another pretty nifty outreach tool and while it might not necessarily be the best (we’ve used it for finding the emails of site owners and admins and we noticed that it gives about 50% to 60% in results), it can be pretty helpful.
There’s a free account available and it gives you access to 50 free searches per each month. If you want to use Hunter for serious outreach, you will have to pay for a subscription.
For example, the Starter package allows you to perform up to 500 searches and costs $49 per month while the next one, the Growth package costs $99 a month and lets you perform up to 2,500 searches per month.
JustReachOut
If doing PR is one of your preferred ways of acquiring new backlinks, JustReachOut might be a pretty good solution to your problem. Its name says it all — you can use it to do outreach, but it is specifically designed for folks that want their link to show up in actual publications.
The downside to using this tool is that it does cost a lot. The quality of the backlinks is great, but paying $159 a month and being billed for the whole year can set you back a lot of money.
NinjaOutreach
This one can be used to discover influencers you might want to work with and other types of link building opportunities — naturally, depending on your specific niche. 
It’s not as advanced as many other tools that we have showcased here, though, and another downside is that it is also rather pricey. It typically costs $299 a month, which, by the way, is more expensive than an Ahrefs subscription.
You can get a lower price if you decide to be billed for the whole year as the monthly cost will drop to $119 in that case.
Majestic
Even though it has gotten less popular through the years, what with the rise of better and more user-friendly tools such as Ahrefs and SEMrush, Majestic is still a pretty good link building tool to look into.
You can discover more link building opportunities, analyze the backlink profile of your competitors or your own, and do pretty much anything that you need to acquire more links.
The downside is that you can’t use it for free and the smallest plan they have available costs $49.99 a month. It’s still cheaper than the other tools that we have mentioned in this section of the blog post.
Whitespark
This tool is particularly useful if you want to build citations and can’t be bothered with doing everything manually. This local citation finder allows you to track the ones that you already have and discover new websites where you can place your link.
It’s pretty easy to use, so it’s not going to raise any technical difficulties, but it does pretty much the same as any other citation builder out there.
Read more: Sites like Textbroker
In terms of the cost, the free version of Whitespark allows you to perform just three searches per day while the cheapest package costs $20 and gives you access to as many as 20 searches per day. Every search practically costs $1 since the largest package, priced at $100, allows you to perform 100 searches.
BuzzSumo
This content marketing platform can prove its worth specifically for brands that are offering services and want to get in touch with influences in their niche.
It might not be the easiest way of going about things, but blogger outreach and people on social media with a very large following are pretty influential these days, so you’ll get the best of both worlds — you’ll both acquire a link and you’ll get yourself known by lots of potential customers.
While there is a 30-day free trial, you can’t use BuzzSumo for free forever. The cheapest plan they have available costs just under $100 and it gives you unlimited monthly searches and can be used by five different people.
Read more: Best music affiliate programs
The Disavow Tool by Google Search Console
We left this for the end but the truth is that it is one of the neatest tools that Google has ever invented. Some might say that it does not, in fact, work, but we’ve used it in the past and seen results every time.
If one of your competitors is organizing a negative SEO campaign against you and acquiring lots of toxic backlinks for you, there’s no way of going about things other than by using this tool.
Naturally, there are disavow tools integrated in other platforms. SEMrush has one and so does Ahrefs, but using the real thing is pretty easy and you can even do it for free.
Read more: Etsy SEO
Final thoughts
As you might have noticed, there are lots of link building tools out there. Many of them can do different things, which is why we suggest trying out as many as possible, seeing which ones you get along with and which ones assist you with reaching your goals faster and easier, and then getting a subscription for those.
You might have to use a combination of several. For instance, you might get a SEMrush subscription, use Google Alerts for brand mentions, Hunter for email outreach, and the Disavow Tool every now and then.
We didn’t mention HARO but these links have become quite popular in the past several years. However, since nowadays everybody is using them, it won’t be long until they are included on an algorithm update.
Need help with your SEO or digital marketing efforts? We have lots of plans and courses available. Get in touch to find out how we can be of assistance!
Craig Campbell
I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years.
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